Different peoples arise from different histories. Different cultures grow from different environments. Different societies are shaped by distinct social pressures, survival strategies, moral codes, and inherited memories. These differences are structural. Not interchangeable. Not shared. Not cosmetic. Not ancestral. Etc. completely different mix
To delineate is to recognize reality. We were shamed for identifying as a “race” but this is now thrown in our face to shame us into compliance. “Yall don’t understand ethnicity, race, and nationality!” Truth is why should we change how we do things because we have guests in the house? We were discussing ourselves and doing our own thing and they included themselves into it under a back door exploitation and misunderstanding of HOW we were using the term Black. Though this understanding is extended to South African Coloureds. Being phenotypically “black” isn’t some granted access to a completely different people groups identity and culture.
Peoples form through shared lineage, language, experience, and historical circumstance. Culture is not a costume that can be put on or taken off at will, nor is it a flat aesthetic layer defined only by appearance. It is a lived system of meaning built over generations. When distinct people groups with different origins and social formations are collapsed into a single category, something essential is erased.
Phenotypical conflation is the act of reducing identity to appearance alone. It assumes that shared physical traits automatically imply shared culture, history, values, or consciousness. This logic is racist no matter how it is framed or who applies it. It is the same reductionism that once justified domination, misclassification, and erasure. Changing the intent does not change the structure of the error. Category Error coupled with low barrier to entry (based solely on phenotype) is by design doomed to conflate and cause division.
The WAB propagates using phenotypical conflation even though people from different societies and structures had a different definition or usage of it. Using Black as an arbitrarily identifier is basically modern groups succumbing to American influence and they do so for access to a culture. This isn’t a diasporic culture that everyone added to in order to create it’s more of everyone is taking something away from it and infusing it with their own. It’s simply a co-opt.
Respecting difference does not require hierarchy. It requires honesty. Distinct peoples can coexist, cooperate, and even align without pretending they are the same people. Conflation does not create unity as its colonial strategy has always been to cause distortion. It forces incompatible histories into a false sameness and demands cultural surrender under the guise of inclusion. Targeted proscriptive remediation becomes impossible.
True respect begins with clear boundaries.
It acknowledges that different societies produce different worldviews, different norms, and different identities and the recognition of this is not exclusion at all.
Delineation is not bigotry. Erasure asp when done through phenotypical shortcuts that are submerged in Racism, is simply is wrong because it denies peoples the right to be what they actually are.
People are reacting to the colonial structure but what they have to identify that if we want to dismantle these structures that their applications were different across societies. We are conflated but we are simply not the same and each group has a different way to solve their problem
They might overlap or share similarities but this global fight against White Supremacy ignores the real fight which is their application adoption and imposition of their viewpoints esp when they are repackaged.
This global solidarity people dream of simply doesn’t exist. Black America our fight is our fight. Other groups are using our fight to swap destinies with us
They want to be you and take what your ancestors produced and created because it’s influential and for the fantasy to work properly YOU must be removed either by absorption into their group(s) OR downplayed/removed from the culture your people produced
We are different people with different cultures from different societies with different histories that shaped who we each other. We have unique problems in our societies that need unique solutions and theyre comparable ness is limited
A person from Nigeria comes from a completely different people group, different culture, different society, different history which gives them a different perspective and different awareness. They have different cultural and contextual memory.
There’s nothing wrong with saying that.
