Community or Chaos? Why Black Immigrants Abroad Can’t Afford the Expat Lie.

There’s a point where you stop begging people to understand the fire they’re playing with. I’m at that point.

Every week, I watch people step into community spaces with the intention to drain them. Not build. Not contribute. Drain. 

Folks show up with personal agendas, competition disguised as collaboration and a quiet desperation for attention that sucks the oxygen right out of the room. They sabotage the very thing they claim they want: connection,and belonging. 

And they do it while the political ground beneath all of us is currently shifting. 😑 

This isnt something we should not sweep this under the rug as people being petty; what’s happening isn’t “just personality differences.” 

While all of that is happening internally within our communities, the Supreme Court in the US is over there sending warning shots about the future of citizenship itself.

Newsflash: if you’re Foundational Black American, that warning is aimed directly at the soil your lineage stands on.

The 14th Amendment didn’t fall from the sky, it was written because the US refused to recognize the humanity and citizenship of the people who built it. That amendment was our legal anchor- a correction to the law and culture that did not see us as human. So when politicians start circling it again, trying to redefine who “belongs” and who doesn’t, understand this: they’re not just targeting immigrants. They’re coming for the roots of all of our citizenship and the language that recognized us as human.

And what do we see? Too many people in our communal spaces treating this like background noise. 

Let me be clear, *nothing about this moment is normal*.

Identity is being weaponized and the US government is testing how far they can go in rewriting the rules of belonging. And right in the middle of all of that, we’ve got folks in our own community fighting each other over nonprofits, petty egos and “influencer” positions that don’t matter in the slightest…especially in this current political climate. 

This is why I’m tired! 😩

The exhaustion isn’t just about the internal mess, it’s about the mindset I see among Black folks abroad who cling to the “expat” identity like it’s insulation. There’s a lot of people who feel like it exempts them from the realities every other immigrant navigates. The word sounds softer, and more elite. In my opinion, it is dangerous to adapt to this mindset because it’s not rooted in reality. 

The moment you leave the United States, you are an immigrant. Period. If you’re Black, you are a Black foreigner in someone else’s country, subject to their policies, their prejudices, their bureaucracies, their national identity myths. You don’t get to outrun the weight of Blackness just because your zip code changed. And we definitely don't get to sidestep immigration politics because you don’t feel like an immigrant in your little community bubble. 

The difference is that expats get to float while immigrants have to land.

I think it’s important that Black Americans abroad need to understand which one we actually are and what it actually means…

Being a Black immigrant means:

• you are negotiating power you don’t fully control,

• you can be accepted one minute and rejected the next, (My family has been called the N word here in Mexico to our faces)

• your rights are conditional,

• your presence is tolerated, not guaranteed,

• and your safety depends on community, not optimism.

Knowing these things requires seriousness with the understanding that you are living within someone else’s social contract. And if we don’t adopt that mindset, we end up recreating the same fractures we escaped from.

This is why the fantasy of being an “expat”, floating above consequence, breaks down the moment laws change and nations decide who they want to claim.

So yes, the mindset has to evolve, not toward fear, but towards a more unified clarity on how we are moving together. This will put us in position to figure out how we move toward building community with people who understand that we are immigrants, and not escapists. 

Community is a living boundary; if we don’t protect it, we simply won’t have one.

Foundational Black Americans (FBA) and others across the diaspora of black and indigenous people have already lived through centuries of instability: stolen land, stolen children, stolen citizenship, stolen futures. We don’t get to be naive about infiltration. We don’t get to leave the door wide open for anyone with a convincing story. What we should continue doing is exercising the right to be cautious. We’ve earned the right to vet others and to say “No, you don’t get access to this space.”

If that sounds harsh, *good!*

Because what’s at stake right now requires a hardness a lot of people avoid- the hardness of discernment. The hardness of saying, “This isn’t personal, it’s community protection.” 🗣️ *The hardness of refusing to let clout-chasing, chaos agents, or opportunists dictate the future of a community built by people who actually give a damn.*

When identity is under attack, community cannot be loose. 

When rights are in flux, the community cannot be disorganized.

When the political ground is moving, the community can’t be led by people who don’t understand the stakes and we don’t have time for people who aren’t serious. Not now, not ever. 

Not in this global climate, not with this Supreme Court, and absolutely not while the foundation of FBA citizenship is being tested, again.

If we’re going to build something real, it has to be protected from the inside out. And if people don’t get that…They’re not community, they’re a liability.