The sometimes-negative aspect of growing up in this country without a firm cultural basis is that your entire being becomes predicated on satisfying … - Tope Folarin

He’s hitting hard against what the American societal definition of what being a black man is and also a diasporic Nigerian conception of what being a black man is.

Growing up, I experienced this viscerally because my parents are from Nigeria, I was born and raised in America and my parents tried to hand over that identity card and that didn’t fit me because I was growing up in a context in which their identity didn’t necessarily line up with how I saw myself…

We're at an era where a lot of people are beginning to step in, in a really firm way, into their identities. Whether people are saying...they're born with one sex, they say: I'm actually another gender—that's who I am; or people are claiming their cultural heritage in a more profound way than they have in the past...For any number of reasons, we have an opportunity to construct our identities that are more honest and open and true to who we are than what we've been handed at birth.