The America That I Didn’t Know Existed: Immigrant Experience in American Education

By Francis Kwarteng

The American Dream is a popular concept. It is a celebrated mantra. But does it really exist? Even if it does, is it for everyone? The American experiment tells a different story. Examples abound of many for whom the American Dream is an empty rhetoric. Although America prides itself on liberal ideas of equity, social justice and equality for all, harnessing the potential benefits of the American Dream is far from true for many hardworking, educated Americans. Inasmuch as the American Dream may exist for some, white privilege, employment and educational discrimination, racism...may stand in the way of achieving one's fullest potential. This is compounded by the Eurocentric content of the American curriculum which denies equal representation to non-white Americans in the marketplace of ideas, reinforcing their sociopolitical and epistemic marginalization.

"In a remarkably wide ranging and moving book Francis Kwarteng has provided us with one of the most honest and earnest assessments of what immigrants find in the United States. The book The America That I Didn't Know Existed reminds me of the complex reasons people are attracted to the American society and the disappointment that they find when they sometimes discover that what one reads about America is not truly the best way to know America. Kwarteng has lived, studied, and learned in America and he counts these experiences as blessings as anyone would who has seen possibilities. However, this determined intellectual has shown us a path forward with acceptance and humanity. This riveting book has the making of an incredibly powerful drama as well."

Molefi Kete Asante, author of Erasing Racism: The Survival of the American Nation

"Francis Kwarteng's book recounts his personal journey to America by reliving the challenges and struggles he had to overcome to realize that the dream he once imagined was only a mirage. The author provides the rationale behind his decision to come to America and the subsequent disillusion with the gap between his aspirations and realities on American soil. Framed within the intellectual lens of Afrocentricity, Kwarteng exposes and critiques the prevailing dominance of Eurocentric constructs that systemically dehumanizes, and perforce disempowers, persons of African descent. The result of this is a readable, empowering page-turning memoir that will resonate with every African immigrant."

Kwame Akonor is Associate Professor of Political Science at Seton Hall University (USA), founding director of the New York-based African Development Institute, and author of African Economic Institutions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664127296

Book preview

THE AMERICA THAT I DIDN’T KNOW EXISTED

IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN

AMERICAN EDUCATION

FRANCIS KWARTENG

Copyright © 2020 by Francis Kwarteng.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-6641-2730-2

                eBook            978-1-6641-2729-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. [Biblica]

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 10/08/2020

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

818908

In memory of Cheikh Anta Diop,

Greatest scholar of the 20th century who completely vanquished

the arrogance of Eurocentrism and buried it alive for good

For Dr. Ama Mazama and Dr. Molefi Kete Asante,

The greatest intellectual warriors the world has ever known,

noble mouthpieces for the heart and soul and spirit and mind of

the African world in the international academic community

Once I arrived at Temple University, once I saw the life of a professor through the life of Molefi Asante, through the life of my dissertation adviser, Ama Mazama, the way in which they were engaged in worldwide intellectual struggle against white supremacy, against racism, I was sort of hooked. And I wanted to be like them, and I wanted to be a professor.

—Ibram X. Kendi, Democracy Now! (2019)

(National Book Award

Winner for Nonfiction, 2016)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Dr. Ama Mazama and Dr. Molefi Kete Asante have played a decisive role in my intellectual development. Both have also contributed tremendously to the evolution and continuing maturation of my worldview and personal philosophy of life. In fact, what I am largely today in many ways, they already have been and steadfastly continue to be. I have always asked my friends to aspire to the intellectual greatness, characterological humility, level of intellectual activism, and greatness of mind of Dr. Mazama and Dr. Asante.

Frankly, and if truth be told, the African or Black world needs such great men and women of honor more than ever.

And I say this from the bottom of my heart.

