What Blacks Worldwide Have in Common

Strength Gained From Surviving Oppression

Homepage photo and Journal-isms Roundtable images by Jeanine L. Cummins

” ‘Black Like Me?’ What Black People Worldwide Have in Common, and Don’t,” attracted about 53 people to the Zoom, and 121 had watched the video by Aug. 13. Fifty-seven watched a separate, extended video interview with Matthew Vari, digital director of South Pacific Post Ltd., which publishes Papua New Guinea’s oldest daily newspaper, the Post-Courier.

Strength Gained From Surviving Oppression

By a Journal-isms contributor

When Francia Márquez made history as Colombia’s first Black vice president in 2022, she had to survive an assassination attempt and vicious racist attacks. Yet even from inside the presidential palace, she still faces the same racism that has plagued Black Colombians for generations. The violence targeting her continued even after taking office.

“It doesn’t matter if you are in the power… doesn’t matter if you are the vice president,” said Edna Liliana Valencia Murillo during a virtual Journal-isms Roundtable. “At the end, she’s still suffering oppression, she’s still suffering racism inside the government. And she’s part of it.”

In the United States, the pattern held for Barack Obama’s presidency, as Lori Montenegro (pictured), Telemundo’s Washington bureau chief, explained: “I was still a reporter covering the Hill, the White House — and I would hear the comments.

“This was a nation that elected its first Black president, but in many ways it was not prepared to allow a Black president to really govern.”

From Bogotá to Washington, from Papua New Guinea’s newsrooms to Ireland’s government offices, the same dire reality emerged during the discussion connecting Black voices from around the world. As Valencia Murillo put it: “The door to Black people is formally open, but it’s really closed.”

And yet, the obstacles have produced a commonality that many say should be celebrated.

“You can see the resilience, the drive, the push,” said Dr. Ebun Joseph (pictured), founder of the first Black Studies program in Ireland. “You know, somebody said hunger, and that’s one of the things I think we have in common everywhere. We’re hungry. We’re hungry to not be at the bottom. We’re hungry to push . . . .

“You know, the road kept keeps getting blocked here and there, like, ‘oh, you can’t do this’, ‘you can’t be that.’ But I think Black people everywhere don’t take the words ‘you can’t.’ You know, I think ‘you can’t’ [has] been removed” said Joseph, a native of Nigeria who is also special rapporteur, Racial Equality and Racism Ireland and founder and CEO of the Institute Of Antiracism and Black Studies in Dublin.

Added Dion Rabouin (pictured), a financial journalist then running for president of the National Association of Black Journalists, “Colonialism has affected and impacted us historically, and also the way that we’ve fought back against and rose against colonialism. And the way that a lot of those same things . . . within our food, within our culture, our dance, are similar across global cultures . . .

“What I think is beautiful about Black culture globally, and I’ve been fortunate enough and blessed enough to be able to travel and be able to have lots of conversations with folks, is just the way that there is a spirit of brotherhood everywhere you go.

“When Black folks see you. They see you, and they want to talk with you, they want to learn more about where you’re from, and they want to learn more about what your culture is like, and they want to know, hey, are these things I see on TV,. Is that the truth, or am I just, you know, seeing things?”

The Roundtable, held via Zoom on July 27, was titled ‘Black Like Me?’ What Black People Worldwide Have in Common, and Don’t.” Two news pegs helped set the stage: December’s United Nations formal declaration of the Second International Decade for People of African Descent, and last fall’s launch by Britain’s Guardian newspaper of a weekly newsletter on the African diaspora, “The Long Wave.” It is part of recompense after the news organization discovered through its own investigation that its founder was a slave trader (scroll down).

The discussion took place during online balloting for the NABJ elections that concluded Friday.

Errin Haines (pictured) editor-at-large for the 19th, said at one point, “This was such a robust conversation and I look forward to continuing it — with NABJ as a partner if I’m our next president.”

She is now that president.

