The Politics of Belonging: On Diaspora, Gender, and Learning to Call Yourself Home

There are certain questions that follow Black people wherever we go. Questions such as: “Where are you from?”, often followed by “No, where are you really from?”. It’s an interrogation that communicates a disbelief or denial of citizenship, and that coerces the person to prove themselves as a worthy citizen. It is a not so harmless demand to participate in a test of legitimacy. Though every person of color is expected to participate in this test, no answer is ever satisfactory enough to justify their existence with full access to the benefits and protections of citizenship. 

As part of the African diaspora, those questions simultaneously pull at geography, history, trauma, and pride. They force the person to place their body outside of their inherent humanity and force them into political conversation where they must prove their immigration as the basis for human decency and respect. 

For Black women and gender-expansive people, that question is heavier. While we’re figuring out who we are to the world, the world is constantly telling us we need to be strong, resilient, and unbreakable. We are expected to be a vessel of culture, and caretakers of movements. If we fail to show up as any less than what is expected of us, we face the possibility of ostracization, and possibly, punishment for not confirming to the molds created for us. The layer of questioning on belonging and citizenship relates to our capacity to confirm, according to an often unspoken consensus, of what black womanhood looks like within a specific geopolitical context. 

No pressure…

As a member of the diaspora, you learn early that belonging is not guaranteed, even among people who look like you. You learn that the expectations for the approved performance of your Blackness vary locally. You learn that gender scripts also shift depending on borders, languages, social class, religious practice, and political realities. You are faced with the complexity of your black womanhood and the hyperawareness required to be able to pick up on the subtleties that your survival depends on. You eventually learn that survival has never been neutral. But beyond that, you start to yearn for more, for something beyond survival. You become concerned with the intricacies of living, and discover the joy of resistance. 

When you come into yourself while existing between cultures, you become fluent in navigating between worlds. You learn the language and the means to survive passport and visa appointments. You learn to identify and jump through the extra loops we must go through to survive. We erase our accents, tone down our culture, modify our styles, just to fit in, just to get by and survive. We make sacrifices so that maybe the next generation will know a freedom we could only dream of. 

We learn the skill of building homes in temporary places. We reconstruct our feminities and masculinities in this space of in between, where we build ourselves as we hope and wait for a better life. We adapt and walk the line between surviving where we are not wanted, while we struggle to honor aspects of our cultures we are often encouraged to erase. 

That resilience is often romanticized, but it comes from living at the crossroads of who we must be to survive and who we know we could become outside of the bounds of oppression. 

Colonialism redefined borders, separated families, created flawed healthcare systems, and restricted educational access. Gender violence is an outcome of the colonial structures that were implemented to police bodies and erase autonomy. Immigration systems weren’t designed for our joy; they were designed to control our movement.

As diaspora, every day we negotiate the politics of identity. We grapple with a painful awareness of who gets to feel safe, who gets to rest, who gets to be human, vulnerable, and whose body is always in negotiation with the state.

Diaspora identity, especially for Black women and gender-expansive people, is deeply relational. It’s shaped in cultural kitchens, WhatsApp group chats, funeral songs, hair braiding chairs, late-night conversations about feeling too foreign wherever we go.

Diaspora identity is political because our very existence is a form of resistance to the systems that seek to erase us, and the communities that make no effort to understand us. That is why for us, the personal will always be political and why we must always remain vigilant in matters of law. 

We cannot separate public policy from lived experience. We cannot accept narratives that reduce us into the stereotypes that ignore the aspects of us that are also soft, unsure, experimental, complicated, and evolving. We cannot shrink our needs and we cannot shrink who we are. Our silence can cost us our survival. 

A much needed reclaiming is happening across the diaspora. A reclamation of language, mental health, and what it means to be queer and trans as a Black person. We’re not just showing up in political conversations; we’re shaping them. We’re naming the intersecting forces that impact our communities such as health inequity, policing, environmental racism, economic precarity, migration instability. We are saying that we see the whole picture, and that we deserve better.

Diaspora identity is about how you merge where you come from with the world you have to survive in. It’s about the worlds you build because you were never meant to exist comfortably in the ones imposed on you.

It is a curse and a gift. To belong nowhere is to learn how to build a home anywhere. It is a skill to know how to create culture out of fracture, and find humor in our exhaustion. We invent belonging where there was once loneliness and we insist on tenderness despite being taught to harden. We keep loving each other across oceans, across borders, and across history itself.

There is deep, revolutionary joy in claiming ourselves fully, unapologetically, without shrinking our stories or our culture to make other people comfortable.

Sometimes the most radical political act a Black diasporic woman or gender-expansive person can commit is to belong to ourself first.