I had to commute to San Francisco two days this week, and a young brother I saw on my Thursday morning BART ride made me stop and think about diaspora, Blackness, and difference. I think it was the way that he seemed — like so many African Americans — to wear on his very skin the complex historical relationship between nations and races and belief systems that has shaped what Black folks have become. So many identities and experiences and histories comprise how each of us comes to Blackness; and yet we are all more similar than we are different. It is our shared history of celebration and survival in the face of subjugation and displacement than brings us together worldwide. The things that divide us as people of the African diaspora are so very fleeting; under the sun, they are a insignificant as a speck of dirt.

8-Rock