The then-leader, Ken Lemon (pictured), said that when he assumed the office in 2023, he wanted “a real pan-African exchange, a cultural exchange.” But Lemon went on to announce that the United States was blocking journalists from Sierra Leone in West Africa from coming to the following week’s NABJ convention in Cleveland.

China and the virtues of technology stepped in to allow those journalists to participate last Saturday (scroll down).

The session “was informative because it was honest,” Roll Call columnist Mary C. Curtis said afterward. “The panel brought up a variety of issues, but one theme that has always remained was the lack of nuance in coverage of people, places and challenges.”

Charles Ray, a former U.S. ambassador said, “This has been a fantastic program.” Adam Powell III, who is director of the Annenberg Center Washington Programs and moderates a monthly forum on Africa, called it “a terrific discussion.”

Dera Tompkins, who regularly connects with musicians globally from her base in Washington, saw another bonus: “Despite different perspectives in identity, I think that a huge plus is that we know more about each other throughout the Diaspora than ever before in history. We are also traveling more and connecting the dots,” she messaged.

“We are also more interconnected through music and culture than ever in our history. There was a time when only whites knew about and attended African artists in concert. Through hip hop, rap, R&B, reggae, Afrobeats we are all connected, understanding each other, speaking the same language and singing the same song.”

Still, the conversation revealed how formal progress often masks persistent, systemic exclusion.

Two Forms of Racism, Same Result

Journal-isms’ Richard Prince and John Yearwood, editorial director for diversity & culture at Politico, opened with excerpts from a recorded interview with Matthew Vari, digital director of South Pacific Post Ltd., which publishes Papua New Guinea’s oldest daily newspaper, the Post-Courier. Vari illuminated how colonialism’s legacy persists in unexpected ways, even in the South Pacific. (Full interview here)

“If you’re in a press conference, and there are 10 journalists sitting there, and the prime minister is talking, only one or two journalists will be asking him questions,” Vari explained. The silence reflects what he called “the Big Man mentality,” an unwarranted deference to authority.

Before the Roundtable, a U.N. official identified for Journal-isms two qualities about the African diaspora: Black Americans were prouder of their nation than others were of theirs and that with the wider adoption of braids, dreadlocks, cornrows, buns and coils, one can no longer identify a Black person’s nationality from appearances alone.

Jean-Francis Varre and his band Sahel at the Kennedy Center in 2022. “See examples of Sahel performing interpretations of music ranging from Senegalese Mbalax, Salsa, Cape Verdean Morna, Samba & more!” says the caption for this promotional video. (Credit: YouTube)

Jean-Francis Varre, a Washington, D.C., musician whose band Sahel performs across the African diaspora in six languages, elaborated on the observation about pride.

“America (like South Africa, Australia etc..) were settler rather than just extraction colonies, which inevitably intensified the control of and conflict between indigenous/enslaved and Europeans,” Varre explained via email and again at the Roundtable. “Also, the average ratio of white to Black in the US was on average 10 to 1 when that ratio was almost reversed in the majority of the diaspora during most of the slave trade centuries — at least until the ‘Blanquiamiento/Branquiamento’ – the deliberate whitening of Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas at the turn of the 19th century.

“As a result of these factors and America being a global leader of Nationalism and Industry at the time, African Americans have developed a unique consciousness that became the blueprint for Black Nationalism and pride globally. This is why Marcus Garvey had to leave Jamaica in order to get political traction in Harlem.”

Varre also said Anglophone cultures developed explicit exclusion through Jim Crow, “which was so stringently honest in its racism,” while Latin cultures created “hidden racism” that promotes mixing while maintaining hierarchies.

A book by Valencia Murillo (pictured), the Colombian journalist, examines racism across 10 countries. “Here in Colombia, society tries to [deny] that there’s . . . racism. . . . And that’s why Black people, we have been in the same schools, in the same universities, in the same enterprises, just spending our money in the white pockets,” she explains in “La Diaspora Perdida.”

The Afro-Latina journalist and author drew a contrast with the United States, where legal segregation inadvertently created separate Black institutions (historically Black colleges and universities, organizations such as NABJ) that don’t exist in supposedly integrated Latin societies.

