Diaspora Wars and the Weaponization of Identity
The internet is on fire with old wars dressed in new language. From the ashes of enslavement and the fragmentation of stolen people, a storm now brews in comment sections, live streams, and hashtags. Across platforms, Black folks from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and the African continent hurl insults like spears and insist, in their own way, on the legitimacy of their particular Blackness. This is the Diaspora Wars, a borderless conflict fought in digital trenches, yet rooted in centuries of dislocation, longing, and betrayal. These combatants have one thing in common, they have taken up the tools of colonial logic by measuring lineage like land, drawing boundaries around Africaness/Blackness with the precision of cartographers. They move like Stephen from Django, not in name but in nature, protecting the house even as it burns, loyal to a colonial order that will never love them back. They carry the language of the oppressor in their mouths and call it truth. Their ideology flattens Black identity and turns a vast ocean of diasporic experiences into a single, narrow stream. They demand that Blackness conform to lineage charts, passport stamps, or proximity to trauma, stripping it of its complexity, its contradictions, and its beauty. In their worldview, culture must be static, identity must be singular, and belonging must be earned through blood.
On the United States’ side, two battle flags have been raised: American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) and its offshoot, Foundational Black Americans (FBA). What began as a demand for clarity in the reparations conversation has calcified into rhetoric shaped by xenophobia, historical revisionism, and rigid claims over cultural ownership. Their rallying cry is inheritance, and their central claim is true. Reparative justice is both necessary and long overdue. The enduring consequences of American chattel slavery are borne disproportionately by a specific lineage, and any meaningful remedy must account for that historical and genealogical specificity. Yet in their pursuit of precision, they have drawn borders where bridges once stood and transform meeting places into fault lines.
None of the combatants in this conflict are without fault. Across continents and timelines, many have picked up the weapons of mockery, dismissal, and superiority. Some African Americans have reduced continental Africans to caricatures, questioning their relevance to the Black struggle. Some Africans and Caribbeans have dismissed the cultural and historical weight of African American identity, framing it as disconnected or derivative. Black Brits have, at times, echoed the imperial tone of the empire that shaped them, looking across the Atlantic with condescension rather than kinship. What was once an opportunity for cross-cultural understanding has become a cycle of injury and retaliation. In this digital war, everyone loses, even the victors.
This framework does not offer a pathway to liberation. It adopts the very architecture of white supremacy: division, hierarchy, exclusion, and sows seeds of suspicion. Rather than dismantling systems of racial violence, it redirects that violence towards other victims. The descendants of the enslaved and colonized are left to wage war among themselves, long after the chains have fallen, the ships have disappeared, and the colonizer has returned to Europe.
Maya Angelou wrote, “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.” The Diaspora Wars forgets that. It forgets that we are many, not because we are fractured, but because we are vast. The ocean doesn’t apologize for having many waves.
A choir not a solo
The Black world speaks in many tongues. It moves to many rhythms. It carries grief in one hand and joy in the other, and it does so in thousands of dialects, melodies, and migrations. The soil that grew us was not the same. Some were born of cotton and cane, others of salt mines and sugar estates. Some carry the memory of chains in the mouth of the Mississippi, while others remember the ocean as a cradle, not a grave. This difference does not weaken us. It tells the truth.
There is no singular Black culture. No one story holds us all. The belief that one narrative could contain the entire diaspora is a shadow cast by empire, colonialism, and slavery. These systems needed simplicity to justify domination, so they collapsed our complexity into caricature. Unity does not require uniformity. To demand sameness is to echo the very logic that shackled us and reduced our cultures to primitive categories and turned kin into strangers. It is the myth that we must be the same in order to stand together. But the drumbeat of freedom has never had one rhythm. The field holler is not the griot’s song, yet both tell of survival. The blues is not calypso, but both remember the wound. The goal is not to merge into sameness. The goal is to move in formation.
What we need is not uniformity, but alignment. We need a framework that honors the sacred difference in our stories while refusing to weaponize those differences. We need a shared language of struggle that does not erase the local tongue. Call it diasporic convergence. Call it Black transnational kinship. It looks like mutual recognition across oceans. It looks like cooperative repair across histories. It means seeing the blues and highlife, spirituals and dancehall, trap and griot poetry not as rivals, but as branches from the same scorched root. This kind of solidarity does not ask us to dissolve into sameness. It asks us to move like a chorus with many voices, many tones, and one rhythm forward.
They Not Like Us
The Diaspora Wars are not about truth. They are about injury. This is the sound of wounded identities echoing across oceans. The violence is verbal, but the trauma is ancestral. For centuries, Black people have been dismembered…cut from land, from language, from each other. Slavery broke the bones. Colonialism took the tongue. Anti-Blackness replaced dignity.
What you see now is the reaching. A desperate search for shape, for certainty, for belonging that does not blur. People are trying to draw a clean line through a history that was written in smeared blood. FBA and ADOS give language to that grief. They offer a flag to those who never had one. They create a tribe for those who were born into exile. That is the source of their appeal. For those on the continent, the diaspora was perceived wrapped in foreignness and suspicion. Colonialism deepened the division. The British told Ghanaians they were not like Nigerians. The French told Senegalese they were not like Cameroonians. White Americans told African Americans they were not like Africans. Each message was delivered in the voice of empire. Each was received like truth. And across oceans, in English, in French, in shame, we learned to chant back: they not like us.
Frantz Fanon wrote that the oppressed will sometimes identify not with the struggle for freedom but with the symbols of power. When denied full humanity, people seek to reclaim it through proximity to authority even if that authority is the one that broke them. This is how hierarchy creeps into liberation movements. This is how the colonized mind survives long after the colonizer has left the room. This is how the plantation stays forever in bloom.
The danger of what psychologists call "horizontal hostility" grows in the colonized mind. When marginalized groups cannot access the dominant system, they often turn on each other. The rage that cannot reach the oppressor redirects itself to someone nearby, someone familiar, someone just close enough to be mistaken for a rival. It is the wounded lashing out at the mirror.
Audre Lorde wrote, “The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.” The Diaspora Wars fertilize that piece. They nourish it with false pride and historical amnesia. They tell us that the threat is not white supremacy but another Black face with a different accent, a different flag, a different story.
This is not liberation. This is reenactment. This is the aftershock of empire playing out in pixels and posts. It is the psychic residue of captivity, now performed in public. It is proof that the plantation was never just a place. It was a logic. And that logic still speaks in every post, in every Tweet, in every YouTube video.
It is the Diaspora Wars.
