How Anti-Blackness on Social Media Negatively Impacts the Well-Being of Afro-Indigenous People

Note: There is a glossary at the end of the article for definitions of specific terms and a new update about my personal experiences recently dealing with anti-blackness via a social media hate campaign.

In the year 2020, the world shut down due to the global pandemic. For a lot of Afro-Indigenous people, this isolation didn’t start in 2020, but the year we were born into this world. It is excruciatingly difficult to exist in three different worlds at the same time and still feel as if you are never truly accepted by either community. To be Afro-Indigenous is to constantly be under public scrutiny just for existing while simultaneously having to exist within a society that is pervasively both anti-Black and anti-Indigenous.  Some Afro-Indigenous people turn to social media websites like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, or Facebook to find community online due to feeling ostracized from their tribal communities or experiencing violence offline. Unfortunately, social media does not protect or prevent Afro-Indigenous people from experiencing harassment, cyberbullying, doxxing, and race-based violence. According to the findings of a study conducted by the National Library of Medicine, BIPOC adolescents' exposure to racial discrimination through social media platforms is proven to negatively impact their mental health as well as overall well-being.

Pretendian Hunting

When we, Afro-Indigenous social media users, proudly post our tribal affiliations, practice our Indigenous cultures, and affirm our Afro-Native identities online, we are oftentimes met with comments questioning the validity of our identity due to our phenotype or proximity to Blackness. Automatically, we are interrogated even in certain instances by other Indigenous people online and are pressured to prove we are Indigenous. Some Afro-Indigenous people post their tribal ID cards, genealogical documents of their ancestors, photos, or videos proving that they are active community citizens within their nations, and even sometimes their DNA test results, just to get racist online trolls to leave them alone.

This is a screenshot of a TikTok post made by user @gothmommari, who is an Afro-Indigenous Cherokee Two-Spirit content Creator responding to a racist comment under a post of them wearing traditional regalia.

Despite Afro-Indigenous people proving our Indigeneity, we are still told we are not Indigenous enough in comment sections, as well as private direct messages. The Afro-Indigenous people who have more complex histories with their nations and multiplex intersectional identities are targeted even more when they either do not have the colonial paperwork that strangers online feel entitled to or just because they rightfully feel like they do not owe it to online strangers to prove who they are. Some social media users feel the need to take things into their own hands by calling themselves ‘investigating’ certain Afro-Indigenous creators that they believe are Pretendians (usually based on ideologies rooted in white supremacy). This, in turn, leads to the specific Afro-Indigenous people targeted having their personal information, like their place of employment, addresses, phone numbers, or family trees, exposed to random people online, which puts Afro-Indigenous people in immense danger. This also encourages a culture of attacking Afro-Indigenous people not only online but in person as well, which can be life-threatening.

“These attacks come at a time when our communities are being ravaged by a global pandemic, on-going environmental racism, the struggle for food sovereignty, anti-blackness against Black Native relatives, xenophobia, and a slew of other issues that require the attention and good work of many,”- An excerpt of Indigenous community members speaking out against Pretendian Hunting  from lastrealindians.com

In the year 2021, the Navajo and Yankton Dakota writer named Jacqueline Keeler published a defamatory list which recorded people she believed were Pretendians. A portion of the list included Afro-Indigenous people who were also targeted due to anti-Blackness.

Indigenous Twitter users heavily criticized the supposed research done on the  Indigenous people put on Keeler’s list and compared the list to white supremacist Dr. Walter Plecker’s list that was published for the sole reason of targeting Indigenous/Afro-Indigenous families in Virginia. His list was published 78 years before Keeler’s list. The irony is that Plecker typed on a typewriter the very racist letter that he would send to court offices and hospitals to continue the paper genocide of Indigenous Nations/Peoples, but today we are seeing this same type of racist blacklisting occur in the digital age. Over 80 years have passed, and nothing has changed. This gatekeeping of Native identity has just taken on a different form. It takes two seconds to make a disparaging, derogatory post that promotes violence against Afro-Indigenous people that can instantly go viral and cause enormous harm. In Plecker’s day, it took more effort and resources to spread his anti-Black and anti-Indigenous rhetoric compared to today. Although that doesn’t negate the vast suffering and trauma he inflicted on multiple generations of Indigenous people that still have effects to this day (including the harm he’s done to my nation and family). Instantly after Keeler’s list was published, a plethora of tweets from Indigenous people directly impacted and targeted on Keeler’s list were posted, as well as shared amongst different Native spaces online. Plenty of Native/Afro-Native people discussed how being put on the list negatively impacted not only their mental health but physical health. Online discourse surrounding the ‘validity’ of the list, uncovered the fact that there are plenty of Indigenous people who are afraid of being put on the list next due to being apart of a state/unrecognized tribe, not having enough blood quantum, anti-Blackness, being adopted out, or simply not enrolled in their nations due to tribal politics. This sheds light on the problem with non-Indigenous people undermining tribal sovereignty by laboriously policing Indigenous identity based on Native stereotypes, as well as the issues with defining Indigeneity through colonized perspectives that alienate actual Indigenous people from their communities. The issue also arises when people like Keeler, who are Indigenous themselves, cause lateral violence to other Indigenous people by questioning their Indigeneity unfairly through weaponizing colonial constructs made to further disenfranchise Indigenous people to begin with.

