White in Kenya: Privilege, Perspective, and Positionality

This piece was originally published on Medium and has been moved to my personal website for continuity.

Image generated with ChatGPT. Behold: my straddling of two worlds.

“Mzungu! Mzungu!”

The call rings out as the sun dips behind the hills of Kapseret, Kenya. A group of men are stacked precariously onto a boda boda, zipping past while waving their arms like they’d just passed a celebrity. I wave back. It’s become reflexive. “Habari yako?” a chorus of schoolchildren calls from behind a chain-link fence, their faces pressed between the bars. I respond, “Poa,” and we continue walking. They clutch at the fence, not ready to lose sight of me.

There’s a unique kind of self-awareness that settles over you when you’re the only one of your ethnicity in a public space. A hypervisibility. A strange kind of fame that doesn’t come with admiration or recognition, just attention. It’s not inherently hostile — at least not here — but it’s constant, and it’s jarring. Here, I’m not feared or excluded — but I’m always seen. Always marked.

Growing up in the rural South, I was always on the other end of that stare. I was the white kid, blending into a sea of white faces, casting that long, unknowing look at the one Black person in the grocery store or passing by in a car. If difference showed up in my childhood, it was infrequent and always felt like an interruption in the norm — a moment that lingered just long enough to make you realize how homogenous everything else was.

Belonging and the Illusion of Sameness

I spent my formative years in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky. To say the area was white would be an understatement. There were Black people, but they were largely tied to the Job Corps center and rarely seen outside of organized activities. My first real friendship with a Black peer didn’t come until high school.

Her name was Crystal. She was smart, quick-witted, and had a warmth that made everyone feel welcome. She never withheld her attention, no matter who you were. After graduation, she went missing. Years later, her remains were found. She’d been murdered — brutally — by men who decided to act out the kind of racial violence that America has never truly confronted. I didn’t grow up in a sundown town, exactly. But it often felt like the sun never really came up on the truth of what was happening around us.

My friend from high school, the one I shared AP classes with and the occasional lunch, had died for a reason I had never thought of or tried to comprehend. I can understand murder driven by desperation or protection, as horrifying as it is. But I couldn’t fathom a murder justified only by someone’s skin color.

Crystal has been dead for decades, her muder solved for about ten years, but the kind of attitude that encouraged it in the first place remains. When I started dating a black woman, she asked if I would bring her home to see my family. It was with both anger and shame that I had to tell her no, not anytime soon. It wasn’t safe, and I would never put her in an unsafe situation.

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Sometimes I wonder if the twenty-first century is just coloring in the margins of the same line. Even as my world expanded, I didn’t realize how much of it still revolved around me.

In college and later as a working adult in places like Cincinnati, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., I was exposed to more diversity. I made friends across lines of race, nationality, and religion. And while I learned and grew through those relationships, I was still, without realizing it, the default. Part of the majority. Part of the empowered.

I moved through the world with all the unconscious ease that whiteness in America provides. I walked through neighborhoods without anyone questioning my presence. I applied for jobs and got interviews without worrying that my name might be flagged. I owned a home and a car, and never had to think twice about whether I’d be followed in a store. I told myself I didn’t see race. That we were all one race, the human race. I thought that was the enlightened thing to say.

It wouldn’t be until the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic that I would understand colorblindness doesn’t solve the problems, or erase them. It just hides them and pretends they are not there. As those like George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor took center stage on national television, as I watched white nationalist attempt to take over my rural Maine town, I knew that my sitting on the sidelines wasn’t helping anyone. I wasn’t the ally I thought I was. I knew that the systemic problems facing my fellow Americans and not only been allowed to begin but also to continue due to the silence of those like me: the priviliged who thought that being one of the good ones was enough.

Otherness and the Limits of Discomfort

Then I moved to Kenya.

The culture shock hit before I even landed. Renting a home didn’t involve background checks or references. Electricity is pre-paid at little shops on the side of the road. The cost of living is wildly different. But all of that faded in comparison to the sudden, persistent awareness that I was one of the only white people in sight.

At the Nairobi airport, it didn’t feel all that different. Plenty of white and Asian travelers passed through. But when I got to Eldoret — one of Kenya’s smaller cities — everything shifted. I could go to the largest mall in town and, on a busy day, see maybe two other white people. Walking down the street brought the familiar chorus of “Mzungu!” from every direction.

At first, I wondered if this was what it felt like to be a racial minority — constantly seen, always noticed. But that’s not quite right. What I experience here is visibility without vulnerability. Curiosity, not surveillance. Attention, not danger.

Fanon wrote of the “white gaze” as a force that distorts Black identity — making the Black subject hyper-visible, alienated, and defined through the eyes of others. In Kenya, I am seeing a mirror image of that dynamic: I am the object of the gaze, but the power behind it is different. My whiteness isn’t interrogated — it’s still protected. I’m not seen with suspicion or hostility, but with fascination or deferential amusement. My presence is still buffered by history, status, and symbolic capital — remnants of colonial and global hierarchies that still mark whiteness as exceptional. Even in moments of discomfort, I’m insulated by the privileges that came with me. This isn’t marginalization — it’s misplaced celebrity.

My whiteness still carries symbolic capital. It’s tied to power, wealth, global status, and lingering colonial history. It opens doors. It implies access. It confers legitimacy in rooms I haven’t earned my place in. Even when I’m out of place, I’m still insulated.

In a postcolonial space like Kenya, whiteness doesn’t dissolve into the background. It hovers — remembered, questioned, expected.

The Comfort of Being Seen, The Risk of Being Misread

When children call out and smile, I smile back. There’s a part of me that wants to believe it’s pure. That it’s joy. But I can’t pretend that what they’re seeing is me. They’re seeing a character, a figure they’ve been taught to associate with stories, aid workers, movies, wealth, whiteness. Sometimes this is made all the more clear when they ask for 20 bob.

It’s tempting to romanticize that — to feel good about being a source of delight. But that’s not the whole picture. Their curiosity doesn’t mean admiration. Their smiles don’t erase the power dynamics that frame every interaction.

And still, I walk freely. I move through public spaces without fear. I live here with my Kenyan partner and navigate this space in ways that most foreigners don’t. But I’m never anonymous. I’m always noticed.

There is a lot to break down about community in these reflections. We all belong to multiple communities, even when we don’t take the time to think about them. I belong to my family, to the Appalachians, to a politcal party, and now to a diaspora. I belong to the spoonies, the gamer geeks, the college students, the scifi/fantasy nerds, the foodies. When I was still a smoker, I knew the instant camaraderie that comes when you approach a group of strangers with a lighter in hand.

But walking through Eldoret alone makes me feel keenly that I do not have a community here. At least, not yet. Despite those micro-communities, there’s a different kind of loneliness here — one born not from rejection, but from unfamiliarity.

Conclusion: Holding Complexity

Being white in Kenya has not made me oppressed. It’s made me visible. It’s challenged the illusion that race doesn’t matter, or that I’d somehow stepped outside of its influence. If anything, it has highlighted how race, power, and place intersect in every moment of daily life.

I’m learning to sit with that. To listen. To observe more than I speak. To recognize that being the “other” isn’t always a mirror of what others have lived through. And to hold space for complexity, contradiction, and uncomfortable truths.

I’m learning that being the outsider doesn’t always mean being excluded — but it does mean learning to listen harder, to see clearer, and to carry my history more carefully. In the end, being white in Kenya hasn’t reversed the structures I’ve always benefited from — it’s just relocated them, made them visible, and demanded I name them.