The America That Killed George Floyd

In the late ’90s, not long after I left Cameroon to attend college in the United States, I learned of a word used in certain African-immigrant communities to refer to African Americans: Akata. It was not uttered with affection; far from it—Akata means “wild animal,” and thus has much in common with the N-word. In my early days here, it wasn’t unusual for me to see a fellow African look at an African American and say, with a sneer, “Look at that Akata,” or “I just don’t understand these Akatas.”

Days after George Floyd was killed, I attended a Zoom memorial of sorts, organized by Africans for Africans, so we could mourn his death together and think of how we, as a community, could better treat our American brethren. The ludicrousness of this was not lost on me—that it would take so long, take a tragedy of this public magnitude, for us to see what America had been doing to our brothers and sisters; that it would take a graphic video for both immigrants and citizens