Being Noah Tesfaye #5: Life as an Black Student in Silicon Valley

There aren’t too many of us around here, if I’m going to be honest. We don’t get the opportunity to connect per say, and there is only one other Ethiopian family at my school. I don’t really like to think myself as much of an anomaly as much as someone unique and with a special heritage. But it’s a struggle being Ethiopian. I am not going to deny the frustration of not being able to connect with people like you every single day.

The first thing that I want to make clear is that it frustrates me to be African because people feel comfortable saying negative things about black Americans. For example, many students will make the stupid jokes about how athletic black people are, and not only are being racially insensitive, but often do it to provoke a laugh out of me. However, those moments destroy me because people behave as though I am not black. “Oh, you’re not black. You’re Ethiopian.” While I like to think of myself of as Ethiopian, I am African American. All your statements about black people, no matter how related I may be to those comments, affect those of us of African descent too.

I don’t often spend too much time thinking about these thoughts, mainly because I struggle to decide how I should approach people who differentiate me. The same way a black person would be so offended by being called stupid and uneducated is the same way I feel if someone assumes my people are starving and my family lives in a hut back home, which some do. It also frustrates me that everything…