Black Americans are a distinct ethnic group & not solely a racial category. I’ll keep saying it for as long as folks engage in our ethnic & historical erasure, pretending we aren’t a distinct culture while continually appropriating & capitalizing off of our experience. https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🤗" title="Hugging face" aria-label="Emoji: Hugging face">https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="💕" title="Two hearts" aria-label="Emoji: Two hearts">

The refusal to acknowledge us as a distinct ethnicity & culture w/ a unique 400 yr experience of diaspora & enslavement is rooted in anti-Black constructs of American white identity, imagining whiteness as the opposite of the “Negro” or “nigg*r” in the racist imagination https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🙃" title="Upside-down face" aria-label="Emoji: Upside-down face">https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🙂" title="Slightly smiling face" aria-label="Emoji: Slightly smiling face">https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🙃" title="Upside-down face" aria-label="Emoji: Upside-down face">https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🙂" title="Slightly smiling face" aria-label="Emoji: Slightly smiling face">

No one is immune to internalizing these racist constructs. They are pervasive in people’s understanding of how the white-black racial binary operates in the USA, which is why this keeps having to be said & we keep having to fight against historical erasure.