Shame as a Method of Identification
An origin myth is a story a group tells about where it came from, what made it a people, and why it has a particular identity or destiny.
“ Myth” here does not necessarily mean a complete fabrication. An origin myth can contain real historical facts. What makes it a myth is that it organizes those facts into a simplified, emotionally powerful narrative. It usually:
- selects one starting point as the true beginning;
- identifies a homeland, founding population, trauma, migration, or heroic event;
- explains what has supposedly been lost or preserved;
- defines who belongs to the group;
- gives present-day political or cultural goals a sense of historical necessity.
For example, an origin myth might say: We were once one people in an ancestral homeland; we were scattered by violence; we lost our authentic identity; and our task is to reunite, return, or restore what was taken from us.
The important question is not merely whether parts of that story are true. The question is what the story emphasizes and what it suppresses. It may emphasize ancient ancestry while minimizing the creation of a new people in a later place. It may turn political solidarity into proof of a shared ethnicity. It may portray cultural change only as loss rather than as the creation of something new.
In the argument about Pan-Africanism, the proposed origin myth works like this:
Black Americans are said to have originally been Africans, slavery is presented as a rupture that removed their real identity, and reconnection with Africa is offered as the solution. Africa becomes the authentic homeland, while Black American identity is treated as damaged, incomplete, or secondary.
The critique is that this narrative confuses the origins of some ancestors with the origins of Black Americans as a people. The TAST event was real but it was reconstructed. It primarily highlights African points of origins from New World creoles. The thing is the progenitors of BAs were already in the Americas but were amalgamated with other ethnic groups and cultures upon contact. I see it as points of development: The progenitor groups became the American who then became the Black Americans we developed in North America.
The origin myth places the decisive beginning in Africa; a Black American ethnogenesis argument places the decisive formation in the New World.
So an origin myth is not simply a story about the past. It is a story that gives authority to a particular definition of the present.
Black Americans are not merely invited to identify with Africa. We are often shamed into doing so.
The pressure usually begins with an accusation: that a Black American who does not call himself African is ignorant, self-hating, colonized, ashamed of his ancestors or desperate for acceptance from white people. A disagreement about history is turned into a defect of character.
This is a powerful rhetorical trap. Once identification with Africa is defined as evidence of racial consciousness, refusal becomes evidence of psychological damage. Black Americans are not allowed to say that African ancestry is only one component of our history. We are told that declining an African identity means rejecting Africa, African ancestry, and Africa people/cultures themselves.
But ancestry does not create an unlimited political or cultural obligation.
A Black American can respect African civilizations, oppose anti-African prejudice and recognize African ancestry without claiming an African nationality or ethnicity. The same distinction is accepted for many other populations. An American with distant Irish ancestry is not automatically accused of self-hatred for declining to identify as Irish. A Brazilian of Portuguese descent is not presumed to possess a moral obligation to organize his identity around Portugal.
Black Americans are treated differently because racial ideology collapses ancestry, appearance, political allegiance and ethnicity into one category. Since we are classified as Black, and Africa is imagined as the natural home of Blackness, we are expected to treat Africa as our primary civilizational reference point.
This expectation reproduces an old racial assumption: that Blackness cannot be native to American history.
White supremacy once used African ancestry to say that Black Americans could never truly belong in America. Certain forms of Pan-Africanism reverse the emotional value of that claim but preserve its structure.
Instead of saying, “You are African, so you do not belong here,” they say, “You are African, so your real belonging is somewhere else.”
Black Americans who insist that we are a people formed in North America are then accused of abandoning our origins. Yet this accusation depends on defining “origin” so narrowly that centuries of Black American life become secondary.
Our progenitors came from many different places with many different cultures. Some were already here that formed the core composite group for the American systems of enslavement. In many ways, not only come from somewhere. They also became someone.
They became Black Americans in North America. To recognize that transformation is not self-hatred. It is historical adulthood.
The language of shame prevents that adulthood because it keeps Black Americans in a permanent state of ancestral dependence. We are told that our identity remains incomplete until it is validated by a continent, a symbolism or a political ideology located outside our own historical community.
The identity crisis is therefore not always something Pan-Africanism discovered. In many cases, Pan-Africanism helped produce the crisis by persuading Black Americans that knowing our own families, regions, communities and history was insufficient.
First, Black Americans are told that slavery erased our identity.
Then we are offered an externally constructed identity as the cure.
The Expectation to “Build Africa” Instead of Black America
The shame surrounding African identification frequently produces a second demand: Black Americans are told that we should redirect our money, expertise, political attention and emotional loyalty toward “building Africa.”