I first got to know Dr. Asante first through his many publications. Two to three years following my relocation to the US, I took to visiting street booksellers on a regular basis in Harlem, New York, on weekends after a hectic five-day workweek. My profoundly knowledgeable, well-informed bookseller friends and I discussed almost every major topic one can pull out of and under the sun. Then one day I sighted the book Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge. I thought it would be an excellent and intriguing read, and so I quickly purchased it as it was the only copy left on the stand.

While at home and on buses and trains and in my school library, I simply could not leave this hard-to-put-down book alone. It accompanied me everywhere until I was finally done reading it. This book would shake the foundations of everything I had known about intellectual history (history of literature, history of philosophy, history of science), classical scholarship (Ancient Egypt and the Greco-Roman worlds), cultural history, global intellectual history, historiography, cultural studies, the sociology of knowledge, and the history of ideas, thus calling into question what we were studying across Africa.

But it was the author’s last name that first grabbed my attention. The name was Asante, a common name in Ghana. I fossicked through the bibliography and before long I had read every one of Dr. Asante’s books and articles on the Theory of Afrocentricity, too. Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge also led me to the writings of Cheikh Anta Diop, a multifaceted scholar, scientist, linguist, historian, sociologist, mathematician, and Egyptologist. Like I did to Dr. Asante’s, I devoured each of Diop’s books published in English.

I also got to know about the works of Dr. Mazama and several others. I read Dr. Mazama with the same level of devouring intensity, importance, and seriousness as I did Dr. Asante. I also got to know about Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for the first time because he wrote a blurb for Dr. Asante’s The Afrocentric Idea. About the latter, Gates wrote: Asante’s wide range of references, his delightful examples taken from black traditions, and his sheer pleasure at discussing black culture, all combine to make his argument both cogent and important. This will be a major book.

And in no time, I began to listen to occasional interviews of Dr. Asante on New York’s WBAI Radio (99.5FM) and to watch him on Gil Noble’s Like It Is. I made my decision then to see him in person, come what may. Fortunately, there was news on WBAI about the celebration of the centenary anniversary of Kwame Nkrumah scheduled for September 20, 2009, to take place at New York’s Schomburg Research Center for Black Culture, where Dr. Asante was to deliver a speech as a panel member. He titled his spellbinding speech Nkrumah Celebration. It was at the Schomburg Center, Harlem, where I first met my idol and mentor in flesh, the beginning of a long, educative, intellectual, and fruitful relationship. Dr. Asante also became my father.

Dr. Mazama, author of The Afrocentric Paradigm, another multifaceted scholar and academic about whom I once wrote passionately, a two-part piece I titled Ama Mazama: An Intellectual Warrior, for my international readers, was also in attendance. Ama Mazama, one of the African world’s most influential, vibrant, distinguished, and productive scholars, is more than an individual Iroko tree. She is an institutional tree with many groundbreaking research and publication branches as well, I wrote about her. I was extremely elated to meet her too. Likewise, I have written a two-part article based on Dr. Asante and his scholarship for my international readers, entitled How Another Scholar Portrays Us in the West: Dr. Molefi Kete Asante.

Dr. Asante also brought along copies of Egypt vs. Greece and the American Academy: The Debate Over the Birth of Civilization, a book he co-authored with Dr. Mazama. I asked to buy one even though I did not have money on me to pay for it at that very moment. But he insisted on giving me a copy and politely asked me to settle the payment once I got the money. And he left it at that as we went our separate ways, joining the other celebrants. Remember that he did not know me at this point. How then could he have reposed this level of trust in me when he did not know me, when he did not know who I truly was, when he had not met me before? This told me a lot about the character of this great man.

I took pictures with him and Dr. Mazama after the conclusion of the program. I settled my payment of the book at this time. And then I told him straightforward, You are the only person on this planet that I want to see in person before I die! The humble and modest Dr. Asante gave me his phone number and email address and told me to keep in touch. What a human being! While I lived and studied in Philadelphia, Dr. Asante’s modesty and humility drove him to pick me up from my apartment complex and to drive me to his house to meet the likes of Charles Fuller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist and author of Snatch: The Adventures of David and Me in Old New York, to feed me, and then to drive me back to my residence. Dr. Asante’s Dramatic Genius of Charles Fuller: An African American Playwright is an interesting and delightful read.

