Becoming

Dear Mr. Baldwin, I first met you when I was twenty-seven, I had recently returned to our nation with much reservation. Similar to you, I did not miss much about the United States; not the individualist culture nor the ethnocentric values that governed the way we learned about the world around us. Coming off the heels of living nearly three years in Rwanda and traveling eastern and southern Africa, I accomplished things I had at one point only dreamed about. For those years, everywhere I went—the bank, the dentist, school, restaurants, and shopping complexes, I was among black people. This was a stark difference from growing up in Minnesota where a professor in college once walked up to me before class and pulled my braids asking if my new hairstyle was “a hat.” Before leaving the States, there was an insurgence of recorded police brutality. The violence was no longer hidden, and it was overwhelming. So, Mr. Baldwin, to travel where I was among the majority was much ne...