🚨THREAD🚨 1) The term "tether" has been tossed around a lot in recent years. It refers to a Black person in the country that does not descend from persons enslaved in the US AND is actively against lineage-based #Reparations for American Freedmen. Let's go deeper.
2) Being Black in America is no cakewalk. However, some ppl came to the US, a historically racist nation, voluntarily after the changes around race & nationality were forced into immigration policy by the Civil Rights Movement in 1965. asianamericanedu.org/immigration-an…. 
3) Even with these changes, 99.2% of the Black people in the United States descended from persons enslaved in the US & the Survivors of Jim Crow- US #Freedmen. That did not change significantly until the 1980s, two decades after the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
4) Since then, solidarity with non-Freedmen Black folks has been spotty. There are some great allies out there. Sadly, multiple studies show many are anti-Freedmen & view us the same way other immigrant groups view us, through a white supremacist lens. dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/handle/…
5) With that in mind, it’s easy to see why US Freedmen are upset w/ active muddying of our #Reparations justice claim that is rooted in a US Slavery, Jim Crow, and other harms only so they can also benefit. At the same orgs like CARICOM do not include us. caricom.org
This dispute is often framed as Diaspora Wars or xenophobia. What we are witnessing is the collapse of Pan Africanism as an assumed vehicle for change within US borders. US Freedmen are a distinct ethnicity with a particular history & unique justice claim in this nation.
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