The meme presents a linear progression of an identity crisis that people want Black Americans to have. It is a byproduct of the “We Wuz” variant of memes. It is stupid because it lacks context and oversimplifies a complex subject. Much like the meme it was born from, it is intended to silence, discredit, or mock Black Americans.
For white supremacists, the purpose is to enforce a singular racial narrative. For Afro-supremacists, it becomes, “You don’t want to be African,” when the reality is far more complex than that.
Everyone thinks they can police Black American identity because they also believe it is a weak point for us. We know who we are, yet we are constantly being told who we are by people outside the group.
White supremacists are busy enforcing their reconstructed version of history and flattening people’s identities to validate their oversimplified origin myths. Afro-supremacists and Pannies, meanwhile, reinforce the same binary in reaction.
The traditions shown in the meme are also not stages in a single historical progression. The Moorish Science movement, the Nation of Islam, Hebrew Israelite traditions, Pan-African thought, and various ancestry claims emerged in different periods, for different reasons, and often existed simultaneously. Some were religious movements, some were political projects, some were attempts to recover histories disrupted by slavery, and some involved unsupported or exaggerated claims. Flattening all of them into one timeline removes the very context needed to evaluate them.
The meme commits a hasty generalization by presenting several unrelated movements and identities as stages in one supposed Black American identity crisis. They did not develop as a single linear progression. Moorish Science emerged in the early twentieth century as a religious and national movement; the Nation of Islam developed as a distinct Black nationalist religious organization; Hebrew Israelite traditions encompass several independent religious movements; “Hotep” is now largely an internet caricature applied indiscriminately to Afrocentric thought, cultural nationalism, and pseudohistory; African identification can express ancestry, diaspora politics, or cultural affiliation; and claims of Native American identity raise an entirely different set of historical, genealogical, and tribal questions. These categories have different origins, purposes, beliefs, and relationships to Black American life. Treating them as interchangeable costumes removes the context necessary to evaluate any of them fairly.
The reasoning would be obviously absurd if it were applied to white people. A meme could place the KKK, self-described “patriots,” furries, goths, punks, and various religious sects in a row and claim that they represent a universal white identity crisis. No serious person would accept that as an accurate account of white identity, because those groups emerged from different subcultures, political conditions, historical periods, and personal choices. Yet Black Americans are routinely judged through the most unusual, fringe, or visually recognizable groups associated with us. The meme does not explain Black American identity; it selects unrelated examples, strips them of context, and uses them to support a conclusion it had already decided upon.
Many want to silence people who go against their established narratives and mock people from researching what happened. Each group has their own stakes and reasons for doing so but they overlook key things in order to pursue them. These things often overlap and in those overlaps complexity forms which is why nuance and fluidity is a required metric when analyzing these cultures.
The NOI
African
Hotep
Moor
Hebrew Israelites
Natives
Each is a different ideology from smaller subcultures that have never been the majority. Truth is, where there’s fire, there’s smoke, and the desire to find out who we were is born from the awareness that Eurocentric scholarship obfuscated our origins and much of global history by erasing and redefining dark-skinned presence in global history. They refuse to be honest. I cannot generalize, but most of the groups really are offshoots that points towards the same thing.
That the story of our progenitors is far more complicated. Outside of the extreme and radical polarizations, most people are aware they aren’t directly descended from other groups, but that those groups were melanated or within the category, whereas others believe it’s all interconnected. It is these complexities that should be respected in regards to knowing the erasure and reclassification systems deployed.
Black American identity is multilayered. We are a New World Creole.
