You already know something is wrong.
Not with you. Not with your people.
With the distance between us.
The suspicion. The competition. The way we can love our community and still not fully trust it. The way we have been hurt by our own as much as by the system.
That feeling is real.
But here is what most people never get told:
That distance did not come from nowhere.
It was shaped. By slavery, by exclusion, and at times by deliberate action. Over centuries.
And the proof that we were always stronger together is written in every moment they worked hardest to keep us apart.
This is Part 2 of a two-part series.
Part 1 named the pain — what community violence is really doing to us and why.
This is the way forward.
What the FBI’s Own Files Show
Let us start with the truth that changes everything.
Several of the systems this community has faced — slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, redlining, COINTELPRO — weakened Black collective power. We name an intent only where a source documents it.
For COINTELPRO, the aim is not a theory. It is written in the FBI’s own files.
The FBI’s COINTELPRO program — which ran from the 1950s through the 1970s and whose files are now declassified and public record — listed its own goals in 1967: prevent a coalition of militant Black groups, prevent the rise of a leader who could unify them, and discredit them. The Senate’s Church Committee confirmed this in 1976.
Those goals also included preventing violence. They also included stopping these groups from growing, especially among young people.
Some of the tactics are documented. Anonymous cartoons. A forged letter. Informants. Efforts to set Black organizations against each other.
The FBI’s own files said that feuding between those two groups had limited both.
A divided movement was easier to contain.
What Slavery Did to Us First
Before COINTELPRO. Before the War on Drugs. Before any of the modern machinery of division.
There was the original harm.
Slavery in the Americas was not just labor extraction. It tore at the bonds that hold a people together.
African kinship systems were broken by sale and separation. Slave codes restricted gatherings and teaching enslaved people to read, and South Carolina’s 1740 Negro Act banned drums and horns out of fear of revolt. Names were often changed or anglicized. In Cuba, Catholicism was the only religion legally permitted, so enslaved Yoruba people joined their orishas with Catholic saints, and Santería took shape. Even so, enslaved people carried African traditions forward and built new ones.
After Reconstruction — when Black communities built political power, elected officials, created businesses, founded schools — the response was not competition.
It was terror.
Lynching. Burning. Legal rollback. Every surge of Black unity and self-determination was met with organized, violent suppression that carried one message:
This is what happens when you rise together.
What They Did to Our Minds
The body can be controlled with chains.
The mind requires something more subtle.
Psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon spent his career studying what colonization and oppression do to the psychology of the people living under them.
What he found was devastating and clarifying at the same time.
He called it the colonization of the mind.
When a system tells you — through every institution, every image, every interaction — that you are less, that your people are dangerous, that your culture is inferior — eventually some of that gets inside. Not because you are weak. Because you are human. And humans absorb the messages of the world they live in.
That internalized message does not stay quiet.
It turns outward — toward the people who look like you. Who remind you of the parts of yourself the world told you to be ashamed of. Who trigger that pain just by existing.
Psychologists call this horizontal hostility.
When you cannot reach the source of the pain — it is too big, too powerful, too distant — the pain lands on whoever is within reach.
And who is always within reach?
Your own people.
This is not weakness. This is not a cultural defect.
This is a predictable psychological response to sustained, generational oppression.
The community knew this before the scientists named it.
Colorism — A Hierarchy We Inherited
We have to name this directly. With love. Without shame.
Colorism — the preference for lighter skin within Black communities — did not start with us.
It started on the plantation.
Slaveholders ranked enslaved people by skin tone and gave lighter-skinned people some advantages. Enslaved people with lighter skin were more likely to be placed in the house, given slightly less brutal work, positioned as “closer” to whiteness and therefore marginally safer. Darker-skinned people were pushed into the fields, into harsher conditions, into more visible dehumanization.
The rank came from white supremacy. We inherited it, and we can set it down.
And centuries later — in dating preferences, in media representation, in hiring decisions, in how we talk to each other — the echoes of that plantation hierarchy are still running in our community.