Most important, I have been to his residence more than once where I met Dr. Mazama (with her family) and others. She and I engaged each other in brief intellectual exchanges. I was also in the audience with Dr. Nicholas Anuku, my organic chemistry professor, as Esther Armah, a British-born Ghanaian political commentator, playwright, and radio host, hosted a gathering of activists, academics, and historians in New York to refute the controversial claims of Dr. Gates’ New York Times article How to End the Slavery Blame-Game. Dr. Asante was one of the noted keynote refuters at this august gathering. He aptly titled his rebuttal paper Henry Louis Gates is Wrong about African Involvement in the Slave Trade. This brilliant paper was unsparing in its sweeping, formidable rebuttal of the ahistorical and unfounded claims of Dr. Gates in its measured articulation of irrefutable facts.

I would later learn that he acquired his doctorate (UCLA) at 26, became a full professor at 30, created the world’s first doctoral program in Black Studies (Temple University), founded the Journal of Black Studies and the Cheikh Anta Diop Institute for Scholarly Advancement (which organizes the yearly Cheikh Anta Diop International Conference), authored 90-plus books and over 500 articles, directed at least 135 PhD dissertations, and won at least 100 awards for his scholarly work. He is Professor and Chair of Africology and African American Studies (Temple University) and named to the American Textbook and Academic Authors Association (TAA) as a TAA Council Fellow. Finally, Dr. Asante, a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association (NCA), is also the International Coordinator for Afrocentricity International and founding President of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute (MKAI).

Some years later, I read his long-awaited memoir As I Run Toward Africa but only got to know with time that the real story of the memoir itself was merely a tiny fraction of the historic metastory and megastory of his impressive CV. Following my reading of this memoir and his CV, I formulated this thoughtful story I would share with friends and colleagues over and over again, "If you want to know more about the true story of the greatness and remarkable achievements of Dr. Asante in this life, in this world, and about who he is as an achiever and fighter for the African world and a giant in the American Academy and the International Academic Community, please don’t waste your time reading As I Run Toward Africa. Read the metastory and megastory of his CV instead!" Indeed, Dr. Asante is a thousand heads and scholars and thinkers and intellectual activists and influential authors and academics in one powerful body. As would be expected I encouraged anyone who listened to read both for personal edification.

At 25 years of age, Dr. Mazama earned her doctorate with distinction (in Linguistics) from La Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III, France. She has authored almost 20 books and published more than 70 articles in addition to many book chapters, while both she and Dr. Asante are the Journal of Black Studies’ editors-in-chief. She has published in both English and French. Dr. Mazama, a leading proponent of the Theory of Afrocentricity, is Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Programs (Department of Africology and Africa American Studies at Temple University). Lastly, Dr. Ama Mazama is the Vice President and Provost of MKAI and sits on its board of directors.

I joined Dr. Mazama, Dr. Asante, and others at the launching of the Pan-African organization in Philadelphia—Afrocentricity International (AI).

And both meticulously read the manuscript for this book and offered constructive criticisms. I cannot thank them enough for this generous act on their part.

Dr. Kofi Kissi Dompere also made useful and constructive suggestions here and there. In the end, I want my readers to know that this book and its sequel, Clinical Progression and Afrocentric Literary Pedagogy in Nursing Education, are as much about their intellectual activism and struggles and resistance against the scourge of racism, white supremacy, and Eurocentrism as it is about my struggles in America against institutional racism, Eurocentrism, and social injustice.

Finally, I should point out that I completed this major work and its sequel months preceding the broad daylight lynching of George Floyd, a symbol of global resistance against racism and white supremacy even in death. Floyd’s public lynching broadened the scope of the discussion around race relations on a global scale. I can only hope that this book makes a valuable contribution to the discussion.

