From Biafra to police brutality: challenging localized Blackness toward globally racialized ethnicities of Nigerians in the U.S.

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reveals how Nigerians in the U.S. negotiate their multiple forms of Black racialization. They incorporate both local and global social scripts within their intersected subjectivities as part of the following communities: Black American, Black immigrant, and post-independence Black African (Nigerian). I use a historically-informed ethnography of Nigerian middle-class communities in Houston, Texas to convey the distinct but overlapping sociohistorical realities that makeup definitions of Blackness for my interlocutors. I argue that Nigerians in Houston, Texas embody global intersecting modalities of Blackness where race and ethnicity are interconnected, existing within a global frame, and grounded in contemporary Nigeria. I demonstrate how “localized Blackness” as a politics of solidarity confines race and Blackness to the U.S., which limits post-independence Nigerians’ racialized reality. This article moves from police brutality to U.S. anti-Black immigration laws and the Nigeria-Biafra war (genocide) to help us think about racialization globally and across time and space.