Braids, Beats, and Bloodlines: When Black and Pacific Histories Collide

Kinship isn’t claimed through culture alone. It’s practiced in truth.

We’ve been dancing to the same drums for decades—sometimes beside each other, sometimes across oceans, sometimes without even knowing the song belonged to someone else first.

I’ve seen the ways our boys speak in borrowed tongues—laced with slang and swagger shaped by Black America. I’ve seen Island girls lay their baby hairs down and caption their selfies with Black vernacular they don’t fully understand. I’ve watched us throw on Tupac and tattoos, gold grills and gang signs, as if we were born into the struggle, not just styling ourselves in its image. And I’ve stayed quiet before. Because I know it comes from a place of love. Of resonance. Of rhythm that lives in both of us.

But love without accountability is just costume. And admiration without memory is a kind of theft.

This isn’t about shame. It’s about story. It’s about unveiling with the silence between our histories, the kind that lets us claim each other’s culture but not each other’s pain. Because while we blast the music and mimic the moves, too many of us stay silent when Black bodies are mourning. Too many of us forget that Black culture was not given freely, but forged through resistance, through grief, through survival that came with no applause.

Black and Pasifika histories have touched in deep, complicated, beautiful ways: on ships and plantations, on military bases, in love stories, in birth certificates that never made space for both identities. We have kinfolk we’ve never claimed. Wars we’ve fought on the same side of. Pain we’ve both inherited—just shaped differently by empire.

So this is a gentle knock at the door. A reminder to those of us who know the rhythm but forget the root: if we can wear the sound, we must be willing to honor the story. If we can dance to their drum, we can march in their protest. If we can borrow the culture, we can fight for the people.

We’re not visitors to each other’s pain. We’re bound—by memory, by migration, by music, by love. And this is the place we begin again.

Entwined Histories: Blackbirding, Slavery & Mixed Lineages

Some of us were taken from land. Some of us were taken from home. But all of us were taken from something.

The story of Pacific Islanders and Black Americans doesn’t begin at a protest. It begins on ships. On shores where names were changed and bodies became labor. Where brown skin was measured in dollars, and dark skin was called debt. Our shared history isn’t often written in textbooks, but it exists—in the silences passed down, in the missing names on our family trees, in the way we both learned to survive under someone else’s rule.

Blackbirding swept through the Pacific from the 1860s to the early 1900s, targeting islands across Melanesia, Polynesia, and parts of Micronesia. The most heavily impacted were Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, where an estimated 45,000 to 60,000 Pacific Islanders were kidnapped, coerced, or tricked into labor for plantations in Queensland, Australia. Thousands more were taken to Fiji, German Samoa, and even as far as Peru, where they worked in guano mines under brutal conditions. Laborers also came from Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, and Kiribati, with smaller numbers from Sāmoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Niue, and Nauru. Many were never returned. Some were as young as 12. Entire villages were emptied. Families waited decades for people who never came home. Blackbirding wasn’t migration—it was Pacific slavery by another name. And while most of the world has forgotten, our islands still remember.

And across the ocean in America, Black people were still fighting to be seen as human. After centuries of slavery, after being traded, branded, and brutalized, they were left to build their lives on the bones of systems designed to break them. Their labor built nations. Their joy was criminalized. Their bodies were policed. And yet they still created rhythm, resistance, and culture that would eventually touch every corner of the world—including ours.

But our stories didn’t just run parallel—they braided. During World War II and the Vietnam War, thousands of Black soldiers were stationed across the Pacific—Hawai‘i, Guam, Sāmoa, Okinawa. Some fell in love. Some had children. Some were buried far from home. In places like Compton, Carson, and the Bay Area, Black and Pasifika communities grew up side by side, their struggles overlapping—in housing, in schools, in churches, in prisons. And in between all of it were the children of both—Black and Pacific—raised by aunties who didn’t always know how to name that lineage, in families that weren’t always ready to claim both bloods.

These histories are not side notes. They are center. They remind us that our kinship is not metaphor. It’s lived. Mixed. Messy. Erased. And aching to be remembered.

Because when we say we’re family, we need to know the cost of that claim. We need to know the labor our ancestors gave, the wars they were sent to fight, the children they made across borders and battlefields.

