Dear Diaspora: Why Are We Fighting Each Other?
- Nadia Renata
- May 24
- 7 min read
Article 2 of the Dear Diaspora Series
If you've spent any time on any corner of social media where diaspora communities gather… you've seen it.
It usually starts small. A post. A comment. Someone saying something that rubs another person the wrong way. And then, before you know it, there are hundreds of people in the replies, flags in bios, declarations being made, histories being weaponised, and pain, so much pain, being hurled across the internet at people who, if you stepped back far enough, actually have more in common than either side is willing to admit in that moment.
Caribbean people and African Americans. African Americans and Africans. Caribbean people and Africans. First generation immigrants and second generation. The ones who stayed home and the ones who left.
We are fighting each other online with an energy that, honestly, our actual oppressors don't even require of us. We're doing it ourselves. For free.
And it needs to be talked about. Not to pick a side. But because the fighting is a symptom, and if we only treat the symptom without understanding what's underneath it, nothing changes.
So let's go there.
First — Empathy. Because It's Required.
Before anyone gets called out, before the mirror goes up, we have to sit with something uncomfortable.
Every group in this conversation is carrying pain. Real, historical, ongoing, unresolved pain. And pain that has nowhere safe to go has a habit of finding the nearest available target, which is often not the source of the pain at all, but someone close enough to feel familiar. Someone who looks like you, or almost like you. Someone whose story rhymes with yours even if the verses are different.
African Americans carry the specific, particular weight of being descendants of enslaved people on American soil — a country that was built on their labour, that has never fully reckoned with that debt, that continues to extract from Black communities while simultaneously denying them the full dignity of belonging. The anger that comes from that place is not irrational. It is the entirely logical response to centuries of being told you don't matter, followed by decades of watching the systems that were supposed to fix it fall short again and again. That history produced a cultural and political experience that is deeply specific to America, even while remaining connected to broader diasporic realities.
Caribbean people, and here I'm speaking as someone still at home, still living this, carry our own weight. The weight of colonial histories that reshaped our identities before we were even born. The complexity of being multi-ethnic societies where race, class and culture intersect in ways that don't map neatly onto American frameworks. The frustration of having our cultures consumed globally — our music, our food, our carnival, our spirituality, while we ourselves are often reduced to a punchline or an afterthought in the very conversations that claim to centre Blackness.
African communities carry the particular grief of being the source — the origin point of a diaspora that was created through violence, while simultaneously being looked down upon by some of those descendants. The irony of being told you don't understand Black struggle by people whose ancestors came from your soil is a specific kind of wound.
None of these pain points cancel each other out. None of them make one group's experience more valid than another's. They are different expressions of the same original rupture — the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and the long aftermath of both, playing out across different geographies, different generations, different cultural contexts.
When we fight each other online, we are often, without realising it, fighting about whose pain is most legitimate. Whose experience counts most. Whose version of the story gets to be the true one.
And that is a fight nobody wins.
Now — The Mirror.
Empathy doesn't mean everything said in these online wars is equally valid or equally harmless. It isn't. And some things need to be said plainly.
On The "You're Not Really Black" Argument.
This one needs to be retired. Permanently.
When Caribbean people or Africans, or any Black person from outside America are told they aren't really Black, or that their Blackness is somehow lesser, conditional, or in need of American validation, that is not activism. That is not consciousness. That is one group attempting to gatekeep an identity that belongs to no single nation, no single culture, no single experience.
Blackness is not an American invention. It is a global reality with roots that predate the existence of the United States entirely. The African diaspora did not begin and end on American shores. It scattered across the Caribbean, across Latin America, across Europe, across the Pacific and every branch of that diaspora developed its own relationship to identity, to resistance, to culture, to survival. Different. Not lesser.
Telling a Trinidadian, a Jamaican, a Bajan, a Guyanese person that they don't understand Blackness, or that their experience of race doesn't count because it doesn't look exactly like the American experience, is a form of cultural imperialism. And it is particularly painful coming from within a diaspora community that knows exactly what it feels like to have its identity defined and diminished by an outside force.
On Dismissing African American Struggle As Somehow Less Than.