This expectation deserves scrutiny.
Black Americans are encouraged to purchase land in African countries, invest in African businesses, relocate to the continent, participate in development projects and treat African political advancement as a responsibility inherited through race. Such activities may be worthwhile when chosen freely. The problem is not voluntary cooperation. The problem is the suggestion that Black Americans possess a special duty to repair, develop or redeem a continent because our distant ancestors came from parts of it.
No continent is a single political project. Africa contains more than fifty states, thousands of ethnic communities, many competing interests and widely different legal and economic systems. Telling Black Americans to “build Africa” often turns this complexity into a racial abstraction.
Which country? Which community? Under whose political authority? According to whose priorities? Why should a Black American family whose recent history lies in Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia or Louisiana possess an automatic obligation to a modern African state with which it has no documented familial, legal or cultural relationship?
The demand becomes even stranger when Black American communities continue to face dispossession, failing infrastructure, declining institutions, historical land loss and limited political power in the places where our people actually live.
Black Americans are rarely encouraged with equal intensity to rebuild the Black Belt, preserve historic Black towns, support Black American farmers, restore family property, strengthen local schools, document cemeteries, fund historical archives or create durable institutions in our own communities. These projects are often treated as narrow, provincial or insufficiently revolutionary.
By contrast, sending resources overseas can be presented as evidence of global consciousness.
This creates an inverted moral order in which responsibility to distant ancestry is portrayed as more enlightened than responsibility to one’s living community.
The comparison with Jamaicans and Haitians exposes the inconsistency. Jamaicans and Haitians are widely understood as distinct New World peoples despite their substantial African ancestry. They can identify with Africa, participate in Pan-African politics and maintain connections with African societies, but their legitimacy as Jamaicans or Haitians is not normally made dependent on recovering an African identity.
No serious person argues that Haiti is unreal because its people are largely African-descended. Haiti is understood as a nation created through a specific New World history. Jamaica is likewise recognized as a society with its own language patterns, institutions, historical memory and cultural formation.
Black Americans deserve the same recognition.
Jamaicans and Haitians may also encounter romantic demands to identify with Africa, so the distinction is not absolute. But Black Americans are especially vulnerable to being treated as a population without a legitimate national or ethnic center of our own. Because the United States historically denied us equal citizenship, intellectual movements often concluded that our true political center had to exist elsewhere.
That conclusion does not follow.
The denial of Black American peoplehood by the American state does not make Black American peoplehood nonexistent. It makes its defense more necessary.
Black Americans have no inherited duty to abandon Black America for an abstract racial homeland. Cooperation with African countries should be based on actual relationships, mutual interests and informed choice and not guilt.
Before Black Americans are instructed to build distant societies, we have the right to ask who is building the communities our ancestors created here.
How Pan-Africanism Became Institutional Knowledge
Pan-Africanism did not spread only through informal activism. Over time, elements of its worldview entered universities, cultural institutions, publishing, journalism, entertainment and public education. The college students and youth who were conditioned into the ideology grew up to become teachers and curators.
It is in my honest opinion that special interest groups exploited and in some cases, allowed certain ideologies to fester. I can see the geometry of their movement and it was brilliant strategy fiber are to look at the outcome of political movements becoming institutional frameworks. Ie African American, Pan Africanism overriding Black, Pro Blackness and its political effects.
Early Black intellectuals such as Alexander Crummell, Edward Wilmot Blyden and W. E. B. Du Bois argued that African-descended populations shared a civilizational or political destiny. The Pan-African conferences and congresses of the twentieth century transformed that claim into an international program. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association popularized African redemption, racial unity and global African nationhood among a mass audience.
After World War II, African decolonization gave this framework new political force. Independence movements in Ghana, Kenya, Algeria and elsewhere were interpreted alongside the freedom struggle in the United States. Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Du Bois and other intellectuals helped create a vocabulary in which colonialism abroad and racial oppression in the United States appeared as parts of one global system.
The establishment of Black Studies programs during the late 1960s and 1970s gave this international perspective an institutional home. Students demanded histories that challenged white-centered curricula, and rightly so. African history, Caribbean history, colonialism and global political movements entered classrooms that had previously ignored them.
But the necessary correction sometimes created a new imbalance.
In some departments, Black American history came to be interpreted primarily through African continuities, diasporic connections and global racial solidarity. The distinct ethnogenesis of Black Americans could appear less politically desirable than a broader Pan-African identity. Black America became one regional expression of an assumed worldwide diaspora.
