BEYOND BORDERS

THE EVOLUTION OF BLACK IDENTITY AND STORYTELLING

In 1997, fresh out of college and carrying dreams as big as my backpack, I boarded a plane to South Africa. For a 21-year-old African American woman, this wasn't just international travel – it was meant to be a homecoming, a return to the motherland. Instead, I encountered a profound lesson about the fluidity of racial identity that would reshape my understanding of global Blackness for decades to come.

"Oh, we thought you were going to be Black." My Durban host family's first words struck like lightning, shattering my assumptions about race and belonging. In America, my Blackness was an unchangeable truth. Yet here, in the land I had romantically imagined as my ancestral home, I was suddenly "Coloured" – my racial identity transforming as I crossed borders.