Francis Kwarteng

February 29, 2020

CONTENTS

Book Dedication

Ibram X. Kendi Quote

Author’s Note

Chapter 1 :   Growing Up In Ghana

Chapter 2 :   The Dying Ghost of My New York in Colorado

Chapter 3 :   The Politics of Interviewing for a Job in America

Chapter 4 :   How I Became an Ethnological Exposition on a New York Train

Chapter 5 :   The Farce of American Post-Racialism

Chapter 6 :   How America Created the Racist Image of Africa

Chapter 7 :   The Eurocentric Curriculum: White Lies in the American Classroom

Chapter 8 :   My Encounter With Implicit Bias & Racism in the American Health Care Industry

Chapter 9 :   My Arduous Struggles in New York & Massachusetts

Chapter 10 :   Pursuing a Graduate Engineering Degree in America

Chapter 11 :   The America that Is Not for Me

Chapter 12 :   The Stress of Black Life in America

Chapter 13 :   The Glowing Undeniable Truths of Otherism: Afrocentric Theory Goes After Curricular Glorification of Whiteness

Chapter 14 :   On the Question of Race, Unequal Opportunity & Education

Chapter 15 :   You Must Learn: The Art of Writing & My Pursuit of Academic Honesty

Chapter 16 :   Why Is It So Difficult to Make It in America?

Chapter 17 :   Trump’s America Sells Me a Fermented Bowl of Fairy Tales

Chapter 18 :   Chaos in the Trump White House of My Unabated Suffering

Chapter 19 :   An Unforgettable Encounter With the Jezebel of Occupational Politics

Chapter 20 :   Why I Went to Nursing School

Chapter 21 :   Whiteness Spits On the Humanity of My Dignified Blackness

Chapter 22 :   I Cry for the Crocodile Tears of Whiteness

Chapter 23 :   The Long-Suffering Self of Blackness in the White House

Ama Mazama Biography (reference)

Molefi Kete Asante Biography (reference)

Selected Bibliography

About the Author

CHAPTER 1

Growing Up In Ghana

It is in the character of growth that we should learn from both pleasant and unpleasant experiences.

—Nelson Mandela, 1997

I am one of six children, five boys and a girl.

Childhood was one special individual I could not wishfully bury alive in the stinking misery of death, a death shaped and informed by the characteristic frustrations and confusions of adulthood, a memorable stage on the Cartesian coordinates system of my developmental psychology.

And to this day, this special individual of childhood remains a powerful statement of my nostalgic sense of paedomorphic wonder.

Childhood, a dense vegetation of colliding contradictions and sharp contrasts, also for me, was a mastermind and harbinger of staged adulthood.

Childhood was a picturesque language of godly beauty, a bubbly universe almost indescribable in its bold statement of exquisite mapping, more precisely in the narrative and processing corridors of human consciousness.

Childhood was a happy world of endlessly laughing and dancing angels, of friendly but redoubtable human gods and goddesses of forceful intimate persuasion who inhabited incomprehensible spaces in the crevices of immanent innocence, of sweet-scented gods and goddesses of human kindness.

Childhood was fun.

Really.

We grew up surrounded by love, humanity, aromatic clouds and blankets of pleasant-tasting cuisines, by an engaging panorama of pristine flora and fauna and of singing bodies of water and wind chimes huddled under a downward-looking telescope of a cheerful sky of stars and moons and suns and rainbows and birds and flying dinosaurs, by a fresh ambience of fruity airiness, by a cohort of friends, by a loving extended family.

Childhood was the ideal for lost adulthood.

Childhood knew no death.

Childhood knew no graves.

Childhood knew no blackness and whiteness.

Childhood knew no lies and falsehoods.

Childhood knew no bounds of mortality.

Childhood was an established and well-respected chef as it taught me to cook; and childhood taught me to cook for my siblings, family friends, parents, and other members of my extended family.

Childhood turned me into a full-fledged chef by the time I was about nine.

Childhood was simply childhood. And soulfully musical.

