If you want to know what the article says, then you should read it yourself. If you're blocked by the NYT paywall, then the full text is posted in the other thread I referenced.
I read this excerpt as well:
"What gave our diaspora shape wasn’t so much racism, slavery, or the contrastive presence of white Americans. It was the more pressing reality of Black Americans. American blacks inevitably became the topic and the source of most arguments. If Black Americans often seemed fixated on white America, black immigrants seemed fixated on Black America, as if it were the wall between them and the promises of this country. Sometimes the conversation began by someone fresh to the country discussing problems they were having with a coworker, or a schoolmate, or an unruly neighbor. Before questions were asked, the seasoned veterans would share a smirk of recognition, knowing that the person being complained about was not white. It was time to school the newcomer on what really went on in this America and that there were two Americas, two distinct regimes of pain and promise."
"Things would usually begin with the newcomer asking a familiar but always loaded question, What is wrong with Black Americans? Occasionally, one of us young cousins would attempt to defend or explain those Black Americans to our elders since we were the ones who knew them best and spent most of our time in the crucible of assimilation. These attempts were inappropriate for interrelated reasons. First, we were not to speak back to our elders, a sure sign that we were assimilating in the wrong direction. Second, in speaking on behalf of African Americans, we inevitably slipped into their dialect, which was enough to invalidate our opinions and earn a cuff to the head."
Diaspora was one of those words from my mother’s “word of the month” or “word of the week” subscriptions. What made it stick out was that I heard it repeated around the table. The word meant the sc…
lithub.com