In the fall of 1998, just a few weeks after I closed on my first apartment in Brooklyn Heights, I met a crew of Ethiopian guys who affectionately called me Somalia. They were at a party on Great Jones Street hosted by a young investment banker I met the summer before on Martha's Vineyard. The young investment banker was part of a rowdy, amazing group of friends brought together by one of the most charming and gracious people I've ever known. Let's call this charming person, "Charming".

Charming's folks had a house in West Tisbury. We met in London the fall before that when he was visiting his girlfriend who I knew because my grandmother and her aunt were friends at church in Brooklyn. Since I'd be in London for a semester of independent study during my last year of law school, Charming's girlfriend and I were put in touch. She became a dear friend to me those three months I lived at Cambridge University and commuted to the City of London daily for my internship at the International Swaps & Derivatives Association.

From moment one Charming and I carried on like two old hens who had been best friends forever, so naturally eight months later I was invited to take a break from BARBRI bar exam study to spend Fourth of July with Charming and his girlfriend, family and a gaggle of friends.

I really almost did not go. The pressure to study. I had accepted an offer to join Cravath Swaine & Moore in the Corporate Department. I could not fail the Bar Exam. It's impossible to imagine the trajectory of my life and who would I be if I had said no to that weekend. The adventure, the love, the tragedy, the heartbreak that would unfold over the following ten years probably explains so much about me today. I really almost did not go. But Charming insisted and convinced me.

Fourth of July on Martha's Vineyard in 1998 is where I met the young investment banker who invited me to his party on Great Jones Street. Let's call him, "Y.I.B." Whatever image you have in mind reading the words "young investment banker on Martha's Vineyard" is hilariously wrong I can promise you. Y.I.B. looked, walked and talked like no one you've ever seen or heard of. Deep and glowing black skin, long unruly hair and oozing with so much irreverence you would wonder less how he managed to be employed on Wall Street, and more so how he had any job at all. Artist was more like it. As it turned out, he was that too.

Now that I've gotten the preliminaries out of the way, let me get back to where I began. The Ethiopians who used to call me Somalia. It started as soon as I met them and they asked me where I am from. I get that question a lot. Sometimes it's the name "Kianga" - people wonder if I am from Africa. Other times people are assessing the structural features of my face trying to determine my origin story. They are often disappointed to find out I'm from Boston and my parents picked my name out of a book. I had developed a tiresome speech to give about it being 1973 and the heights of Black Power when "David" and "Janet" decided their daughter should have a Swahili name that means "sunbeam".

It was a kind of performance I needed to do to take away the sting of being singled out as an exotic curiosity. You see, I was always under a spotlight or microscope depending on how you want to consider the facts. Nearly exclusively white arenas defined my upbringing in Boston independent schools, then advanced education at Yale Law School after a brief oasis in Atlanta for undergrad at Spelman College, followed by my professional world of White Shoe Big Law and social clubs on the Upper East Side.

Always, always, always this requirement to explain myself. Who I was. Where did I even come from? I'm so well dressed and well spoken. Oh, and so beautiful! I appreciate that these are compliments. There are other and worse things that could be said to me or about me. But some readers will understand that it's less flattering when the observer is praising you because they are surprised this version of a black person - a black woman - even exists at all.

Many of us who traverse these environments and situations remember so well what happened in 2008 when the Obamas ascended to the White House. The white people in our lives looked upon us with awe to discover we were not the only one. Their black friend or colleague wasn't the only special black person who "wasn't really black". Apparently there's an entire society of people like us! There are black people with the same elite pedigrees for multi-generations, vacation destinations, businesses, accumulated wealth and also simply very average salt-of-the earth run-of-the-mill working and middle-class upbringings of stability and upward mobility because of married parents, their professions and college degrees.

Unbelievable... Believe it.

The point of me explaining all this is to give you context. Essential context for the real story I came here to write. Why did I remember this week that they used to call me Somalia after not thinking about it for over two decades?

When the Ethiopians asked me where I was from it was because they looked at me like their long lost sister. Not because I was surprising and unfamiliar. I think black people from Africa always feel a bit sad for us here who don't know our origins. We are sad about it too. I am the descendent of so many different lineages and ethnicities and places. Some were slaves from Africa. Some were slave merchants from Portugal. And there's a whole lot in between. Basically the answer to the question of where I'm from is: I DO NOT KNOW.

The Ethiopians immediately claimed me. "You look like you are from Somalia. We are going to call you Somalia." These guys who had been born in another country on another continent made me feel a kind of belonging in New York, U.S.A. that was new despite my family having roots here back to 1849.