The academic category of “Africana Studies” further consolidated Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe and Black America into a single field. This produced valuable comparative research. It also encouraged students to imagine that populations placed under the same racial category necessarily formed one historical community.
Institutional categories shape public identity. When generations of students encounter Black Americans mainly as members of an African diaspora, that classification begins to seem self-evident rather than interpretive.
The same process occurred in cultural media.
During the Black Power era, African names, clothing, hairstyles, maps, languages and symbols became visual rejections of white standards. Television, magazines, museums, music and popular publishing circulated these symbols as signs of awakened Black consciousness. Later forms of Afrocentric thought presented ancient African civilizations as sources of psychological restoration for Black Americans. Pan Africanism ALWAYS comes during the Black Power movements, the Dewey uses the energy to divert energy to Africa.
Again, these developments arose for understandable reasons. American institutions had deliberately degraded Africa and erased Africans from history. Recovering African history challenged racist claims that African groups lacked civilization.
But a corrective can harden into an orthodoxy.
Once African symbolism became associated with consciousness, Black American particularity could be associated with ignorance. A person who knew the history of Egypt, Ghana or Mali might be considered culturally awakened, while a person deeply grounded in the history of the Mississippi Delta, the Sea Islands, Reconstruction or the Great Migration could still be treated as disconnected from his “roots.”
This hierarchy reveals how an imported origin narrative can overshadow the historical knowledge closest to a people.
Universities and media also favor the diaspora framework because it is expansive. It supports international conferences, comparative scholarship, cross-national coalitions and large cultural narratives. “The African diaspora” appears intellectually broader than “Black Americans.”
Immigrants typically support foreign policy movements whereas BAs are interested mainly in domestic policy effects.
But breadth is not automatically accuracy.
A framework can connect many populations while simultaneously flattening the differences among them.
Not every scholar of Pan-Africanism or diaspora denies Black American distinctiveness. Many have studied creolization, cultural transformation and the creation of new identities. The problem lies in the popular institutional tendency to treat diaspora as the unquestionable foundation and Black American ethnogenesis as a secondary variation.
That order should be reversed.
Black Americans should first be understood as a historically formed North American people. International relationships can then be examined without making those relationships the source of our existence.
Deconstructing the Diaspora
The word “diaspora” comes from a Greek term meaning to scatter or disperse. For much of modern intellectual history, it was strongly associated with populations such as Jews, Armenians and Greeks who maintained a collective identity, historical memory or orientation toward a homeland after dispersal.
During the twentieth century, scholars broadened the term. It came to describe many migrant, exiled, displaced and transnational populations. The concept of an “African diaspora” developed through the work of Pan-African intellectuals, historians of slavery and scholars of the Atlantic world. George Shepperson’s use of the term during the 1960s is often cited as important to its academic consolidation, although the underlying idea of worldwide African dispersal was much older.
The concept allowed scholars to study the Atlantic slave trade as one enormous historical system. It drew attention to cultural continuities, international political networks and related forms of racial domination across national borders.
But every concept highlights some facts and conceals others.
The diaspora model generally contains several elements: an original homeland, a dispersal from that homeland, the preservation or reconstruction of collective memory, continuing identification with the homeland and some idea of return whether physical, cultural or symbolic.
Black American history does not fit this model as neatly as the term suggests.
The American negroes people who were enslaved to North America experienced dispersal. Black Americans emerged as a population after that dispersal. The formation of Black America was not the continuation of an African people abroad. It involved people from multiple societies across the Americas, as well as people groups from Africa, Europe, and Asia not to mention generations born in North America, developing new systems, speech patterns, religious traditions, cuisines, musical forms and political identities.P
People oversimplify this.
The diaspora concept confuses the progenitors with the identity of descendants. It treats departure as the defining event while minimizing formation. It tells us where some ancestors left but not where a new people came into existence.
The framework also creates an imaginary homeland more unified than the historical reality. Even in this particular perspective and framework, the ancestors of Black Americans did not leave a single nation called Africa. They would’ve came from different societies whose people did not necessarily regard themselves as members of one race or civilization. “Africa” becomes a collective homeland largely through later political interpretation and reconstructions of history.
This does not make Africa imaginary as a continent. It means that Africa as the singular ancestral nation of all Black people globally is a modern ideological construction.
A continent can be a source of ancestry without functioning as one people’s homeland in the ethnic or national sense.
The concept of diaspora further assumes that connections among dispersed populations are more fundamental than the new identities those populations created. Yet Black Americans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Barbadians, Afro-Brazilians, Nigerians, Ghanaians and South Africans possess different histories, national formations, languages and political interests.
