“My name is Thompson Izere, and I’m from a family of three―me, my mother and my brother. I was born in Burundi, grew up in South Africa, and then I moved to Zimbabwe where my little brother was born. I’m three years older than him. We have different last names. A lot of people ask me, “Why do you guys have different names? Do you have the same father?” But in my culture, we get our last names according to what situation we were born in. My mother almost had a miscarriage of me three times, but then she believed that she was going to give birth, and when I was born that’s why they gave me the name Izere, which means “believe”. 

The way I look is like, I look African American, but when I go to the African communities, the people from Africa don’t notice that I’m African because of the way I look, the way I speak, they think I’m African American until I tell them where I’m from. And I feel like, I’m not offended by it but at the same time, why do I not look like where I’m from? It’s just a question that I always ask myself. I try to make myself fit in when I go to African events so they know I’m African, not African American. 

As a Black person in America, I have a lot of things that have been going on. I came to the US in 2016, October, and I started going to school in 2017. I remember this one time I was going home, the UTA busses were not working at that time. I went home late because I stayed after school doing my homeworks. I walked home. I was almost home when this one cop car pulled over and I had on my hoodie and my backpack. It was in the cold and I had on all these clothes. He came up to me and told me, “Where are you going? Where are you from?” and all that, “What’s your name?” I gave him all my information and then he searched my backpack and I didn’t know why. When I came I didn’t know anything about racism but when I got in history class and the more I learned about it, that story just popped up in my head, like, that’s why that cop was searching me that day. I just asked myself, why did he do that? I didn’t have answers because I was still new in the US. I didn’t mind, I didn’t care, but now that I remember that, with the stuff that’s going on now, I’m kind of hurt.

One thing that everybody has to know: people are the same. We are all humans. We all have lives to live. Just because someone is Black or is from a different country from where you are from, doesn’t mean they are bad or are different from you. As humans in the world, in my perspective, we should help each other. Because there’s something that I know somebody else don’t know. I would like to share that knowledge. And if there is racism, maybe you want to learn something from me that I know, or I want to help you, but the way you are treating me, I’ll be scared to tell you because I don’t know how you’re going to react. Because not everyone is racist, but when you ask for help, you think, “what is that person going to think about me? How should I approach them?” And that’s how most people struggle right now. So I think we should be one, help one another, and be a great nation. I know one day I want to have kids. I want my kids to grow up in a better place. So if my kids grow up in a world like this, what will they think? This started way back. If racism was prevented way back, our generations would have never known stuff like this. But it’s gone on for decades and we don’t know when it’s going to stop. The way to stop is just to be one, one community, one nation, and build our country good.”