Ugh. I am so sick of these stupid comments!

They are so freakin' irritating because they treat Blackness like a narrow club with a single entry point, instead of a BROAD, DIASPORIC IDENTITY shaped by history, power, and racialization.

“They are NOT Black, they are Somali” assumes Blackness is synonymous with African American ethnicity, when in reality Blackness is a racial category imposed through GLOBAL SYSTEMS OF WHITE SUPREMACY, not a nickname for one national group.

Somali people are African. They are racialized as Black in the United States. They are policed as Black, surveilled as Black, excluded as Black, and targeted by anti-Black racism as Black no matter what some Facebook commenters wish the taxonomy to be.

What comments like these really expose is how many people confuse ethnicity, nationality, culture, and race, and then weaponize that confusion to gatekeep Blackness.

“Somali” names an ethnicity and nationality. “Black” names a racial position in a global hierarchy built on slavery, colonialism, and anti-African ideology. Those things are not mutually exclusive. They operate on different levels. You don’t stop being Black because you can trace your lineage more precisely, practice Islam, speak Somali, or wear hijab. That logic would also require Nigerians, Ethiopians, Jamaicans, Haitians, Afro-Brazilians, and Afro-Colombians to step out of Blackness too, which reveals how unserious the argument is.

There’s also a deeper, more insidious thing happening here. These comments reflect an American parochialism that treats Blackness as something that begins and ends with U.S. history, while ignoring the fact that anti-Blackness is global. European colonialism carved up Africa, racialized its people, and exported those racial hierarchies worldwide. Somali people didn’t opt out of that history because they didn’t pass through U.S. chattel slavery. Colonial violence, racial science, immigration bans, surveillance, and Islamophobia all folded them into the SAME ANTI-BLACK LOGIC. When they arrive here, the state doesn’t ask for a genealogy lesson before deciding how Black they are.

Some of y'all are uncomfortable with a Blackness that isn’t familiar, Christian-coded, or culturally American. It’s a discomfort with diasporic Blackness. Saying “they are NOT Black” is less about accuracy and more about control, meaning who gets to represent Blackness, who gets visibility, and who gets erased when Blackness becomes too expansive to manage.

This mess is loud, wrong, and confident in its ignorance. But more than that, it exposes how many people still don’t understand that Blackness is not a single story. It’s a global racial condition shaped by power, history, and harm. And Somali people sit squarely inside that reality whether social media likes it or not.