I told myself I’d stay out of the diaspora conversation happening online. The comment sections are full of vitriol and misinformation. But my purpose on these platforms is to counter exactly that, and I try to do that with facts, nuance and historical context on the Black experience in America and across the diaspora.

When the Cam Newton podcast released its episode with Da’Vinchi, I knew what would follow: intense emotion, intentional clipping, misrepresentation and dogpiling. I often ask myself, To what end? What is the benefit of the diaspora wars?

I’m from New York City. My family is Black American and Caribbean: Haitian, Bajan and Dominican.

My grandmother and her siblings left Millen, Georgia, during the Great Migration and landed in Brooklyn, where, like many Black Americans in Northern cities, they met Black people from all over the world. Her first husband was Bajan; my grandfather, her second, was from Boligee, Alabama. Her children had children with a Dominican, a Bajan, a Haitian and other Black Americans, which gave me my big diasporic family.

I guess that’s why I’ve never truly understood how the rest of the country experiences identity and exposure to other ethnic groups—or rather, a lack of such exposure. Social media has shown me that many Black Americans exist solely among their own kind. The key takeaway for all of us is that the Black experience in America isn’t homogenous. We are a complex ethnic group, within and throughout this country.

Mind you, the intensity of these diaspora conversations never happens in real life the way it does online. We always joke about it, but I swear the CIA is working overtime.

There has always been an “us versus them” rhetoric within the diaspora. When Cam asked why some Africans, Caribbean people and Black Brits act like they’re better than Black Americans, and Da’Vinchi answered, “Yes, it’s true, but it’s not right,” that was one thing.

However, in the next breath, he went on to describe Americans as being lazy, lacking work ethic and of low intellect, because he was “raised Haitian at home.” We have to pay attention to what’s being said to combat that train of thought. No one can call the people who built this country, worked for free for centuries, and helped make America the richest country in the world lazy.

Da’Vinchi is Haitian-American, and nobody in Haiti knows who he is. His career, audience and platform are American. So, when he says “Americans” as though it’s a group he isn’t a part of, that’s a pointed statement. It’s called ethnic distancing: signaling “I’m not like them” to win favor from people with power.

Why does this happen? Many Black immigrants arrive in this country believing that proximity to Whiteness is the path to success. That belief is a byproduct of colonialism, and it does the work of White supremacy for free. Whiteness doesn’t see a Haitian, a Jamaican or a Black American. It sees a Black person, full stop. Sociologist Mary Waters documented in her book Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities how immigrants from the West Indies often stress their ethnic difference to White institutions as protection against American anti-Blackness. But if you grew up here, went to school here and built your platform in American media, you live inside the American racial system. At a traffic stop, White supremacy doesn’t check your passport.

Da’Vinchi also said that Black people enslaved Black people, that Caucasians enslaved Caucasians and that everyone practiced slavery, as if we should just get over it. That’s an old talking point, and it flattens chattel slavery into a universal human flaw to soften the West’s hand in colonization. Slavery existed in many places. But the transatlantic system was specific: hereditary, racialized and built for profit. Flatten that history and you erase the machinery still running in the postcolonial world. As a Haitian, he knows he wouldn’t exist in his current capacity without chattel slavery.

Sometimes I see things my people say, and I just want to grab them by the shoulders and shake some sense into them. Imagine telling Black Americans to get over slavery while holding up Haitians for defeating the French. The Haitian Revolution was a crucial blow to colonialism. But to celebrate it, you must acknowledge that slavery grew out of a larger system of colonization that still oppresses people today.

If you’re Caribbean or African reading this, you may think, What about what I’ve seen, heard, and faced from Black Americans? Your experiences are real. But this conversation is about the systems that fuel the diaspora wars, and my attempt to dismantle them.

Growing up, many Black immigrants hesitated to identify as Black, or flat-out refused, for fear of being associated with those they understood to be at the bottom of White acceptance. Many Black Americans also pushed xenophobic, America-centric talking points onto immigrants. Both can be true, but we still need to look at the root cause.

It comes down to ignorance. On my first trip to Nigeria, it felt like a homecoming. I walked to the shores from where my ancestors were once taken. Around 50 percent of my DNA traces to what is now Nigeria, so I assumed Nigerians would know our history. Instead, I was shocked by how little they’d been taught about the transatlantic slave trade, and how much of their exposure to America came from media. I went from shocked to angry to hurt, then realized who was to blame: colonizers and White supremacy.

In Lagos, someone asked me, “How much do you know about us?” Then it clicked. As a millennial, my entire view of Africa had been shaped by American media: the feed-the-children commercials, endless war and the idea that Africa was poor. So, we have two groups who look alike and share a history but have been intentionally kept ignorant of each other, aside from extreme media depictions. Europeans did a bang-up job inventing race, colonization and caste systems to keep us apart so we wouldn’t rise up together.

There is one key difference. Many of these groups carry that ignorance to the U.S.A., the homeland of Black Americans. Combined with the desire to succeed in a country that aims to oppress us all, it leads some Black immigrants to look down on Black Americans. I’ve heard these talking points from my own family: “How can they be poor? They don’t take advantage of the country they’re in. They’re lazy.”

The comparison is never one to one. Black immigrants compare themselves to the poorest Black Americans, not the poorest people in their home countries. You escaped poverty in Port-au-Prince or Kingston and came to America for a better life, and you’re comparing yourself to someone who hasn’t escaped poverty and oppression in Mississippi, where the systems in place have indirectly propped you up over them.

Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, in Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, calls this reasoning the “cultural racism” frame—explaining inequality through supposed cultural flaws like laziness instead of structures. It reinforces the White supremacist stereotype of the lazy Black American. If you attack Black Americans that way, you’re serving the ideology that targets you.

One of my aunties from Barbados used to love saying, “Black Americans are so entitled; they didn’t do nothing for me.” The older I get, the more I laugh at that premise, because it shows her lack of knowledge and the bias in her mind. It also ignores history. Before 1965, immigration law favored northern Europeans and kept most of the world out. The Civil Rights Movement, led by Black Americans, broke Jim Crow and helped create the climate for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which opened the door to folks from the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa.

Looking down on the people whose organizing made your arrival possible is historical amnesia.

So why does this conversation keep taking over our feeds? The attention economy runs on conflict, and pitting Black people against each other through the diaspora wars is one of its most profitable products.

Many podcast hosts are unprepared or don’t know history. The host nods, the clip gets cut, goes viral and lazy anti-Black talking points get packaged as “barbershop real talk.”

Chasing favor by distancing yourself from Black Americans doesn’t dismantle the system. It only means you’re scrambling for a higher step on a rigged ladder. A platform without intellectual honesty isn’t commentary; it’s miseducation. White supremacist talking points are built on lies, and they spread because they sound like common sense. If you don’t know the history, you have nothing to check them against, and when you distance yourself from the group a talking point targets, it’s easy to repeat it without asking where it came from.

This isn’t about attacking anyone in the diaspora. Real solidarity starts with knowing the history, and it means holding the people holding the microphone to a higher standard.

We can do better, and we should aim to. At the end of the day, it’s the same systems oppressing us all. Imagine how wild it would be if we were all in community with each other?

Stay Black, stay blessed.

Alexander Duncan IV, known as ADIV, is a multi-platinum songwriter and multifaceted creative turned creator who breaks down diaspora history and U.S. politics for millions online. Based between Los Angeles and New York, he shares his work at @adivunsolicited on Instagram.

Read the original article on Essence.