Blood Quantum vs. The One Drop Rule

“I believe [sic] the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman,” -President Thomas Jefferson

It was believed by white supremacists that if Native Americans intermarried as well as reproduced with Europeans and denounced their Indigeneity to assimilate into European society that they then could be considered equal to White people. This would in turn, help further the settler colonial state because White men would marry into Native tribes to steal Native land, abuse natural resources,  and infiltrate Indigenous Nations through their Euro-Native offspring. Thomas Jefferson, along with other white supremacists, believed that any mixture with African ancestry contaminated the White blood; therefore, Afro-Indigenous people were deemed lesser than, as well as impure, putting Whiteness or proximity to Whiteness on a pedestal at the top and superior to Blackness. In Maroon communities, both Black and Indigenous Native peoples were able to live in peace, have cultural exchange, protect Indigenous land, protect each other against enslavement, and were able to destabilize prominent Settler settlements by fighting against the colonists through using guerrilla warfare. Maroon communities threatened the settler colonial state; therefore, the colonists did everything in their power to sever ties between both Black and Indigenous communities. During this process, Afro-Natives were usually torn in the middle, and multiracial families were separated. Each family member was classified by skin color and phenotype. The siblings who presented as White could choose to pass as White for survival, while siblings who had what was considered more  Native features were allowed to stay within their tribal communities. Dark-skinned, more Black presenting Afro-Natives siblings were exiled from the community. Oftentimes, these people either came from the same families,  shared kinship ties from the same tribes, or were related on the same Native lines but had different racial designations on the census or different blood quantums on tribal rolls. Due to the one-drop rule, only Natives who had European ancestry were able to keep their Native identity (I.E., the Pocahontas clause) while Natives who had African ancestry had their Native identity stripped away from them and were forced into the Black racial category. After the Indian slave trade ended, Settlers needed as many Black bodies to increase the slave population to exploit for labor, so denying Afro-Natives their Indigeneity was strategic, which prevented them from being considered eligible to be freed like their Native counterparts. These colonial, outdated doctrines are still prevalent within online chat forums and social media platforms. It is one of the reasons why we, as Afro-Indigenous people, get told that we cannot be both Black and Indigenous. Even historically, being associated with Blackness as Indigenous people had its consequences during colonization. The Gingaskin tribe in Virginia had their reservation land taken away and were later on racially reclassified as Black for being accused of mixing with Black people. To prevent being racially reclassified, some tribes adopted anti-Black tribal laws that allowed marriage between tribal citizens and White people but banned marriage with Black people. Afro-Indigenous people were kicked off the reservation (whose ancestors were previously allowed on the reservation as a safe haven from enslavement), and their descendants currently today still denied enrollment.

“If a Pamunkey married or had a kid with Black person, or associated Black people, they were disenrolled and banished. They also a purged reservation forcing people who were took dark to leave. They documented this in their fed rec petition to the BIA as proof of their purity, btw. My family was no more mixed or not mixed than other Pamunkeys. However, we had a prominent family member who elected to VA legislation during Reconstruction. He gave some of his own land to create a school for newly freed Blacks in the area. That was considered crossing a line,” — from a Twitter thread made by Azie Dungey an Afro-Indigenous Pamunkey woman speaking about the Pamunkey tribe not allowing her family to enroll due to anti-Blackness.