Journeying into the past made me ponder deeply this week the painful mess we are in, America. My deep horror and agony watching beautiful Somalia be desecrated, dehumanized and demonized from the Oval Office. One especially cruel twist in this demonstration has been to watch people claim the attacks are not racist because Somalia is a COUNTRY. Wow. Now we get to be unique and individuated based on our actual differences instead of just being "Black"? Not so fast.

No honest and thinking person is ignorant about the weaponization of image and fear at play in the scapegoating of Somalia. But here is the rub. Let me take this essay where you never expected it to go, which is that politically speaking it is liberals and the Democrat Party mafia who deserve the lion share of our ire and outrage. Because as compassionate people we are trapped and that was the point the entire time.

The architects and carpet baggers of identity politics pretended to side with us as we expressed our pain about the treatment of "black bodies". As they glazed us in recent years with a DEI cultural and social BLACK OUT of superficial designer representation, we find that in the dark lurk unaccountable forces targeting specific groups of people in order to commit crimes and destabilize American communities. We find that again and again and again our faces, our stories and our bodies are put on the front line as shields, swords and cannon fodder for faceless others who do not defend us, do not care about us and who profit from our decapitation.

I will not be emotionally manipulated by what it feels like to carry the face of a people the President of the United States speaks of in the way he has. I feel terrible. They used to call me Somalia. I am not from Somalia. I am from here. America. But because of this situation in America today, I need only be in the wrong zip code to be targeted and swept up in some enforcement action - or unspeakable other thing - because of how I look.

I've already be tagged with "GO HOME" from trolls online who see me post videos from where I have a residence in Maine. A state that I believe has a comparable situation to Minnesota in terms of specific corruption that centers around a particular group of people with Somalian heritage. I don't know all that's going on with this, but I know enough to be clear I am not defending any of it because of some notion of ethnic or race solidarity. Or because "we are a nation of immigrants". Yeah. No.

If an arsonist arrives at your door to burn your house down, are you going to let him in to do it because he's an immigrant and this country was built by immigrants? Are you going to let your own child starve and die, so you can feed the child that was SENT to your house for the express purpose of killing off the children you already have? This is how I see the problem of identity politics and immigration today. Weaponized by all sides in a war that we didn't start and we aren't going to finish by continuing to defend the original saboteurs of our collective economic potential, family structures, faith communities and political viability.

This is why you are resting, black woman. No, we are not a trend. We are eternal.

We are not the mule of this nation. We are its mother.

They used to call me Somalia and it filled me with pride to have that association. If I have features that resemble these elegant people, I am glad even though my face is the face of an American mutt. I'm just a mix of many things. I'm from everywhere which makes me from no where which means I'm quintessentially and uniquely AMERICAN.

The Ethiopians I met that night in 1998 on Great Jones Street had their own extraordinary migrant stories originating with the famine that ravaged Ethiopia decades before. Each one was doing something valuable, exciting, creative and entrepreneurial in New York. Those were the years. We were so young, wildly ambitious and enjoyed the best the City had to offer at the end of the 20th century. Which was quite a lot. There were no limits that we could see or feel. It was quite wonderful.

Before 9/11. Before the internet took over. Our lives were a ceaseless international love fest with people of every color, shade, language and background on equal footing because we were together in New York. Everyone was accepted. We learned from one another. We were all Americans. There was no hierarchy. There was no othering no matter whether you had been here for 2 years or your family for 200. And it all started with me meeting Charming in London one foggy night in December 1997. The rest - as they say - was history.

Then, one late winter day in 2007, Charming collapsed after a regular workout. His heart stopped and he died. Just like that. No health issues. No warning. Died suddenly. It shattered us all. Charming was the connector. He was our heart. He was the center that brought together the world.

I really haven't gotten over it. I don't know how to despite life very much moving on. We had no idea at the time that being together the way we were could not last. People moved away. To other parts of the country and world. Some careers skyrocketed. Others not so much. Romances ended. Marriages and children happened. We drifted apart.

This week I remember what they all taught me about friendship, acceptance, creativity, courage and the frailty of life. It was an experience that's only possible when you have a free country that welcomes people from all over the world to be as much a part of us as we are already of ourselves. I write this essay not only to reflect, but also I interrogate what and who created such a catastrophic situation so ripe for this kind of backlash and; therefore, has done the greater harm to what is precious and rare about this nation.

I will not allow the liberal rhetoric about who is against "black and brown" bodies to deceive me or obscure from view who the generational destroyers of the so-called blacks and browns have been through their policies of the last nearly 100 years. That's a topic for another time. For now I will end this simply by holding love and solidarity in my heart for the people who have been used and will suffer in all of this mayhem. Which is all of us.

I do it privately. I do it publicly. I let the world know. They used to call me Somalia.

Watch the companion performance to this essay "Call Me Somalia" on the Kianga Ellis Projects website, YouTube and Rumble.

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