ARE WE "RACIST" ? 🤔

Language is never innocent. The way we name things reveals the way we think, and often, the way we unconsciously inherit power structures. Today, I find myself questioning a term that has been academically normalised, culturally repeated, and rarely interrogated: Black Literature.

We speak of American Literature and British Literature without attaching the colour of skin to them. We do not call them White Literature. Their identity is rooted in geography, history, and nationhood. But when it comes to African or Nigerian writing, we frequently abandon geography and reach for colour. Why Black literature? Why not African Literature, Nigerian Literature, Kenyan Literature, or Ghanaian Literature?

This naming is not neutral.

Ironically, while critiquing Western racism and colonial hierarchies, we continue to reproduce a racial lens ourselves. By foregrounding colour instead of culture, we reduce an entire continent’s literary richness to skin tone. Africa becomes an identity defined by pigmentation rather than philosophy, language, oral traditions, politics, resistance, or imagination.

If literature is a mirror of lived realities, then African literature already possesses its own specificity, colonial trauma, indigenous epistemologies, postcolonial identity crises, diaspora narratives, and ancestral memory. None of these require the prefix black to be legible.

The problem is not the word black itself, it has been reclaimed, politicised, and empowered in many contexts. The problem lies in who gets racialised and who gets universalised. Whiteness remains unnamed, unmarked, and “normal,” while blackness is constantly labelled, highlighted, and separated.

By continuing to call African writing Black Literature, we unconsciously participate in the same system we claim to oppose, a system where Europe is the standard and Africa is the “other.”

If we look closely at the racial hierarchy produced by colonial modernity, we begin to see where we are positioned. Historically, whiteness occupied the top, white men first, followed by white women, while Black men and Black women were placed beneath them, in that order.

Brown bodies were largely excluded from this hierarchy altogether, rendered invisible rather than equal. Yet, if we were to insert ourselves into this system today, we would likely fall somewhere between whiteness and blackness. And this in-between location is precisely where complicity begins.

"We are fighting for our own freedom while simultaneously participating in the oppression of others."

When we refuse to name American literature as white literature but continue to label African writing as Black literature, we unconsciously align ourselves with the very hierarchy that marginalised Black voices in the first place. This linguistic choice suggests proximity to power, an acceptance of whiteness as the unmarked norm and blackness as the marked other. 

In doing so, we participate in the same oppressive structure we claim to critique. Our silence around whiteness and our insistence on naming blackness reveal an uncomfortable truth oppression is not sustained only by those at the top but also by those who benefit from standing closer to it

Perhaps true decolonisation begins not only in rewriting syllabi but in renaming with care. In allowing African literature to stand on its own terms, without being filtered through colour-coded categories.

Because when we name literature by race instead of place, culture, and voice, we must ask ourselves an uncomfortable question:

Are we resisting racism, or quietly rehearsing it?