It is atrocious enough that Afro-Native people who are systematically not able to enroll in their nations or participate within their communities deal with rejection in real life, but to experience the same harassment online is just heartbreaking. It is also wretched that we Afro-Indigenous people who are enrolled and/or claimed by our Nations still have to deal with anti-Blackness from our people as well as others online and offline. We shouldn’t have to hold our breath every time we log onto social media because we are anticipating getting a great deal of messages calling us racial slurs or even sometimes death threats just for existing. Experiencing racial discrimination online severely affects our mental health as Afro-Indigenous people because it is a reminder of the colonial trauma that we are still affected by intergenerationally. Now, it isn’t Thomas Jefferson or Plecker we have to worry about; it is thousands of everyday people online, some of whom even come from our communities, who are regurgitating white supremacist rhetoric against us. It is arduous enough to belong to multiple oppressed groups and already having trauma from experiencing both the Black experience and the Native experience, but it’s another level when we are shunned from  Black spaces as well as Native spaces online.  It feels like there is nowhere safe to be both Black and Indigenous unless we are around other people who have the same intersectional identities as ourselves. Some Afro-Indigenous people only claim their Blackness and are fearful of proclaiming their Indigeneity publicly due to being persecuted online. This shouldn’t be the case. We should be able to live our lives freely and embrace who we are without having hateful people online bothering us or just assuming we aren’t who we say we are because of our phenotype.

Silencing Afro-Indigenous Voices

Since the inception of social media, Afro-Indigenous people have been spreading awareness about the discrimination and racism we go through. Afro-Indigenous people relentlessly prevail and unapologetically continue to showcase our Indigeneity despite detractors. It is the responsibility of social media corporations to ensure the safety of all online users on their platforms and that people who promote racist ideologies are deplatformed. Sadly, plenty of racist bigots online are able to profit from the bigotry and continue to torment Afro-Indigenous people online with no repercussions. Afro-Indigenous people who speak out against the vile hatred and bigotry we deal with are silenced or just ignored. Some Afro-Indigenous content creators have been unjustly banned or deplatformed just for exposing well-known racist people.

My logo for my podcast show on Spotify called Afro-Indigenous Yesą on Turtle Island. I speak about being an Afro-Indigenous Yesah Saponi woman describing my experiences dealing with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeniety. A special shout-out to PatmuSe oTTow from the Tamien Nation and the First People of Los Gatos who created this beautiful artwork, pi:láhuk (thank you ).

In conclusion, it is important to spread awareness about issues that affect BIPOC and especially Afro-Indigenous people, when we are oftentimes underrepresented due to being a minority even within other marginalized communities. The consistent harassment that we as Afro-Indigenous people experience online and offline is not ok, and the people participating in this behavior should be held accountable.

Update 07/05/25: Speaking Truth: Reflections on Harassment and Community Accountability

When I first wrote about the lived experiences of Afro-Indigenous people, particularly the layered realities we navigate on and offline, I could not have imagined that, just a few years later, I would become the target of a prolonged and deeply harmful harassment campaign. For over nine months, I have faced doxxing, threats, defamation, stalking, and cyberbullying, attacks fueled by anti-Blackness, ableism, anti-african, Xenophobia, misogyny, and anti-Indigeneity.

What has been especially painful is that some of this harm has come from individuals within Native communities, including people related to me by blood and others claiming Indigenous identities. While I’ve long been familiar with racism, even from a young age, there is a distinct and profound hurt when the harm comes from people I once trusted, built community with, or supported. It is devastating to witness people I’ve uplifted participate in misinformation, public harassment, and erasure, often for social capital or fear of backlash themselves.

I have always approached the community with humility and respect. I have never claimed to know everything, and I’ve publicly acknowledged my learning journey. I have invested years of time, labor, and financial resources into responsibly researching my lineage: supported by historical documentation, oral history, DNA evidence, and verified by licensed genealogists and tribal historians, some of whom are my kin. Yet despite this transparency, my identity has been repeatedly misrepresented by individuals creating false family trees, spreading defamatory content, and even mocking my disability.

I remain committed to using my platform to speak out against injustice, not only for myself, but for others who suffer in silence. To those who have offered genuine support and encouragement: Misaotra (thank you). Your solidarity has meant everything.

This experience has taken a toll on my mental and physical health, a reality that many Afro-Indigenous people know all too well. Our intersecting identities are often misunderstood, even by mental health professionals, and the trauma of erasure, exclusion, and targeted violence can be life-threatening. Some in our communities have been harmed or even killed for simply existing in their truth. We must not normalize this.

