FBA, ADOS, And Misinformation Within The Black Community
Elections have consequences. It’s almost a cliché at this point, something said either before an election to rally the troops to the polls or after losing an election. It’s an introspection point, where in comparing and contrasting political policies, the stark reality between the actions of the victor and the promises of the defeated candidate is made clear, not just to the losers, but oftentimes to the winners, too.
That’s what we’re seeing in Washington, D.C., particularly in the Southeast section. Black folks are being harassed for everything from smoking weed on their stoop, which in D.C. is legal, unless you’re in Section 8 housing, which means you’re under federal authority, where you can lose your home, to simply recording the mass presence of the National Guard, FBI, DEA, and D.C. police marching through the streets.
Black neighborhoods are under a siege, and I’ll bet even former New York City mayor Rudy Guilinani, the most popular champion of stop and frisk and broken window policing in the country, must be impressed.
In America, our politics lie along a philosophical spectrum. At the poles are communism on the left, which I can’t find that many adherents to in 2025, and fascism on the right, where we can discover enthusiasts throughout the current Trump administration.
But, in general, the political center is where most Americans like to find their politicians. Center right or center left is about how much money to spend, or not spend, on the priorities of the party in power.
However, the 2024 presidential election wasn’t about the center. It was about an existential threat to Black people. A clear choice between a normal political candidate in Kamala Harris for the Democratic Party, and a criminal felon who’d been found liable for sexual assault in Donald Trump for the GOP.
For rational people, even if you didn’t like Harris’ policies, or if you didn’t know a single thing about her policies, the choice for president should have been as easy as thinking, which one of these candidates would I trust around my family? The Black woman with the cackling laugh, or the white guy with more criminal indictments than we have fingers and toes, and whose best friend is a pedophile?
Yeah, tough choice.
For the majority of Black people, even with slippage among some Black male voters, enticed by the notion of embracing misogyny, an approximation to power, and who were transactional in their philosophy, we saw the threat and voted accordingly. But there was one group of loud and wrong Black folks who populated social media telling Black people not to vote, or to vote for everything except the top of the ballot, because in their eyes, if the Republican and Democratic parties were snakes, then it didn’t matter who was in office.
FBA (Foundational Black Americans) and ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) folks.
If you’re reading this, I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with this crowd. Yes, I know that they’re technically two different groups, under two different leaders, but I don’t particularly care about their particulars or their leaders. Their ideology of xenophobia, fetishization of ancestry and lineage, and the distraction that they use to divide Black people based upon whether or not one’s ancestry is tied to slavery, is a white supremacist dream.
It’s almost as if the long-serving FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover rose from the dead, sent a COINTELPRO 2.0 battle plan to a group of gullible Black folks, and then unleashed a torrent of flag-bearing, hashtag and meme-loving, xenophobic, Black social media accounts on the Black community, and then watched the magic happen.
Why does this matter?
It matters because information, particularly in the Black community, is golden. Of the groups in this country, we as Black folks have always needed to create our independent forms of information, whether it be Black newspapers or Black Twitter, to tell our stories our way. And there’s an inherent trust that all the actors in spreading information are working in our best interest.
That is not FBA and ADOS.
Before the election, these two groups did their best to spread as much misinformation about candidate Harris as possible. In a barely masked effort to embrace the talking points of the Trump administration, they challenged whether Harris was a Black woman, just as Trump did at the National Association of Black Journalists. They denigrated her as a “cop,” ignoring the fact that the Black community needs both criminal defense attorneys and criminal prosecutors making decisions about Black people in the judicial system.
And, most egregious of all, they, as a tacit voter suppression tactic, urged Black folks not to vote, all because they claimed not to be able to see the difference between a small Democratic candidate and a white supremacist, white nationalist, fascist criminal president.
Now, as the military sweeps through D.C., and there are GOP politicians openly talking about bringing the same situation to other Black cities and neighborhoods, these chaos agents suddenly have discovered that when a Black community is under martial law, that the state doesn’t care about whether or not your people have lived in this country since the Mayflower or just arrived from Kingston.
They’re scrambling to create social media discussions on X and other platforms, where they’re now shocked, shocked, that the white supremacist they said was the same as the lovely Black lady who just wanted to give them housing credits, protect civil rights gains, and maybe, just maybe, not be crazy, is doing the crazy white supreamcist things he said he’d do.
They’re learning that adopting a nativist nationalist ideology of blood and soil doesn’t include them in the blood or the soil. All because the maws of the monster don’t care if you’re as xenophobic as they are, with your “diaspora wars.” He’s still gonna go into the National African American History Museum and strip you of your history. Know why? To paraphrase Malcolm X, they don’t hang you because you’re from America, Canada, Ghana, or Trinidad; they hang you because you’re Black.”
But it’s too late now for FBA/ADOS folks. They can run under the banner of lineage, put yet another American flag on their profiles, and think that their tactics of Black division are gonna somehow result in reparations for Black Americans. Still, most Black people realize at this point that they’re fools. Discredited fools.
Someone once said that Newt Gingrich was a dumb person’s idea of a smart person, and the same can be said of FBA and ADOS: a dumb Black person’s idea of a smart Black movement. But I don’t blame the dumb people. Everyone searches for a philosophy to guide their lives, and we trust, whether it’s religion or social justice, that the movement’s inherent premise is to move the individual or the community in a positive, forward manner.
To combat the assault on Washington, D.C.’s Black community and the Black communities to come, whether as a provocation to justify incarcerating more Black people through police contact, or voter suppression during the midterms, with the military acting as the intimidation force, FBA and ADOS aren’t to be trusted as a movement. Because they went bankrupt as a philosophy when they couldn’t see, identify, or strategize against the threat that, to an intelligent group like the majority of Black voters, was right there in their face.
Ultimately, the actions of Donald Trump are his responsibility. He’s the arsonist carrying the gasoline in Washington, D.C., and he’s responsible for the fire that he creates. But FBA/ADOS folks were determined to tell Black folks living in D.C. and throughout the country that the firefighter and the arsonist were the same. And for that point alone, you shouldn’t listen to a single word they say again.
Because elections have consequences.
Lawrence Ross is the author of “The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities” and “Blackballed: The Black & White Politics of Race on America’s Campuses.” He’s also the founder of TheMetaphorClub.com, a new social media platform that emphasizes community, selflessness, and authentic relationships. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, April.
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FBA, ADOS, And Misinformation Within The Black Community was originally published on newsone.com