Our blood remembers even when we don’t.

Borrowed Rhythms: From Celebration to Appropriation

We love Black culture. That part is obvious.

It’s in the way we walk, talk, pose, rap. It’s in the bass of our speakers and the curve of our slang. It’s in the way our boys sag their shorts and our girls quote Megan or Beyoncé like scripture. It’s in our playlists, our TikToks, our fashion, our dances. It’s in the rhythms we’ve claimed without always understanding the roots they grew from.

But love without context can become erasure. And celebration without commitment can quickly turn into appropriation.

We don’t always want to hear that part. Because we’re taught that proximity to Blackness made us feel bold, not accountable. We take the music but not the mourning. We imitate the style but ignore the struggle. We throw around the N-word like it’s seasoning, like it doesn’t carry generations of blood, breath, and broken bones. We laugh at the memes, copy the cadence, steal the aesthetics—but where are we when Black lives are taken in broad daylight? When grief floods their streets? When mourning becomes protest?

Too often, we stay quiet.

And it’s not always that we don’t care—though some truly don’t. Some of us have convinced ourselves that growing up next to Black culture means we’re part of it. That because we shared the same neighborhoods, the same classrooms, the same mixtapes, we’ve earned a right to carry what was never ours to begin with. But proximity isn’t the same as permission. And environment is not inheritance.

No one taught us the full weight of what we’re borrowing when we reach for Blackness. No one told us that Black American cultural expression is sacred—that it was forged in survival, stitched together by people who made joy out of suffering, who carved beauty out of violence. We were handed the rhythm, but not the history. We copied the style, but never carried the cost.

Because this is what America does—it strips Black people of their humanity while stealing everything they create. The struggle gets silenced. The culture gets sold. The pain gets ignored, but the slang, the songs, the stories? Those get packaged for everyone. And the closer you want to be to “American,” the easier it becomes to mimic that same extraction. To be fully American, in many ways, has meant siding with the white oppressor—even if you’re not white.

And that’s what so many of us non-Black people of color do without realizing it. We perform the parts of Blackness that make us feel powerful, expressive, included. But we disappear when Black people are grieving. We inherit the mimicry, not the memory. And we wonder why our solidarity rings hollow.

Pacific Islanders know culture is sacred. We know what it means to protect songs, to treat dances as ceremony, to guard our stories like lineage. We were raised to understand that culture is not aesthetic—it’s ancestral. And yet, when it comes to Black culture, we sometimes forget to offer that same reverence. We wear it like style, not spirit. We treat it like it’s ours to remix, instead of someone else’s to survive. Black culture didn’t just arrive fully-formed on our phones or timelines. It was built under surveillance. It was born while being hunted. It survived when everything tried to kill it.

When we mimic it without reverence, we flatten that history. We disrespect that brilliance. We turn resistance into costume. And we forget that real love shows up in grief. In protest. In protection.

This doesn’t mean we can’t dance to the same songs. It doesn’t mean we can’t be shaped by what moves us. But it means we have to stop pretending that cultural borrowing is innocent when it exists inside a world built on exploitation. It means we have to ask: Am I honoring the source, or just performing it? Am I showing up for the people, or just the vibe?

We can’t say we love Black culture and stay silent when Black people are in pain.

If we’re going to carry the rhythm, we have to carry the responsibility too.

Inherited Anti-Blackness: A Legacy of Colonialism

The truth is, many of us were taught to love Black culture and fear Black people at the same time.

We weren’t born this way. It was passed down. In whispers, in warnings, in who we were told not to date. In what we saw glorified on TV and what we saw demonized in real life. It was taught at kitchen tables, in Sunday schools, in migration dreams shaped by white approval. Some of us heard our own parents or pastors speak about Black people with disgust, while our cousins danced to 50 Cent and practiced singing like Beyoncé. That contradiction was never explained to us—it just became normal.

But anti-Blackness didn’t start in our homes. It started in colonization.

When missionaries came to our islands, they didn’t just bring religion. They brought hierarchy. They brought skin tone charts. They brought shame. They told us whiteness was purity, cleanliness, civilization. They taught us to cover our bodies, cut our hair, bow our heads, obey. They planted the seed that the closer we stood to whiteness, the safer and more worthy we became. And that seed grew. Quietly. Generationally.