It is time for change. We must hold each other accountable. Our traditional teachings do not condone hate, exclusion, or lateral violence. As Indigenous peoples, we are meant to protect each other, not turn our communities into gatekeeping spaces that uphold colonial harm. Calling out injustice, defending oneself, and protecting others is not “drama”; it is a necessary act of survival, truth-telling, and collective healing.

I share this not for sympathy, but for solidarity. To those who have experienced similar harm: you are not alone. I will continue to use my voice and platform to speak up, to support others, and to demand better, because the ancestors are watching, and they are not pleased. We all deserve to exist, to be safe, and to be heard.

In reflecting on the harms I’ve experienced, I’ve come to understand why some of my ancestors chose to leave their homelands and distance themselves from the very communities they were Indigenous to. While much attention is rightfully given to the violence and displacement caused by colonization, there is often silence around the internal harm that persists within our communities. Many Indigenous people today are courageously acknowledging that they can no longer sacrifice their peace, mental health, or physical safety to remain part of spaces that perpetuate cycles of lateral violence, exclusion, and intergenerational trauma that often go unaddressed.

We are witnessing a powerful shift: a growing number of Indigenous people are no longer seeking validation, whether from colonial governments or from Indigenous spaces that refuse to decolonize or heal. Shared tribal lineage alone is no longer enough to justify staying in environments where community is defined by hierarchy, groupthink, or silence in the face of abuse. For too long, some have prioritized status, money, and politics over accountability, healing, and human dignity. Many are choosing to step away from these toxic dynamics, recognizing that true kinship is built on shared values, not just bloodlines.

This is not abandonment of tradition; it is a return to it. We are reclaiming our ancestral languages, identities, and teachings that colonization sought to erase. We are refusing to remain silent out of fear, and we are no longer asking for permission to exist in our fullness. In honoring our ancestors, we speak the truths they were not given the safety or language to express. We are breaking generational cycles, not perpetuating them. And if healing requires building new spaces and communities rooted in mutual respect, accountability, and cultural integrity, then that is exactly what we will do. Below, I will end this article with a quote from the late Fulani elder/historian Al Hajj Sekou Tall. As a person of Fulani descent, it saddens me to know that this quote still stands true decades later, how we have not progressed as humankind, but only have gotten worse. I, as well as others, can relate to the wrongful discrimination. It is time, like Al Hajj Sekou Tall urges, that we stop the hatred and do better.

"Incomprehensible acts of hatred and a scornful attitude toward the other are not necessarily related to pride in cultural identity. When each culture will have extirpated the compulsion to always be in the right, when the stranger is no longer received as an infidel but as a brother who is compelled by his own culture, the world will have then laid the first foundation toward a humanity finally at one. For universality does not necessarily imply uniformity but cultural alliances for the well-being and happiness of man...The world seems to be engulfed in a vertigo of violence and intolerance. Is this some genetic fatality? We must nourish the hope that man will free himself from the obscure forces that push him toward his own destruction and the denial of differences. The inquiry into the question of the Fulani's origins is therefore a lesson in intolerance. It teaches us that we must be vigilant against the cultural and racial discrimination preached by the great fools, those who traffic in hatred and abeyance, the prophets of misfortune, the malicious Gods who shame and plague us..."

Glossary of Terms

Afro-Indigenous/Afro-Native- is a person who has both African and Native American ancestry/lineage, or a person of African descent adopted into a Native American Nation.

BIPOC- stands for Black Indigenous People of Color.

Blood Quantum- the supposed amount of Indian Blood or percentage of Native ancestry a person possesses, calculated based on their closest Native ancestor(s) recorded on tribal rolls.

Doxxing- Exposing personal, private photos, videos, as well as information about a person online without consent.

Federal Recognition- are tribes that have a political relationship with either the United States or Canadian government and are identified as sovereign nations, usually through completion of federally recognition process.

One Drop Rule- One of the Jim Crow laws that required all people who had one African ancestor to be identified as Black and treated as a Black person without any privileges of being considered White by society.

Pretendian Hunting- People who investigate the genealogy of people who they believe are not Indigenous.

Pretendian- A person who falsely claims an Indigenous identity without any proof for financial, social, and/or political gain.