The assignment
In my early years in Northern Virginia, I worked at an Office Depot. I had a Ghanaian colleague. For the period he was there, we were, as far as I knew, the only African immigrants on staff.
A supervisor assigned us tasks that did not seem to be assigned to other employees, Black or white or otherwise. Nothing was said openly about race or origin. They were simply the tasks nobody else appeared to receive.
On August 23, 2011, the supervisor sent me by bus and Metro to help with a closeout at another store. I had no car. The round trip took the entire morning. That afternoon, the magnitude 5.8 earthquake centered near Mineral, Virginia, struck while I was standing between aisles in an unfamiliar store, alone and not knowing what was happening. ([usgs.gov](https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/science/m58-august-23-2011-mineral-virginia?utm_source=openai))
He had not sent the stockroom staff. In the pattern I remember, he made the Ghanaian man and the Kenyan man the movable ones. On a day when the city moved, that distinction became impossible for me to miss.
I do not tell this story as a grievance. Grievance asks for a target, and the target here is diffuse. I observed the allocation of work. What I inferred from it was a social logic: in that store, our foreignness seemed to make our time and inconvenience unusually available.
The supervisor may or may not have understood the pattern I saw. A hierarchy does not require everyone inside it to name it. Sometimes it appears only in the distribution of errands, distance, waiting and undesirable labor.
The theory
There is another hierarchy operating in the space between African immigrants and African Americans. Almost nobody speaks about it directly. The people inside it navigate it daily. The people outside it rarely know it exists.
It does not have a clear top and bottom. It is more accurately a set of overlapping misrecognitions, each community holding an image of the other assembled from insufficient information and cultural distance. This note follows only one direction through it.
From a subset of African Americans toward African immigrants, I heard a version that went like this: you did not go through what we went through. Your presence here is different in kind from ours. You arrived with a choice we were not given.
Then came the specific version I encountered in Virginia: “Obama brought you.” The African president, as he was imagined in this account, had imported African immigrants as a political project. This was stated to me directly more than once, with varying degrees of hostility.
As a literal account of African immigration to the United States, it was false. Federal immigration records document African migration long before Barack Obama’s presidency, including throughout the preceding decade. ([ohss.dhs.gov](https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-12/Yearbook_Immigration_Statistics_2008.pdf?utm_source=openai))
But the error is not the end of its meaning. Inside the theory was a historically intelligible grievance: African immigrants occupy positions in America made possible, in part, by struggles they did not fight here. The legal and social gains of the civil-rights movement changed American public life, while the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed the national-origins formula and allowed more immigrants from Africa and elsewhere to enter. ([loc.gov](https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/african/a-social-revolution/?utm_source=openai))
The African immigrant community has not always acknowledged that inheritance adequately. I have sat with this perception. It requires sitting with.
The Obama theory converted that historical relationship into a presidential plot. The specific theory was wrong. The grievance beneath it was not therefore meaningless. Historical distrust can be intelligible without making every explanation produced by that distrust accurate. These things coexist.
The sorting
The store and the theory meet at the question of belonging. One asks who has inherited America through struggle. The other asks whose body and time may be treated as flexible, movable and unusually usable.
This is the hierarchy nobody names. It is not the formal hierarchy of citizen, resident and visa holder. It is an older and less legible sorting system, assembled from American racial habits and expressed through ordinary decisions: who is presumed to understand the rules, who is granted the dignity of refusal, who is sent across the city by bus because somebody has decided that his morning is available.
One store cannot establish a universal social law. One supervisor cannot explain every workplace. What I can document is the assignment, the repeated remarks and the pattern I believed I saw. What I infer is that African immigrants, in some American environments, can fall into a category that reads as usable in ways other categories do not.
I have navigated that possibility for fifteen years. I have watched it operate on others. I no longer find it surprising. I find it worth documenting.
These notes were made between June 2011 and the present. I started writing them down in 2026. The gap is not an absence—it is the difference between experiencing something and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.