ot long ago, I stopped referring to one of my most cherished recipes of black-eyed-pea dip as “hummus.” In Arab cultures, hummus is seen not just as a legume or chickpea dip—but also as a sacred offering from one of the world’s most ancient regions, the Fertile Crescent. In the shadow of the darkness that is “chocolate hummus,” listening to Arab and other Middle Eastern voices from the Levant forced me to confront my lazy acceptance of a generalized eponym useful for Western gloss. The thought swirled in my mind a nonspecifically “African” word. This not only reduces the diversity and richness of African languages and cultures, but also makes the deep connections between Africa and the subsequent diaspora in the Americas more murky. These maladaptions allow us to miss the point of our uniqueness and necessarily multicultural world.
