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African American and Black Immigrant Experiences

This podcast was created during the CCDE Interrupting Privilege Podcasting Workshop during the summer of 2021. Several students and community members came together to learn how to tell stories using the podcasting medium.

In this podcast two women discuss the different and sometimes intersecting experiences of African American and Black immigrants in the U.S. The Jamaican born woman shares how the media deeply impacted how she understood the Black experience and Black culture in the U.S. Now living in the U.S., she is able to correct the negative stereotypes that were broadcast by getting involved in spaces with Black women. Her dialogue partner is a Black American and her father’s family is Jamaican. She shares how often she felt she lacked authenticity to her Jamaican heritage and culture which made her feel disconnected. Both women commiserate over the Black duality of feeling authentic versus inauthentic in different Black spaces.

I felt like I didn’t have that authenticity in that space in the way some of my other Jamaican friends had in that space… I just felt this inauthenticity in THAT Black space. Where i felt very authentic in this Black American space but kinda inauthentic in this Black Caribbean space.