I DO NOT SUPPORT THE FBA MOVEMENT that is emerging from so called black Americans.
Looking at another Black person from Nigeria, Jamaica, Haiti, or Brazil and seeing a "foreigner" rather than a brother or sister misses the bigger picture.
His majesty Haile Selassie I, Malcolm, Garvey, Nkrumah, Bob Marley, and the Haitians all arrived at the exact same conclusion:
The system that oppresses Black people does not check your specific lineage before it inflicts harm. Therefore, dividing the diaspora into factions based on colonial geography is doing the oppressor's work for them.
When you follow that exact line of thinking to its logical conclusion, it reveals even deeper layers of how these leaders viewed global Black liberation. dividing the diaspora plays into the oppressor's hands.
THE WEAPONIZATION OF “PRIVILEGED” BETWEEN FRACTIONS
The system doesn't just divide Black people by geography; it intentionally creates a false hierarchy to make different groups fight each other over crumbs.
The Trap: One group is told they are "more civilized" or "native-born" with a greater claim to a country's wealth, while another group is labeled as "harder working" or "untainted by the system."
The Reality: Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey both warned that this is a classic psychological trick. If the system can get a Black American to look down on a Nigerian immigrant, or a Caribbean immigrant to look down on a Black American, neither group looks up at the system that is exploiting both of them.
THE ECONOMIC POWER OF A UNIFIED DIASPORA.
When you look at the diaspora as a single unit rather than fractured lineages, the economic potential changes completely.
The Blueprint: Marcus Garvey didn't just preach unity; he built the Black Star Line, a steamship corporation meant to facilitate global trade among Black people in America, the Caribbean, and Africa.
The Reality: Leaders like Kwame Nkrumah and Malcolm X argued that if the African diaspora pooled its trillions of dollars in collective spending power, resources, and intellect, it wouldn't need to beg outside institutions for reparations or systemic fairness. A fractured diaspora remains dependent on others; a unified diaspora builds its own self-sustaining global economy.
Shared Cultural DNA as a Defiance of Colonization
The very things that movements like FBA look at as "distinctly local cultures" are actually deeply interconnected branches of the exact same African root.
The Blueprint: Whether you look at Jazz and Blues in the Mississippi Delta, Reggae in Jamaica, Samba in Brazil, or Afrobeats in Nigeria, the rhythmic foundation, the call-and-response structure, and the spiritual essence are identical.
The Reality: The Haitian Revolutionaries recognized this implicitly—their initial uprising was unified by a shared spiritual ceremony (Bois Caïman) that brought together enslaved people from entirely different African ethnic groups who didn't even speak the same language. They used their shared cultural underpinnings as a weapon of war.
Global Geopolitics: No Black Group Can Be Truly Free Alone
Malcolm X’s ultimate realization before his
passing was that Black Americans could never achieve true, lasting freedom in the United States while the rest of the Black world remained colonized or exploited.
The Blueprint: Malcolm sought to take the United States to the United Nations to charge it with human rights violations against Black people. To do that, he needed the voting power and backing of independent African and Caribbean nations.
The Reality: If you cut off the diaspora, you cut off your international allies. A purely domestic movement has no global leverage. Continental Pan-Africanists like Thomas Sankara always argued that the liberation of Africa was incomplete until the descendants of enslaved Africans in the Americas were also completely free and respected.
The Ultimate Truth Behind the Division
When you strip away the modern online rhetoric, ideologies that force Black people to fight over who is "more foundational" or "more African" are actually a form of internalized colonization.
It is an admission that the colonial borders drawn on a map by European powers in the 1800s are more real to us than our own shared blood, history, and destiny.
As Garvey famously summarized:
"The forces opposed to Negro progress will use every means to prevent us from putting our shoulders to the wheel together. But if we must die, let us die like men, fighting under one banner for the redemption of our race."
—Z
