When Olúfemi Táíwò was an undergraduate at Indiana University, he traveled with Nigeria, for his grandfather's funeral in the southwestern city of Abeokuta. To reach the family compound where they would be staying, the travelers chartered a convoy and an armed escort. “At that point, it was some of the most concentrated poverty I'd ever seen in my life, Táíwò, who is 32, told me. He spent most of that night in a nauseated daze-malaria, he thinks—and was shocked to wake up in midair. Armed men were storming the compound, and Taiwò's father had thrown him out of bed in a futile effort to escape. The family was held at gunpoint for hours while the burglars rummaged for goods and cash.
Nobody was injured, but the experience was formative. For Táíwò, now an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, the limits of catchall identity categories were made evident when his family cruised past beggars with the car windows up and their jewelry glinting. “I wouldn't be saying something false if I identified myself as a Nigerian American, he told me. “But I would at the very least be saying something misleading by suggesting “I was somehow representative of all of those people.”
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