I Am Black Now: A Phenomenologically Grounded Autoethnography of Becoming Black in Berlin

This essay is an autoethnography of becoming Black. It engages my coming to terms with the fact that I have been cornered, as it were, and forced to recognise myself as a being who is othered in a racial classification that was not consciously part of my self-identification before I came to study in Berlin. While exploring the phenomenology of Blackness in spaces where I find myself othered, I also draw a comparative outlook from domestic intercultural power relations in my country of origin, Ethiopia, where the ethnic group I belong to, the Amharas, do the othering. I argue, in my sense-making and ethnographic journey, that the ambiguity and intricacy of Blackness has granted me a redemptive stability in navigating the world and in demystifying the logic of my oppression as a newly profiled black person in Berlin and the logic of my cultural positioning as an oppressor in Ethiopia. The essay, as such, is an invitation for a reflection on the confluence of the two positions.