Read on Twitter
Those of us whose Africanness is situated via slavery have a different ontological experience to being 'African' white supremacy systemically denied our ability to trace our lineage, its a violence that some continental Africans don't seem to understand or empathise with tbh.
What does it mean to want to know who you are, but are denied the resources to do so? What does it mean to exist within erasure? What does it mean to remember in ways you don't even realise you are remembering? What does it mean to recover something that was taken from you?
I think about Beyonce in relation to these things, because she does have the resources to have good research team to fact check. But there is also something about 'New World Africans' who experience lost heritage we got the pieces but we can't match it up to make the full puzzle.
I'm not a Beyonce stan, but when I see Caribbeans & AFAM were kente cloth, dots & other garments, often mixing-matching across different African cultures, often all wrong. I don't always see people appropriating but I see people TRYING to locate themselves.
The mix-matching is perhaps a visual metaphor of what plantation life did to so many of our Ancestors who were forcibly brought together from different parts of West Africa and had to piece something together.
