A few seconds of video. A woman — someone who could have passed for Leena Alridge’s sister or cousin — referring to Black Americans as “dirty.” Offensive on its surface. But what it pointed toward was something deeper and more complicated: a fracture running through spaces that are supposed to feel like shared ground.
The tension between Black Americans and members of the broader African diaspora is not new. But it is louder now, and the online environment is making it harder to have with any real care.
At the center of the conversation is the Foundational Black American framework — FBA — a term used by descendants of enslaved people in the United States to name their historical lineage with more precision. For those who use it, it is an act of specificity, not exclusion. It is an attempt to say: this particular history, this particular rupture, this particular cultural formation deserves its own name. Chattel slavery did not just exploit labor. It severed language, surnames, geographic memory, and cultural lineage across generations. When someone tells a Black American “you don’t know where you’re from,” they are — often without realizing it — naming a wound that was deliberately inflicted by one of the most brutal systems in human history. The absence was not a failure. It was the point.
Out of that rupture, something remarkable emerged. Over generations, the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States forged a shared identity shaped by survival, adaptation, and extraordinary cultural creativity. Scholars describe this as ethnogenesis — the formation of a new cultural group through historical circumstance. Hip-hop, R&B, jazz, the linguistic innovations, the social institutions, the tradition of invention and civic transformation running from Thomas L. Jennings to Garrett Morgan to Patricia Bath to Mark Dean — all of it emerged from that process. When something becomes global, its origins tend to disappear. That does not mean the origins aren’t there.
The story on the other side of this conversation carries its own weight. Many immigrants within the diaspora arrive having left behind families and familiar lives, navigating unfamiliar systems while supporting households back home through remittances that function as lifelines. Their relationship to American racial history is shaped by a different point of entry. Expecting them to arrive pre-loaded with the same political priorities or cultural sensitivities as people whose families have lived inside that history for centuries is not a reasonable expectation. Their journey is not the same journey. That deserves acknowledgment, not erasure.
What both sides share is a tendency to talk past each other in ways that deepen the distance. Some Black Americans feel that immigrants benefit from access created through the sacrifices of the Civil Rights Movement without fully understanding what those sacrifices cost. Some immigrants recall being warned away from Black Americans by their own families — messages rooted in structural racism that were passed along as protection — leaving behind a distance that looks like judgment even when it isn’t. The misreadings stack up. The hostility online accelerates them.
Davison’s personal position is worth noting: he identifies simply as Black American, even as his lineage — Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, the Gullah Geechee corridor, the Great Migration north — falls squarely within the FBA framework. The identity is available to him. He doesn’t feel the need to claim it as a primary label. He understands why others do.
That feels like the right disposition for a conversation this complex: hold your own experience clearly while staying genuinely curious about someone else’s. The history connecting Black Americans and the broader African diaspora is deep, tangled, painful, and real in ways that online arguments cannot contain. The question underneath all of it is not whose experience is more legitimate. It is whether people are willing to approach the conversation with enough honesty and care to actually learn something.
At a moment when history itself is being contested and erased in parts of this country, turning the energy inward — at each other, with contempt — is an expensive choice.