If we all were to go to a restaurant that is usually marketed and labeled African and order food, I’m sure it will most certainly be West African cuisine yet it’s branded as African.
Why? Why is a continental identifier used to flatten thousands of different cultures and ethnicities under a label that serves as a racial imposition?
When people identify as a continent rather than a nationality or identity so much gets lost in translation.
There is an absence of broad racial labeling. Rather than “Black restaurant,” establishments are identified by specific cultural or national markers. Little Haiti, Jerk Kitchen Grill which is signaling Jamaican or Haitian cuisine. Caribbean cultures are not marketed as a monolith.
Black is never a primary identifier because its application is contextually descriptive and not tied to sociopolitical ethnocultural ethnonational sociocultural identifiers
In fact we see this misattribution happen with Black.
Soul food becomes “African food” or gave same connection to Africa
Black becomes “African” or “African descent”
Black Culture becomes “diaspora” African culture
A specific group creates something then others consume it then rename it into something broader then detach it from the people who made it.
Dodge the hijack in every shape form and fashion
It’s a romanticized origin myth
The term “African identity” is often a politicized and racialized construct that relies on an expansive continental designation, reinforcing homogenization and obscuring the specificity of distinct ethnic, cultural, and historical identities.
Few other groups on the planet are expected to do this
Have you ever heard a Frenchman or Englishman say I’m European ?
Remember
Identifiers are layered :
Continent
Region
Nation
Tribal/Ethnicity
Racial (debunked)
There is no singular African culture or identity. The continent encompasses a vast plurality of distinct cultures, languages, histories, and social systems.
Dodge the hijack
One unnamable group is currently attempting to monopolize what it means to be “African” and use themselves as a “Blueprint” for all of Africa
Many many of my friends and family from Africa make mention of this exploit while my friends within this group have an interesting perspective about it
It’s very very interesting
We are not coming from the same POVs because here Black was intricately tied to us whereas it was a useless identifier in others places where the population are all the same in the USA if you see someone with the same phenotype the assumption is you are one of us but abroad it differs.
How they distinguished amongst themselves through delineation was what we call tribes today but were in fact an overlay of multiple cultures
My s/o call Arabs “white” because she’s using USA language and paradigms to describe something
White is phenotypical to her
Black changes meaning based on the social context of that society
Outside of modern racist thinking, Black DOES NOT African.
That equivalence only exists to simplify domination.
Africans historically distinguished between themselves (ethnic group, language, religion, lineage)
Europeans distinguished themselves nowadays via nation.
French, Polish, German.
But Black Americans were denied that option.
From our POV If you looked like us, you were U.S.
That’s why Black American identity became inclusive and protective by necessity.
That’s why ideas like the WAB feel seductive they appeal to a real instinct: unity under threat.
But when you force different groups into the same category without shared history, it eventually collapses. Always.
Black American culture became the overlay because it had to.
Others move within it, benefit from it, and sometimes hide behind it.
But overlay does not mean origin, and connection does not mean equivalence.
If people understood that one distinction, most of the confusion and resentment would disappear.