Not because we chose this.
Because we inherited it without anyone explaining where it came from.
Understanding the origin does not erase the pain.
But it does mean we can stop blaming each other for a division that was handed to us.
What We Built When We Stood Together
Now let us talk about what is possible.
Because the record is not just a record of what was done to us.
It is a record of what we built every time we chose each other.
Black Wall Street.
The Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma was not a miracle. It was what happens when a Black community decides to build for itself.
Doctors. Lawyers. Hotels. Theaters. Newspapers. Banks. A self-sustaining economy that kept dollars circulating within the community and generated real, generational wealth.
In 1921, a white mob — aided by local authorities and aircraft — destroyed it. An estimated 150 to 300 people were killed. Over 1,000 homes burned. Decades of collective building erased in two days.
They did not destroy it because it was failing.
They destroyed it because it was working.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott.
381 days.
For 381 days, Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama refused to ride the buses. They organized carpools. They walked miles. They held together through economic pressure, threats, and arrests.
The bus company lost tens of thousands of fares every single day.
Coordinated economic withdrawal — community members choosing each other over convenience — forced desegregation in a core Southern city and sent a signal to the entire country.
The Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program.
The federal School Breakfast Program began in 1966 as a small pilot, aimed at rural schools. It received permanent authorization in 1975. In between, in 1969, the Black Panther Party started its own Free Breakfast for Children program in Oakland, working with an Episcopal church there. According to Education Next, by the end of that year Panther chapters in 23 cities were running it, and it had fed more than 20,000 children.
The Senate’s Church Committee later documented FBI efforts to disrupt it. The Bureau sent anonymous letters to businesses that contributed to the program, and it targeted churches that hosted the breakfasts. In San Diego, agents sent an anonymous letter to the local bishop and arranged calls from people posing as parishioners, and the priest was later transferred out of the diocese.
Sources: USDA Food and Nutrition Service, School Breakfast Program history; Education Next, “Before Governors’ Push on School Breakfast, Black Panthers Were Feeding Kids”; Church Committee, Final Report, Book III (1976), “The FBI’s Covert Action Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party,” pp. 211–212.
The program is a picture of what a community can do when it feeds itself.
HBCUs.
Built from collective Black investment when every other institution refused to educate us.
Today they produce outsized shares of Black engineers, doctors, lawyers, and scientists. Studies show higher graduation rates and stronger sense of belonging for Black students than at predominantly white institutions.
That is what intentional collective investment builds.
What the Science Says About Belonging
This is not just history. This is biology.
Human beings are wired for community. Not as a preference. As a survival requirement.
When people feel genuine belonging — real trust, real mutual care, real shared purpose — the brain releases oxytocin. Stress hormones drop. The nervous system finally gets to rest.
Research on loneliness tells the other side of that story.
Chronic isolation — the feeling that your people do not have you — dysregulates the same systems. It raises perceived threat. It increases risk for depression, heart disease, and cognitive decline. It literally shortens life.
Being around people is not enough.
The brain knows the difference between proximity and belonging.
And for too many people in this community — surrounded by family, surrounded by neighbors, surrounded by people who look like them — the nervous system is still running in isolation mode because the trust was broken somewhere along the way.
Robert Sampson’s decades of research on neighborhoods confirmed what the community already knew:
When neighbors believe they can act together — when there is real collective trust and willingness to show up for each other — violence drops. Health improves. Children do better in school.
Not because poverty disappeared.
Because the community chose to hold itself together despite it.
Ubuntu philosophy — the African worldview that says “I am because we are” — is not just a beautiful idea.
It is confirmed by every study on interdependence, belonging, and wellbeing that Western science has ever produced.
The ancestors knew. The science is catching up.
What Division Costs You Right Now
This is not abstract.
Every day we stay divided has a price. And you are paying it.
Black buying power in the United States is estimated at over $1.6 trillion. Most of that money leaves Black communities almost immediately — into corporations that do not hire us fairly, do not insure us fairly, and do not reinvest where we live.
