The Root Does Not Change: The Movement You Should Be Aware Of

What if the movement that sounds the most like liberation is the one you need to examine the most carefully?

Not because the pain it speaks to isn’t real. It is. The wound of the transatlantic slave trade, of stolen labor, of generational wealth stripped away before it could take root — that pain is as real as anything we carry in our bodies. That wound belongs to us. Nobody is questioning that.

But here is what we need to sit with.

The system that created that wound has a name and a history. The transatlantic slave trade was not primarily a racial project — it was an economic one. Race was the tool. The extraction of African labor, African land, African resources, and African identity was the engine. What we call white supremacy was built on that foundation — and let us be clear about that word. There is nothing supreme about a system built on theft, terror, and the forced forgetting of an entire people’s history. It is a system of racial nationalism whose survival has always depended on one thing — keeping African people from recognizing each other across the water.

That system did not retire. It adapted.

And its most effective tool has never been force from the outside. Armies can be resisted. Laws can be challenged. But division from within — that is harder to see and harder to fight. Turn the wound inward. Give people a target that looks like them. Let the pain do the rest.

This is not a new strategy. We have lived inside it for generations.

We Have Been Here Before

Before we talk about what is happening right now, we need to name what has always happened. Because the pattern is not new and the architects did not have to invent it from scratch.

The division between the house enslaved and the field enslaved. Deliberately engineered — one group given proximity to power, the other kept in the dirt, both surveilled and both controlled. The light skinded versus the dark skinded. The brown paper bag test held at the door of Black institutions — a tool of exclusion that Black people did not create but were conditioned to enforce. The bougie negro versus the poor negro. The city negro versus the rural negro. The college-educated versus the working class. Each division a branch. Each branch designed to keep us from looking at the trunk.

And now — the diaspora wars. Black Americans versus African immigrants. African Americans versus Caribbean diaspora. Haitians versus everybody. Continental Africans accused of looking down on us. Black Americans accused of being arrogant and disconnected. The language changes. The architecture does not.

We have been handed versions of this division in every generation. The only thing that changes is the name they put on it.

What You Are Hearing Online

If you have spent any time on Black social media in the last few years you have encountered it. Two movements — so closely related they are almost indistinguishable — called ADOS, American Descendants of Slavery, and FBA, Foundational Black Americans.

ADOS was built by a former congressional staffer and a Los Angeles attorney. FBA was built by Tariq Nasheed — the same filmmaker behind the Hidden Colors documentary series that awakened thousands of Black Americans to their African roots, their ancient history, their connection to the continent. Nasheed initially supported ADOS before splitting off and coining the term Foundational Black Americans in 2019. Different names. Overlapping ideology. Documented conflict between the leaders themselves.

And the first thing you notice when you encounter either of them is that it sounds right.

It speaks to real history. It names real pain. It uses the language of Black advocacy and liberation and justice. And for a moment — maybe more than a moment — something in you nods along.

Then something shifts. A sentence lands wrong. A claim doesn’t hold up. You find yourself reading the same paragraph twice because something underneath it doesn’t sit right.

That moment is not confusion. That is discernment speaking. And it is worth listening to.

Let us start with the name itself. ADOS — American Descendants of Slavery. Four words. And those four words tell you everything you need to know about where this framework is built from.

Descendants of slavery. Not descendants of enslaved people. Not descendants of Africans who were taken, chained, and forced across water. Descendants of the institution itself. The system becomes the ancestor. The thing that tried to erase your people becomes the root of your identity.

That is not an accident of language. Language is never accidental. When you name yourself after the institution that tried to destroy you you have already accepted the frame the oppressor built. You are not standing in your ancestors’ identity. You are standing inside the thing that was done to them.

FBA — Foundational Black Americans — moves slightly differently. It centers American identity as the foundation rather than slavery explicitly. But the underlying ideology is the same. Both movements draw a hard line around who qualifies as authentically Black American. Both movements position African immigrants, Caribbean diaspora, and Haitian diaspora as outsiders to Black American struggle. Both movements have directed significant energy toward attacking Pan-African connection — including attacking Ghana’s Year of Return, one of the most significant invitations for diaspora homecoming in a generation.

A movement claiming to fight for Black liberation spent energy attacking the door back home. Ask yourself who benefits from that door staying closed.

When the Framework Fails Its Own People

Here is where their ideology breaks down completely — not theoretically, but personally.

Under the FBA and ADOS framework, to qualify as a Foundational Black American your ancestors must have been enslaved in the United States. That is their line. That is who deserves the check.

My mother’s father’s family does not fit that line. On both sides of his family, as far back as records go, they were never enslaved. They were free. They were first documented in New York in the early 1800s, having escaped from Haiti and come through Canada into the United States. They were Black. Fully, undeniably Black. And they lived through every single thing this country had to offer Black people — the Civil War, in which family members fought, Jim Crow, redlining, the Civil Rights Movement, every policy and every wall this system built against Black people specifically.

Under this movement’s ideology my family would not qualify. My mother herself would not qualify. And I am certain I am not the only Black American sitting here realizing that their family’s history does not fit neatly into this framework either.

That is not a small problem with the ideology. That is the ideology collapsing under the weight of its own definition.

The Symptoms Worth Naming

Every movement has a foundation. When the foundation is unstable the structure built on top of it will show symptoms. Both ADOS and FBA show several that deserve more than a scroll past.

