Grace Kindeke of Manchester, who came to the United States as a 2-year-old child from the Democratic Republic of Congo, is a program coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee of New Hampshire and is project coordinator of the Manchester Community Action Coalition, which works to support communities of color and ensure that they have equal social and economic opportunities.
Q. Talk to me about cultural identity and what it means to you as both a first-generation African as well as a Black American. How do they intersect?
A. I immigrated to the United States when I was 2 years old, and I’m 35 years old now. Most of my family is back home in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and my mother’s generation experienced independence from a colonial power. In Africa, you are not Black. You’re whoever you are, you are your tribe, your family, your ethnic group — that’s who you identify as. When you come to the United States, you are Black; you carry with you a history of colonialism and the impact that that has had on my country and people and the African continent. Then you combine that with the history of racism and what it means to be racialized in a country that is built on slavery.
Q. How did those two identities intersect?
A. I wish there was an easy answer. I think where I find my intersection is in seeing myself as a Black woman and being able to carry the legacy of both of those heritages, that history and seeing how they interconnect with one another, like slavery and colonialism are inextricably interlocked, but that’s not the totality of our culture and our experience. I am an African who grew up in America, who is American by culture. I still speak my native language of Lingala.
I am a child of these two cultures, and bringing them together has been a healing journey more than anything, because it hasn’t been integrated for most of my life. On top of being African and Black, I’m also all of those things in a predominantly white state, growing up in predominantly white schools, not really seeing myself outside of my home.
Q. You also do a lot of great work in the community with the American Friends Service Committee and other peoplebased initiatives and the commonalities you see that are shared in the inner cities by both the Black Americans and African immigrants. Where do you see some of those commonalities? What do we struggle with together?
A. The real issues that our community is facing are a lack of stable housing, getting the proper educational supports, being able to access job security, fair wages. It’s all the things that we materially need as people to live and thrive in society. We all need AC, we all need food, and we all need good jobs. We all need a stable place to live and good schools for our kids in an environment that doesn’t poison us.
Q. How are those resources invested to uplift people in our communities who are low income, who are needing public assistance, who are depending on the public systems that we have?
A. We all depend on these public systems in one way or another, so it’s really about how those investments are used in a systematic way. At the end of the day, we all want the best for our family, for ourselves. But when you’re Black in America, the ways that our communities get invested into is very different. We experience real disparities.
Whatever everyone’s unique individual experiences are like across the board, people need the same things to survive and thrive.
This article, part of The Common Ground Initiative, is being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.
