08/27/2026
To echo the sentiments of one of my mentors, I look at Blackness through two different but connected lenses: Universal Blackness and American Blackness.
Universal Blackness is bigger than what country you come from, what language you speak, what island you’re from, or what flag you grew up under. Whether our people are from the continent, the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States, or somewhere else in the diaspora, we are still African-descended people. We might come in different shades, have different features, speak different languages, eat different foods, practice different traditions, and have completely different cultures—but those differences don’t erase the kinship.
And that part matters to me because sometimes we get so caught up in nationality that we forget a lot of these borders, languages, and labels came after us. Our ancestors were African before their descendants were American, Jamaican, Haitian, Cuban, Dominican, Brazilian, Colombian, etc. English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Dutch ain’t what made us different people ancestrally. A lot of those languages became ours because of colonization and slavery in the first place.
Especially when we’re talking about people whose motherlands were directly shaped by the transatlantic slave trade, the connection becomes even harder to ignore. African people were scattered throughout the Americas and Caribbean. People who came from the same regions, ethnic groups, and neighboring communities in Africa could end up in completely different places. One person’s descendants might be in South Carolina or Louisiana, somebody else’s in Jamaica, somebody else’s in Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Colombia, or the Dominican Republic.
So centuries later, we might not speak the same language, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t the same people. We might not have the same nationality, but nationality ain’t blood. Geography ain’t blood. Language ain’t blood. Those things tell the story of where different branches of us ended up and what happened to us once we got there.
Then there’s American Blackness—and that deserves its own distinction. Black Americans, particularly those of us whose ancestors were enslaved here, became our own people and developed our own culture through a very specific American experience: slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, segregation, the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Movement, and everything else that came with surviving and building a life in this country. That history is ours. Terms like ADOS attempt to name that specific lineage and experience.
But saying “this is specifically ours” doesn’t mean saying “y’all ain’t our people.” Both things can be true at once.
A Jamaican person has a Jamaican history. A Haitian person has a Haitian history. An Afro-Cuban has a Cuban history. An Afro-Brazilian has a Brazilian history. A Black American has a Black American history. And somebody from Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Congo, or anywhere else on the continent has their own ethnic and national history too. We don’t have to pretend all of those experiences are identical to recognize each other as kin.
Because at the end of the day, we are different branches of the same African family tree. History scattered us. Slavery and colonialism changed our languages, cultures, names, religions, and national identities. Time made each branch develop differently. But none of that magically erased where we came from.
So yes, I believe in recognizing the distinctions. I’m Black American, and there are things about the Black American experience that somebody from somewhere else in the diaspora simply may not share—and vice versa. But that doesn’t make us strangers.
Different language. Different country. Different culture. Different experience. Same ancestral family.
That’s the kinship I’m talking about. We can acknowledge what makes us different without acting like we ain’t related! ✊🏾😉
