There is a particular kind of complexity that lives at the intersection of African and American identity. It is not always visible from the outside. It does not announce itself in obvious ways. But it shapes everything — how you move through spaces, how you understand yourself in relation to other Black people, how you hold the tension between where you came from and where you are.
I am Ghanaian American. My name — Yao Addae — is a constant reminder of that heritage, a daily marker of something I carry from a place that shaped my family long before it shaped me. And navigating that identity in the United States, in predominantly Black American spaces, has been one of the most instructive and sometimes difficult experiences of my life.
At AfroTech 2022 in Austin, I had the opportunity to record a conversation about exactly this — live, in the Expo Hall, with two first-generation African Americans who were also doing the work of holding these identities together. Gerald Onuoha, a Nigerian American physician and the founder of Everybody Vs Racism, and Daniel Oppong, a Ghanaian American entrepreneur and founder of The Courage Collective. Two men who understood the specific texture of this experience in ways that do not always translate to people outside of it.
The hyphen is not a burden. It is a bridge.
One of the things I have had to reckon with in my own life is the tendency to treat the hyphen in African-American as a source of tension rather than a source of power. As though being both things fully somehow dilutes one or the other.
What I have come to believe — and what conversations like the one at AfroTech reinforce — is that the hyphen is actually one of the most strategically powerful positions available. To hold African heritage and American context simultaneously is to be, by definition, a bridge. A translator. A connector across cultures, economies, and narratives that the world desperately needs connected.
My work in the African Diaspora — the Conscious Immersion trips to Ghana, the conversations with governments and universities and entrepreneurs across the continent, the vision of building genuine economic and cultural bridges between the United States and Africa — all of it grows from this identity. From the belief that who I am is not in spite of the complexity I carry, but because of it.
What first-generation African Americans carry:
Gerald and Daniel spoke with a candor that I deeply respect about the particular experience of being first-generation. The expectation of the family back home. The pressure to represent. The navigation of spaces where your Blackness is sometimes questioned by Black Americans who have a different relationship with the motherland. The moments of profound connection with Africa and the moments of grief about the distance — physical, historical, psychological.
These are not small things. And they are rarely spoken about in mainstream conversations about Black identity, which tend to collapse the enormous diversity of Black experience into a single narrative.
The African Diaspora is not monolithic. It is vast, varied, brilliant, and deeply interconnected in ways that are still being discovered. Every conversation we have across those connections is a small act of reunion.
Where this is leading:
I am building toward something. A platform that uses travel, dialogue, strategy, and community to stitch together the threads of the Diaspora into something coherent and powerful. It is the work of my life, and it is rooted in the same soil as the Black Boy Fly movement — the belief that Black people, wherever they are, were born with purpose and deserve the conditions to fly.
AfroTech was one room. Ghana was another. Senegal and Rwanda and South Africa will be others. Every conversation is another stitch in the tapestry.
This journal is part of it too. Thank you for being here.
The Diaspora is not divided. It is dispersed. There is a difference. — Dr. Isaac Yao Addae