Neither movement has meaningful presence in serious Black liberation scholarship spaces. Their growth has been built almost entirely through social media, YouTube, and podcasting — platforms where algorithmic amplification rewards outrage and conflict regardless of the depth of the argument underneath it. The noise has been loud. The documented scholarly engagement has been nearly nonexistent.

The alignments have also been telling. ADOS leadership has appeared on right wing media platforms including NewsMax. They have had documented connections to organizations tied to anti-immigration advocates whose work has historically targeted communities of color.

Here is where discernment becomes essential. When a movement that claims to speak for Black liberation consistently produces talking points that are indistinguishable from white nationalist rhetoric — anti-immigrant, anti-Pan-African, anti-diaspora — that is not a coincidence to explain away. That is a symptom worth naming. Because nothing that comes from genuine Black liberation sounds like that. Nothing rooted in our actual history, our actual ancestors, our actual survival points us toward each other as the enemy.

When the talking points sound like something that did not come from us — trust that feeling. It probably didn’t.

The ADOS Advocacy Foundation is registered as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit — a social welfare designation that carries significantly less financial transparency than a standard charitable organization. Their tax exempt status was granted only in February 2025. No financial data has been filed publicly yet. These facts are available on ProPublica’s nonprofit explorer. They are worth knowing. They are worth sitting with and asking questions about.

Capitalism and the Wound

Dr. Daniel Black, author and professor, said something recently that has stayed with me — white supremacy and capitalism are twins.

He is right. And understanding why those two things are inseparable is understanding exactly how movements like these gain traction.

The same system that extracted labor from African bodies for centuries then built an economy that kept Black people locked outside of it — and then offered money as the measure of whether you had made it inside. That conditioning runs deep. When we measure our liberation by financial terms — by a check, by reparations as a dollar amount, by who gets access to what — we are still thinking inside the framework that was built to contain us.

The root of the word reparations points toward repair. Real repair is not a check. Real repair is the dismantling of the systems that made the wound possible in the first place. Real repair is the return of land, of narrative, of the right of African people to grow and heal through their own cultural frameworks.

But a people conditioned by centuries of manufactured scarcity — who have watched wealth be built and then burned, built and then stolen, built and then redlined out of existence — are vulnerable to the promise of a payment. Especially from leaders who speak their language and name their pain.

When the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution on March 25, 2026 declaring the transatlantic slave trade the greatest crime against humanity — a historic moment spearheaded by Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama — the response from FBA and ADOS spaces was telling. Rather than celebrating a global acknowledgment of the wound the opposition was immediate. Their argument — that Black Americans are the only ones who deserve reparations and that a global framework dilutes their claim to a check — reveals exactly how deeply the capitalist conditioning runs. The world just named the crime. And some of us argued about who gets paid instead of what justice actually looks like.

That vulnerability is not weakness. It is evidence of how deep the wound goes. And it is precisely the opening that a movement without solid roots needs to grow.

The Same Tree, Different Branches

Now look across the water.

In South Africa right now Black South Africans are being mobilized against Black African immigrants — Zimbabweans, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Mozambicans, people who share their blood and their history. Vigilante groups have formed. People have been blocked from accessing healthcare. There has been violence and displacement.

And the mechanism driving it is identical to what we see here. Economic scarcity weaponized through false narrative. The claim that the African immigrant — the outsider — is the reason for the suffering. Social media amplifying the rage. Black pain redirected toward Black people instead of toward the system that created the conditions.

There they call it xenophobia. Here it gets called a movement. Different language applied to the same architecture. And that difference in language is not accidental — calling something a movement grants it legitimacy while calling something xenophobia frames it as a social problem. Same wound underneath both. Same direction the pain is being pointed.

And here is what both of these things are happening against the backdrop of — Africa is rising. The continent is moving. The Sahel States — Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger — are doing the actual work of returning to sovereignty, expelling foreign military presence and reclaiming the right to govern themselves. Ghana, Senegal, Rwanda are building, investing, reclaiming narrative. The African Union is asserting itself. Young Africans are refusing the stories that were handed to them. The diaspora is beginning to return — not as tourists but as people coming home.

A unified African diaspora — people on the continent and people scattered across the water seeing each other clearly, building with each other, returning to each other — is the greatest threat to a system that has always depended on our division. And the louder Africa rises the louder the noise of division becomes on both sides of the water.

That is not coincidence. That is the system responding to what it fears.

What the Noise Is Drowning Out

While these movements demand attention on social media — while the algorithms amplify the conflict and the division and the debate about who is authentically Black enough to belong — something else is happening that does not trend.

Pan-African unity is alive. It is being built quietly and steadily by Ghanaian historians returning true history to the diaspora. By Caribbean scholars and continental African academics in conversation across the water. By Black Americans who followed the thread all the way to the continent and found not strangers but family. By communities on both sides of the water who never stopped recognizing each other regardless of what any movement told them to feel.

The loudest voice in the room is not always the most true one. And the most important work has rarely been the work that trends.

Come Home to Yourself

This article is not asking you to join anything. It is not asking you to declare yourself on any side or abandon any community you belong to.

It is asking you to start where all real discernment begins — with yourself. With your willingness to sit with what doesn't feel right even when it sounds right. With your capacity to ask not just what a movement is saying but what it is doing and who benefits from what it is doing.

Your community is the people around you. Your family. Your block. Your city. The connections you build with intention and with love. Real unity does not require a hashtag or a nonprofit registration. It requires people choosing to see each other across whatever lines have been drawn between them.

The root does not change. It only sends up new branches and hopes you will mistake them for the tree.

But you know your tree. You have always known it. It has never stopped growing.

Look at the root.