For the record.
Yes, Black Americans have family spread all across the United States. We have regional differences, accents, food, slang, traditions, music, and different local histories, but that doesn’t automatically make us separate ethnic groups.
My own family stretches from New York all the way down through Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and the Carolinas. Those regional differences don’t create some deep ethnic hostility between us.
My Singleton family line isn’t looking at my Rickenbacker family line as a separate people who need to be driven out, ethnically cleansed, or mass murdered because they come from somewhere else or have slightly different traditions. Nobody is declaring war because one branch of the family grew up in South Carolina and another ended up in Florida or New York.
That’s the distinction people keep missing.
There is a MASSIVE difference between having regional diversity within a broader culture and having divisions so severe that people begin “othering” neighboring groups to the point of organized persecution, ethnic cleansing, or mass killing.
You cannot point to different accents, foods, customs, or regional identities among Black Americans and pretend that automatically makes them equivalent to ethnic divisions that have historically produced organized mass violence.
Regional differences are real. Cultural variation is real. But difference alone is not the same thing as ethnic hostility, and it damn sure isn’t the same thing as people mass murdering each other because of those differences.