Racial resemblance does not erase those differences.
The category can be useful for comparative study, but it should not become compulsory self-definition. “African diaspora” may describe a field of historical relationships. It does not prove that all included populations constitute one people.
The distinction is critical:
A diaspora is a framework imposed across populations.
A people is a community produced through shared history.
Black Americans may be placed inside an African diaspora by historians, activists or institutions. That does not mean the category exhausts—or even best describes—who we are.
Pan-Africanism’s Operation as an Origin Myth
Pan-Africanism operates as an origin myth by oversimplifying the origins of BAs and arranging them into a politically useful story.
The story generally proceeds as follows:
Black Americans were originally Africans. Slavery severed us from our true identity. Life in America produced alienation and self-hatred. Recovery therefore requires reconnection with Africa, identification with a worldwide African people and participation in some form of African redemption.
Every part of this story contains an element of truth.
Some of Black American ancestors came from Africa.
Enslavement destroyed specific cultural and familial connections.
American racism produced deep psychological injuries.
African history was deliberately misrepresented.
International solidarity and exchanges has sometimes strengthened political struggles.
But the structure connecting these facts is ideological rather than inevitable.
It assumes that the identity existing before enslavement must remain more authentic than the identity created afterward. It treats cultural transformation as loss but not creation. It views distance from Africa as alienation while rarely viewing distance from Black American history as alienation.
Most importantly, it places the solution to Black American identity outside Black America.
That is what makes it an origin myth.
An origin myth does not have to be entirely fabricated. Its power comes from selecting one beginning and making it explain everything that follows. Pan-Africanism selects African ancestry as the decisive beginning of Black American identity. The centuries in North America are then interpreted as exile, disconnection, oppression and attempted recovery.
Can you see the geometric design? It serves to sever your connection to America elegantly, to what your ancestors fought and bled for. It recontextualize you and your fight.
A Black American-centered account selects a different historical emphasis.
It begins with multiple ancestral populations but focuses on the people who emerged from their encounter with North American conditions. Slavery remains central, but it is not understood only as a machine of erasure. It was also the brutal setting in which new relationships, cultural forms and collective identities developed.
Under this account, Black Americans are not a scattered African ethnicity.
We are a people created by history in the New World.
Our identity does not require symbolic return because our collective formation occurred here.
Revised Conclusion: The Right to Name Ourselves
Black Americans have spent centuries being named by other people.
Slaveholders defined us as property. Racial scientists classified us as an inferior type. Colonizationists described us as Africans who should leave America. Segregationists treated us as permanent outsiders. Liberal institutions often reduced us to a racial minority. Pan-Africanists incorporated us into a global people. Contemporary academics classify us as one population within an African diaspora.
These descriptions differ morally and politically, but they share a recurring structure: somebody else possesses the authority to explain what Black Americans fundamentally are.
When we reject that authority, we are accused of ignorance, division or self-hatred.
We are told that insisting on Black American peoplehood betrays Africa. We are instructed to direct our attention toward distant ancestral societies while the communities our ancestors built in North America continue to lose land, institutions, memory and political power. We are taught broad theories of diaspora while our oral histories are dismissed as anecdotal and our regional identities are treated as minor details.
This is not merely a debate over terminology.
It is a struggle over whether Black Americans have the right to interpret our own historical existence.
Africa is part of our ancestry. It does not own our identity.
Pan-Africanism is part of our intellectual history. It is not the final authority on our peoplehood.
Diaspora may describe certain historical connections. It does not cancel the creation of a new North American people.
Black Americans do not need to hate Africa in order to love Black America. We do not need to deny no part of our ancestry in order to recognize what their descendants became. We do not need to accept a racial homeland in order to possess a historical home.
The expectation that we must search elsewhere for ourselves begins with the refusal to see what is already here.
Our identity exists in our family lines, oral traditions, regional cultures, burial grounds, churches, neighborhoods, political struggles, music, language and collective memory. It exists in the history of people who survived catastrophe and created a civilization within the boundaries of a country that repeatedly denied their humanity.
Other groups are permitted to emerge from history.
Black Americans are repeatedly ordered to return to oversimplified ancestry.
We should reject that double standard.
Our ancestors were dispersed, but we are not merely their dispersion.
We are what they became.
Black Americans are not an unfinished branch of Africa, waiting for ideological completion. We are a complete people whose history is North American, whose culture is New World creole and whose identity does not require permission from politicians, academics, activists or anyone else.
The final act of self-determination is not finding somebody else’s answer to who we are.
It is refusing to surrender the authority to name ourselves.