When we cannot build the trust needed for cooperative economics — Black banks, Black investment networks, Black business ecosystems that sustain each other — we lose the chance to build on our own terms.
Politically, division weakens every vote, every coalition, every policy fight. It makes it easy for systems to ignore us or play one segment of the community against another.
Psychologically — living in a community where you half-expect harm from your own people keeps your nervous system in low-grade threat mode. All the time. Even at home. Even with family. Even in spaces that should feel safe.
That chronic activation costs you sleep. Costs you health. Costs you the mental bandwidth you need for everything else.
And your children are watching.
When they see constant conflict, colorism, and disrespect within their own community — they learn that Blackness itself is unsafe. That lesson follows them into every relationship, every workplace, every decision about who deserves their trust and loyalty.
That is the cost.
Paid daily. In ways most people never trace back to the source.
What Unity Looks Like Right Now — Not in Theory
Unity is not a feeling. It is a practice.
It does not require a movement or a march or a perfect moment of collective awakening.
It requires a decision. Made today. In specific, concrete ways.
Modern mutual aid networks — neighborhood food distribution, community fridges, rent funds, bail support — show what organized care outside formal institutions looks like. Research finds they buffer mental health harm by increasing the felt sense that someone has your back.
Buy-Black movements, when sustained — not just during February, not just when it is trending — keep dollars circulating longer within the community and support real jobs and real services.
Community organizing models that blend electoral work, legal advocacy, and direct service are producing measurable results in cities where people decided to show up consistently.
Elders mentoring youth. Adults checking on neighbors. People choosing to de-escalate instead of escalate. Refusing to spread unverified information that destroys reputations. Prioritizing real repair over public performance.
These are not small things.
These are the daily data points that determine whether your block gets safer or more dangerous. Whether your community gets healthier or sicker. Whether the next generation inherits a foundation or a fracture.
The Call — Not Next Month. Today.
Slavery, Jim Crow, COINTELPRO, and mass incarceration all weakened Black collective power. For COINTELPRO, the intent is documented in the FBI’s own files. Much of the rest came from scarcity and exclusion.
Either way, community trust is one of the strongest protections we have.
The pain is real. The trauma is real. The reasons you are guarded, or tired, or have been burned before — none of that is imagined.
But staying divided is not neutral.
It lets old damage keep doing its work.
Researcher Robert Sampson’s work shows that small, repeated individual choices — to show up, to intervene, to organize, to spend differently, to mentor, to repair — compound into measurable shifts in violence, health, and power at the neighborhood level.
Your daily decisions are not symbolic.
They are data points in whether your people get stronger or weaker.
So here is the call. Not in theory. In practice. Today.
Choose one concrete act of unity — right now, not next month.
A conversation you have been avoiding. A grudge you decide to work through. A young person you decide to show up for consistently. A Black business or organization you decide to support beyond one transaction. A neighbor you check on. A piece of gossip you refuse to spread.
Tell someone — with your actions, not just your words — I am on your side.
And then prove it. Small. Specific. Real.
Because in the story our people tell thirty years from now about how things turned —
About the moment we decided to stop being manageable —
Will they be able to point to anything you did and say:
That was one of the moments we chose to stand together.
That is the question.
Only you can answer it.
This is Part 2 of a two-part series: “Turning Inward, Turning Together.” Part 1 — “When the Pain Turns Inward” — examines what community violence is really doing to us and why.
If You Need Support Right Now
You are not alone. Help is available — no judgment, no gatekeeping.
- 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 — 24/7
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
- 211: Dial 2-1-1 for local mental health and community resources
- SAMHSA National Helpline: 1-800-662-4357 — free, confidential, 24/7
- The Steve Fund (young people of color): Text STEVE to 741741
LEGH.org — Love Enabled Growth & Hope. For the people who deserve reliable resources — and have always deserved better. No appointment. No insurance. No gatekeeping. Just reach out.
Studies can differ, and research changes. Read more on how to read our research.