You ever notice how every new term that’s supposed to “free” us ends up creating another hierarchy?
We start out saying, “We need our own name, so we’re not lumped in with everybody.”
Okay, fair. Specificity matters. Lineage matters.
But give it a few months, and suddenly there’s a list of who’s allowed under the label and who’s not ...like we’re filing for membership in some secret order that forgot it was built on the word unity.
That’s what’s happening in these online spaces right now.. I’ve been on r/soulaan, r/blackamerica, and even wandered into r/freeblackmen and r/blackmen just to observe how folks talk about themselves. What I see isn’t evolution — it’s segmentation with fancy vocabulary.
On r/soulaan, people are working overtime to define their boundaries. I read a thread that said:
“In order to be Soulaan you need two Soulaan parents.”
Another user chimed in with:
“We are Afro-Americans, but we renounce both Africanness and Americanness.”
That second line right there… it hit me.
So you’re renouncing both ends of the bridge, the continent that birthed you and the nation that raised you ..but somehow that’s supposed to make you whole? That’s self-exile posing as enlightenment.
And yet, scroll further down and you’ll see people sincerely trying to build pride and political solidarity through that same label. They want distinction without division, but the energy always slides into gatekeeping. It’s like spiritual gentrification, fencing off new “identity property” with no plan for communal maintenance.
Then on r/blackamerica, I saw the opposite fight. Someone posted, “We should expand Black American to include all people of African descent living here.”
Somebody else shot back, “That dilutes the meaning. We’re talking about descendants of American slavery only.”
Both sides make their case like lawyers in a lineage trial, while the real jury ...the Black collective keeps shrinking because everybody’s too busy defending their own jurisdiction.
We forget: an umbrella’s purpose is to cover, not to divide. But the second we carve it into sections, we all get wet.
These divisions spill into how we treat each other in real life... how we side-eye folks who don’t “act American enough,” or how some Caribbean folks look down on Black Americans as if we’re culturally lazy, or how Creoles like me get told we’re too mixed to matter in the reparations conversation.
And I’m sitting there thinking:
We were all categorized as “Negro” when segregation signs were hanging.
Jim Crow didn’t stop to ask for ancestry documentation. It saw melanin and decided policy.
So why are we now reenacting that same paperwork mindset among ourselves?
Every “new label” becomes a new boundary project.
It’s built with good intentions, but it starts sounding like real-estate jargon: “exclusive,” “authentic,” “original members only.”
Meanwhile, the rest of us are still trying to figure out how to pay rent in a system that profits from our disunity.
The irony is this:
While we argue over the right shade of Blackness, white supremacy doesn’t need to lift a finger.
We’re doing its maintenance work for free.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t honor their roots. I love cultural precision. I love knowing where we come from, which branch of the diaspora shaped our rhythms, food, and faith. But when identity becomes a contest instead of a communion, we’ve lost the point.
If every generation creates a new word to mean “us,” and then builds walls to keep “them” out... what happens when no one remembers who we were to begin with?
I’ve come to realize:
I don’t want another term that narrows my circle.
I want a language that expands it through recognition.
We can be Creole and Soulaan, Haitian and foundational, Pan-African etc. None of those are threats unless we turn them into weapons.
So when I hear folks say, “We’re not African, we’re Soulaan,” I think:
Maybe the real liberation isn’t naming yourself different.. It’s learning how to stand together under one storm, without letting the umbrella become the weapon.
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