Except that childhood faced fierce competition from two of its greatest mortal enemies, hungry armies of immortal bloodsucking mosquitoes and indistinct images of frightening dreams and ghost-eating nightmares—over whose claims to ownership of the rambling silhouette and dancing skeletons of nightly curiosity deserved a fair hearing in the court of mortal affairs.

Those encroaching vampire dreams and demanding mercenary mosquitoes eventually became normal fixtures in the quiet biome of nagging childhood curiosity until the evolving tadpole of adulthood ushered in a breath of fresh air for the gaping gaps that constituted, among other things, a gross misunderstanding of the embryonic intricacies of the natural environment.

Each child had a piece of land on which he or she farmed, an activity that inadvertently exposed the child to the immunological implications of the hygiene hypothesis, leading the child to a precocious yet incremental understanding of nature and his or her relationship with the soul and spirit of nature.

The child understood growing up that he or she was an instrumentalist embodiment of the complex language of nature.

Micro-farming and gardening, therefore, taught us, we children, responsibility and self-reliance and respect for nature.

Adulthood did come around eventually, and yes, it did, contaminating the primal innocence and rational ignorance of a mature brain wrapped up in the innocent clothes of childhood. I was growing and growing on a gradualism scale but—along the clock spectrum of time—I saw myself in my quiet childhood while my other self, with its creeping sense of relative maturity, then sheltered in the colorful waterfall of my precocious childhood, exposed a personality of maturity and a fixture of intellectual immaturity simultaneously sharing a humble pie of congruence and conflict in the underlying cosmos of my developmental psychology.

I was studying science in school at this time and my small world, a strange world inhabited by a grandfatherly forest of an incomprehensible outpouring of human beings and weird creatures and crooked ideas and trance-like visions, and this world which was also circumscribed by a constrictive horizon and finite knowing of little things, began to open up a little bit for my growing eyes to pry into its soul.

That distant world was indeed a strange habitation of audacious and creepy imaginings, a place where probability and determinism clashed head-on and controlled the behavior of atoms, and where the encroaching biomes of mosquitoes, fruits, dead people, snakes and disease, mourners, witches and wizards, singing ghosts, roaming doppelgangers and ancestors, urchins, forests and rivers, the living, music and dance, thunder and the moon and the sun, and prayers quashed the silence of monotony.

Life was full of promise when the innocence of childhood shared a continuum with the wisdom of adulthood and when parenthood constituted a masterful blend of childhood and adulthood, of maturity and experience.

Life was a blossoming of community, a community of fullness and amity, and wondrous happenings in the evolving psychology of childhood.

Life also revolved around my parents.

My parents traveled with us, their children, along the labyrinthine trajectories of our developmental psychologies. My father served in the Ghanaian army. Thus we spent part of our childhood on army barracks, part of the Military Academy and Training Schools (MATS). I also had part of my primary education in a school sited on as well as funded and overseen by the military. This public school was situated four to five hundred meters from an infamous location, the Teshie Military Shooting Range, where a paternal uncle of mine, Air Vice-Marshall George Yaw Boakye, was executed by firing squad along with his colleagues made up of army generals and a colonel—almost all of whom made up the Supreme Military Council (SMC), the Ghanaian government at the time. Remarkably, however, Air Vice-Marshall Yaw Boakye became a prominent member of this government because of his rank as the Commander of the Ghana Air Force (GAF).

My uncle and his colleagues were then buried in unmarked graves. Ghana had its version of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), named the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), after which the bodies of my uncle and his colleagues were exhumed and reburied with full military honors (Ghanaweb, 2001). The violent death of my uncle still haunts my father and the rest of the family to this day.

Finally, another brave uncle of mine, my father’s elder brother, served in the Ghanaian military as well.

More important, as an aside, Wole Soyinka offers a sharp criticism of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in his book The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. This book builds on his McMillan-Stewart Lecture series delivered at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, now renamed W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center. Literary theorist and critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a multifaceted scholar whose works I have read and some of which I have critiqued and written about for my international readership, directs this center which primarily focuses on academic research on the African world—continental Africa and the African diaspora.

