Building Black America’s Wealth: Using the Igbo Phenomenon

I am an international entrepreneur living in America. I am demographically classified as black, a cultural identity that I relish with pride.

Like many who fall in this category, I never considered myself black until I came to America (since everyone looked like me in my home country of Nigeria). So, it is with pride and some level of ambiguity I navigate this version of my cultural identity — I humorously refer to it as “Embracing my American Blackness.” Weighing in on the wealth disparity in America is somewhat complex for me. As a successful African living in the United States, I am told I have privileges in America. Although I struggled to grasp this initially, it has become abundantly clear that some of my privileges are:

? my foreign name, although difficult to pronounce, is non-threatening, my college education, although foreign, is debt-free,

? and most importantly, my heritage, although it is one not without struggle, is one of which I have no doubts.

Therefore, I acknowledge my struggle to understand Black America’s wealth disparity. In my quest to seek understanding, I decided to build bridges shortly after coming to Washington DC. I decide to go beyond my borders, culturally and psychologically. First, I moved my office space from Northwest DC to Anacostia in Southeast DC, the least developed quadrant of the nation’s capital. Then, I began living there as well to engage closely with the community. This move was life-changing as it allowed me to recognize the inherent assets in my cultural identity. It became clear that many things I took for granted, like my heritage and culture, were an asset of my identity in the United States. It was in Anacostia I came to understand that if Africa was the source of the black diaspora, then African Americans were the future.

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