This also needs to stop.
There is a particular response that sometimes comes from Caribbean communities — a kind of distancing. "We don't have that problem back home. We're not like that. Our people worked hard and didn't complain." Sometimes it comes from a place of genuine cultural difference. Often it comes from a place of respectability politics, a desire to be seen as the "good" immigrants, the ones who assimilated cleanly, who didn't make noise, who succeeded without asking the system to account for itself.
But here is the truth that respectability politics doesn't want to acknowledge: the system that brutalises African Americans is the same system that exploits immigrant labour, that profiles Caribbean people at borders, that decides which Black lives are acceptable and which are expendable. The address is different. The architecture is the same.
Distancing yourself from African American struggle does not protect you from anti-Black racism. It just means you're facing it alone, without solidarity, having burned a bridge you might one day desperately need.
On Diaspora Members Speaking Over Homeland People.
And then there is this — the one that perhaps gets discussed least openly.
There is a growing tendency, particularly in online spaces, for diaspora members, sometimes first generation, more often second and third, to position themselves as the ultimate authorities on cultures they are connected to by heritage but not by daily lived experience. To speak loudly, confidently, and sometimes aggressively about what a place is, what its people need, what its culture means, while the people actually living there watch from the comments, mouths open.
This is not unique to any one diaspora. It happens across communities globally. But it is worth naming because it causes real harm.
Heritage is not the same as currency. Knowing where your grandparents came from does not make you an expert on where those grandparents' grandchildren are living right now. Love for a homeland — real, genuine love — should make you curious about it as it actually is, not defensive of it as you imagine it to be.
We will come back to this in depth in the next article. But it belongs on the table here too, because it feeds directly into the wars. When diaspora members speak over homeland people, homeland people push back. When homeland people push back, diaspora members feel their identity is being invalidated. And the cycle continues, getting louder and more entrenched with every round.
What's Really Underneath All Of It
Here is what I believe, having watched these conversations for years from this side of the water.
The diaspora wars are not really about who is Blacker, or whose struggle is harder, or whose culture is more authentic. Those are the presenting arguments. And presenting arguments are almost never the real issue.
The real issue is that we are all, in different ways, dealing with the aftermath of the same violence. A violence that scattered people from their homes, stripped them of their languages, their names, their gods, their families — and then left the survivors and their descendants to piece together an identity from what remained. And that is hard. Generationally hard. The kind of hard that doesn't resolve in one lifetime or two or three.
And when you are carrying that kind of unresolved pain, and you encounter someone whose pain looks similar but not identical to yours, and they seem to be claiming something you feel belongs to you, the instinct is to fight. To defend. To prove that your version is the real one.
But none of us has the whole story. Not African Americans. Not Caribbean people. Not Africans. Not the diaspora. Not the homeland. We each have a piece of it — shaped by where we landed, what we survived, what we were told, what we managed to hold onto.
The question is whether we are willing to put the pieces together. Or whether we'd rather keep fighting over which piece is most important.
A Challenge — For All Of Us
Next time you feel the pull to enter one of these online wars… pause. Not because the conversation isn't worth having. It is. But ask yourself honestly:
Am I about to add light to this? Or just heat?
Because we have enough heat. We have centuries of it. What we are desperately short of is the willingness to sit across from someone whose experience of our shared history looks different from ours, and get genuinely curious instead of immediately defensive.
That curiosity won't resolve everything. But it's the only starting point that leads somewhere worth going.
Continue the Conversation:
Previous in the Series: Dear Diaspora: Let's Start From The Beginning — exploring what the diaspora is, why people leave, and why conversations about migration, identity and belonging are often more complicated than they first appear.
Next in the series: Dear Diaspora: You Read The News. We Live It. — on frozen memories, the homeland that kept moving, and the gap between being informed about a place and actually knowing it.
This article is part of the Audacious Evolution Community series, which explores Caribbean culture, social norms and the unseen forces that shape behaviour and relationships. The goal is understanding, not blame, and creating space for more informed, compassionate conversations.
If this conversation resonated with you, you can explore more articles and reflections from Audacious Evolution across Body, Mind, Spirit and Community.
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