The Universal Drive

Across continents, participants identified shared characteristics that transcend geography. Vari captured it through a rugby player who defined his life in one word: hunger.

“You’re hungry to try and prove yourself. You’re hungry to try and beat the system. And you’re hungry, trying to achieve the best in life for your kids.”

He added that one thing “we share . . . as Black people living across the world is, there are a big bunch of us who have also given up hope, too, as well.

“That they’re just trying to pass through life and its existence, so… I think the onus on anyone that’s watching is, is we all need to lift our people up together.

“And that starts by educating the brother next to you, or the sister next to you.”

Cultural Connections Across Barriers

Despite linguistic barriers imposed by different colonizers, participants found unexpected cultural connections. Varre traced African rhythmic patterns from Brazil to New York, explaining how enslaved Africans preserved knowledge through music even when other forms of cultural transmission were forbidden.

“Our cultures before coming to the Americas were overwhelmingly, not completely, but overwhelmingly oral,” he said. “Most of our knowledge was passed through oral culture and music. That commonality within the diaspora is something that has not died.”

Even humor serves as a universal connector. Vari described Papua New Guineans bonding with African American experiences through widely distributed American cultural programming, including sitcoms: “Everything we get in terms of the connections between us and African Americans is through the media and movies. Most of the sitcoms that are being produced and sent, from Madea to…Dave Chappelle.“

Discovering Hidden Connections

The Roundtable revealed how Black communities worldwide are rediscovering ties that were always there. Montenegro pointed to a critical gap: “As a global Black community, we really don’t know each other’s stories.”

During her travels across Africa, Valencia Murillo found that while people would acknowledge Black populations in the United States and Brazil, they remain unaware of significant communities in Colombia, Peru or Bolivia. “We are still that part of the diaspora that doesn’t exist enough,” she said.

Olive Vassell (pictured) co-editor of “Mapping Black Europe,” described how European Black communities remained unknown to each other until recently. However, her book covering eight European capitals revealed shared experiences across borders. It represented “the first time that Black Europeans had gotten together to write their own first-hand account.”

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests demonstrated how quickly these hidden connections could activate. Research shows that more than 200,000 people participated in more than 80 rallies across Germany alone, with similar mobilizations in Denmark, Italy and other European countries. “The Black Lives Matter movement was really strong in every European country,” Vassell noted.

The Media’s Representation Problem

The conversation revealed how superficial diversity pervades newsrooms globally. Montenegro observed that representation doesn’t equal control: “I still believe that we may be on top, but we are not in control.”

Murillo described what she called the “tokenism” in Latin American media: hiring “one Black anchor, or one Black journalist, just to appear that they are not racist.”

The former TransAfrica organizer Cecelie Counts reminded participants that previous generations achieved remarkable results through strategic media engagement. During the anti-apartheid movement, “Black journalists made a profound difference” by using their positions to influence U.S. foreign policy, she said.

Kenneth J. Cooper (pictured), who wrote about African connections in South Asia for the Washington Post, offered a different framework for understanding global Black unity. Cooper argued for recognizing deeper cultural connections that transcend colonial boundaries rather than defining commonalities through shared oppression.

Varre reinforced this perspective: “In order to fight our differences, we have to actually focus on our commonalities that have been obscured. They were obscured on purpose.”

Those commonalities, Varre explained, can be traced through “rhythm, through our body movement, through our food.” These are cultural patterns so deep they’re recognizable across continents, he explained. Cooper described identifying a dark-skinned Indian man from afar simply from the way he moved, illustrating how African cultural DNA persists in unexpected places.

Melanie Eversley, who edits NABJ’s “Black News & Views,” said, “When you travel to Africa you really get to see where ‘we’ are really from. I’ve noticed that every Black culture in the world has a dish with a dark green leafy vegetable combined with a meat/fish, whether it’s callaloo and sailfish, kontomire with fish, or collard greens with smoked turkey.”

The conversation itself proved Cooper’s point. By connecting across continents and languages, participants demonstrated that these deeper connections persist despite centuries of separation.