Now, let me get back to the story of my immediate family. My beautiful mother was a hardworking woman, a housewife, a petty trader. I recall those days of yore with remarkable vividness as if it were yesterday, when I woke up in the wee hours of the morning with my mother to prepare for the market, Makola Market, so-called, where we sold roasted yellow plantains. My mother roasted the plantains while I, a little boy who should be sleeping, carried a tray of roasted plantains on a growing neck, and hawked them around men and women from all walks of life.

The hawking activity enrooted my appreciation in domestic life generally and home economics in particular.

I hawked to supplement the remittances my father sent the family from Libya. My father had been discharged from the army and after working with one or two companies in Ghana, Japan Motors Trading Co. Ltd. and Volta Aluminum Company (VALCO) to be exact, he shipped out to Libya for greener pastures. My mother later joined him in Libya and we, my siblings and I, resettled with a maternal uncle who was a successful accountant with Kingsway Department Store as well as an Elder of the Church of Christ, a branch of Christianity imported from the United States.

A new breed of experiential embracement was in the offing for us, a life-changing dispensation.

My maternal uncle had four children, two boys and two girls, all of whom were older than any of my siblings by many years. We looked like their children. Both of my uncles were pastors of the Church of Christ. Also, none of them was married when we moved in with them. One of my uncles, the second eldest child of my maternal uncle, was living in the United States at the time. And he still lives in the United States as of this writing. His elder brother also lives in the United States today. America became their second home.

My aunts were very beautiful.

We constituted one big family.

My granduncle was married to a hardworking and gracious woman who cooked the best dishes in the whole world, took great care of us with utmost patience and with the priceless experience of maternal dedication, as well as with the encompassing beauty of angelic overprotectiveness and diligence and intelligence of a great woman who truly cared for and loved human beings with all her heart without reservation. We saw her as a doting, saintly matriarch and mother of gods and goddesses and angels. She was flawless in the way she carried herself and discharged her uxorial duties. She was indeed a paragon of motherhood, a precious gift to humanity.

Living with this maternal family was, in more ways than one, like living inside the simmering chaos of an itching boil waiting to explode in volcanic precision. Children only ate once on Sundays. Why? I don’t know! Only my granduncle ate more than once on Sundays. On the other days, he ate before any child did and before his children and wife also did. Of course, as children, we could not wrap our heads around why a full-blown adult would choose to eat before his children and grandchildren did. What’s more, our granduncle never bothered to ask any child whether he or she had eaten. We hid away as our granduncle ate while waiting for an opportunity to present itself and when this did happen, we competitively jumped over ourselves as we made a beeline for the leftovers, helter-skelter. We sometimes fell into a kick bollocks scramble over these leftovers until commonsense prevailed that we should share. Other times, though, we were not fortunate because our uncle got to the dining table before we did. We cried when this happened.

Life was that hard for us children.

My parents shipped food to us from abroad but our granduncle and his children consumed everything without including us, the intended or rightful owners of the said food. Our granduncle cared more about the survival and longevity of his growling paunch than the collective survival of the household. In other words, our granduncle cared more about the expansive fullness of his belly than the mournful tears of his starving grandchildren—us. His wife was not part of this wicked scheme and always tried to do her best for us.

Lastly, our granduncle occasionally squandered or misused money intended for the payment of our school fees, leading to our expulsion from school from time to time. There were occasions when we stayed out of school for extended periods of time because of this problem. We used our absence from school to run errands for people in the neighborhood in those days—in exchange for food. This problem derailed my sister’s education given also that my granduncle never prioritized her education. None of us, however, developed chronic sticky fingers despite our domestic challenges.

On the other hand, he was sympathetic to the son of his eldest daughter. This however was not the case with two of our cousins on the side of his dutiful wife, one the son of Afrobeat and highlife legend Ebo Taylor, the other a daughter of one of his wife’s extended female relatives.

