“People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.”
- Austin Channing Brown
An intimate experience into my life as a Black Eastern European.
“When I was growing up in Ghana there were only 3 universities and it was very competitive. The United Nations had agreed with Eastern European countries to take students from developing countries. Everyone wanted to go abroad for various reasons. We applied, went for an interviews, and I passed. I was sent to Russia to go to study.”
-Benjamin, Ghanaian
“To date a Russian woman in those days was not a problem for me as a foreigner or a Black person, but for them it was, and for her as a woman. Under communism there were a lot of restrictions and the average Russian was not exposed to the outside world. They didn’t understand why one of their own would go out of his or her way to date a foreigner.”
-Benjamin, Ghanaian
“I was always having to explain who I was and how I wound up in Russia. I might feel Russian in a cultural sense, but my face told another story.”
- Yelena Khanga, Russian, African-American & Jewish
“Identity was something I always had to talk about but I didn’t have the vocabulary for it for a long time. I was always like I’m half black and half white. As I got older I started wanting to quantify more because people love to guess and I’m like well you’re never going to guess it. I started being more specific and saying I’m half Russian and half Black because being Russian has always felt like a strong part of my identity and I couldn’t just say I was White. But also finding what Blackness actually meant was really important to me too and I didn’t realize that until I went to college. I was scared of it and I had so much anger rooted in things I didn’t understand based on how I was raised, and what happened to me when I was little. No one looks at me and sees Russian. It was a big thing to marry both parts.”
- Lita, Russian & African American.
“When I became a teenager, I had a moment where I questioned: Am I beautiful or not. As a teenager you start experimenting with your appearance and the way they experiment doesn’t fit me. I didn’t understand what to do with myself. There is a feeling of wrongness that came from childhood, and it increased in adolescence. By the time I was maybe 19, 20 was when I start to let it go and I realized that this is actually my advantage. ”
-Treisi, Ukranian & Angolan
“One drop of black blood makes you black in these parts.”
- Yelena Khanga, Russian, African-American & Jewish