I nonetheless managed to pull through secondary school because I worked very hard, hard enough to win full scholarships and prizes throughout my secondary education. I even sent what remained of the scholarships to my mother after all my school expenses had been paid off, to invest in her petty-trading business. I wrote essays for my seniors in exchange for preferential treatment. I also did homework assignments for classmates in exchange for food and other basic items such as stationery. Writing for others at a tender age helped me hone my writing skills. A maternal uncle of mine who, before his retirement was a prominent Ghanaian ship’s captain, later the head of the Tarkoradi Harbor, Ghana’s oldest harbor, and one of the nation’s only two harbors, the other being the Tema Harbor, drove to my boarding school and gave me money to support myself in school. He too, like his elder brother, took a great interest in my academic development.

This elder brother of his, who served as headmaster of two major secondary schools in Ghana and later as Assistant Director of Budget and Planning, Ministry of Education, exposed me to the rich and vast world of African literature at this time. I began to read profusely and to build my storehouse of vocabulary. My uncles prosecuted their avuncular responsibilities with utmost admiration and humility and respect for their extended family. I am thankful for this kindness.

My siblings did exceptionally well in school too notwithstanding the many challenges we faced. Today one of my siblings living in the State of New York is a chemist, pharmacist (Doctor of Pharmacy), and radiologic technologist; another sibling of mine also living in Colorado is a biochemist, clinical pharmacist (Doctor of Pharmacy), writer, clinical scholar/preceptor, and master’s degree holder; and a third sibling who also lives in Colorado is a systems analyst, doubling as an expert in other fields related to computers, real estate, legal matters, and the like.

We are trying to get our youngest sibling to get a college education as well. This is extremely indispensable for all of us. Ultimately, we have chalked up these little successes in America on the strength of our African culture, hard work, honesty, and the need to become generalists and multipotentialites because the daunting challenges we have been encountering in America keep changing each sibling’s specialized focus on a specific academic discipline. We have learned to individuate our unique American experiences as they befit the peculiarities and particularities of our mental and emotional contexts.

In my case, I have variously relied on the concepts of conscientization and experiential education as well as on the wide-ranging topical, philosophic, scientific, and theoretical writings of Ama Mazama, Molefi Kete Asante, Cheikh Anta Diop, George Dei, Kofi Kissi Dompere, Théophile Obenga, and Brazilian educational philosopher Paulo Freire to drive myself through the disappointing thickness and landmines of cyclical frustrations and institutional racism in America. Freire’s influential works—Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage—have offered me massive support as I navigate through the structural or institutional weaknesses of the American educational system.

Over the years, I have surrounded myself with friends and mentors from around the world who count amongst some of the world’s most important and influential theorists, scientists, university professors, mathematicians and economists, philosophers, writers and authors, humanists, historians and historiographers, political activists, founders and editors of academic journals and newspapers and websites, academic referees/reviewers, dissertation advisors, and so on. I continue to learn and benefit from this great fountain of exceptional and gifted thinkers who have done and continue to do so much for the world. This has been part of my American experiences.

Still, life was not all rosy at home notwithstanding the few positives I managed to chalk up through sleepless nights growing up in Ghana. I could not go home on midterms when almost everyone else did, for instance. I realized that it was not in my best interest to go home on midterms given that my granduncle, in the first place, did not approve of my coming home. Coming home meant that he would have had to dip his niggardly hands into the unfathomable depths of his in-your-face belly for additional funds to underwrite my stubbornness—coming home on midterms.

I remembered staying behind on one of those midterms during which a battalion of strange insects invaded the innocence of my face. The invasion left a bloated face over the one I was born with. I lost the aesthetic sting of my facial naturalness for several days. The fact was that I still could not bring myself to go home even with this facial stamp of a strange medical condition. I nevertheless took it to the school dispensary but not much was done by way of pharmacologic treatment. I was fortunate that it was a self-limiting medical condition. I was stronger than this arthropodal menace.

And as if that were not enough, my granduncle got himself caught up in an eclectic brew of other controversies as well. My father had sent