That’s why colorism still eats at our communities today. Why lighter skin is praised. Why biracial kids with European features are admired, but Black-Pacific kids are often erased. Why “don’t get too dark” is still spoken like a curse. That’s why so many mixed Black-Pasifika children grow up feeling invisible—claimed only when convenient, never fully seen.

We can’t confront appropriation without first confronting this. Because appropriation isn’t just a fashion choice—it’s a symptom of deeper harm. Of a system that taught us to admire from a distance but not stand in solidarity. To mimic but not protect. To consume but not care.

And it’s uncomfortable to admit, but healing begins with honesty.

We say we come from warriors, then let this be our fight too.

Shared Frontlines: Protest, Power & Pacific–Black Solidarity

We’ve stood on the same frontlines before. But too often, we don’t know it—or we forget.

In 1971, in the streets of Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), a group of young Polynesians created the Polynesian Panther Party, directly inspired by the Black Panther Party in the U.S. They wore leather jackets, read revolutionary texts, and knocked on doors in the name of liberation—not just for themselves, but for every brown body policed and displaced by empire. Their demands weren’t performative. They were structural. Rent strikes, free school lunches, legal aid, community patrols. The same blueprint the Panthers in Oakland laid down was carried across oceans and remixed for the Pacific. That’s not imitation. That’s solidarity.

And that solidarity didn’t stop there. Black soldiers stationed in the Pacific during World War II and the Vietnam War built quiet relationships with Island communities—sometimes romantic, sometimes political. Many Pacific people saw in Black soldiers a mirror of themselves: uniformed, used, underpaid. Seen as tools, never as full men. That shared awareness bloomed into small acts of trust, even as the institutions they served continued to oppress them both.

In recent years, the uprisings for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tyre Nichols echoed across the ocean. Pasifika communities in Aotearoa, Australia, Hawai‘i, and cities across California showed up—marching, mourning, donating, reposting, resisting. It was a reminder that we know how to show up when we choose to. That our hearts are not numb. That even across vast waters, we feel the tremors of injustice when they strike Black lives.

And the solidarity has gone both ways. Black organizers have stood with Native Hawaiian kia‘i at Mauna Kea, with Indigenous movements at Standing Rock, with Pacific Islander-led climate resistance in the face of rising seas and disappearing lands. Because the truth is, our fights are not separate. They never have been. They’re all rooted in the same sickness: colonization, capitalism, militarism, white supremacy. Different names. Same wound.

But still, this history is rarely taught. Our children aren’t raised knowing that Black and Pacific people have long shared protest lines, prison cells, prayer circles. That we have fought side by side—not just for our own freedom, but for each other’s. And when we forget that, it becomes easier to feel like strangers again.

So let this be a reminder: we don’t have to invent solidarity from scratch. We just have to remember and recommit to it.

Because none of us are free until all of us are.

Mixed and Unacknowledged: The Children of Two Worlds

There are children who carry both ocean and fire in their veins. Whose skin tells two stories before they ever speak a word.

Black and Pacific. Two worlds. One body.

Some are born on military bases, the children of Black fathers and Pasifika mothers—raised between deployments and diaspora. Some grow up in cities like Compton or Honolulu or Anchorage, moving between family cookouts and being asked, “What are you mixed with?” like their entire existence is a puzzle to solve. Some are rooted in both cultures and still feel they belong in neither. They know how to dance the siva and recite Tupac lyrics, but not always with permission. Not always with protection.

We don’t talk enough about them.

We celebrate mixed kids when their features make us proud—light eyes, soft curls, a smile that could pass for Hollywood. But when they’re darker, when they speak out, when they name anti-Blackness in our homes and churches—we go quiet. Or worse, we push them out. Too Black to be fully Pasifika. Too Pasifika to be fully claimed by Blackness. Expected to embody unity, yet forced to live fracture.

This is not just about identity. It’s about belonging.

Because when we forget to acknowledge our mixed kin, we erase our own shared history. These children are not background stories. They are the embodiment of everything we pretend to forget. Proof that we have always touched, always loved, always intersected. That our communities are not separate continents, but coastlines that have met before.

To be Black and Pacific is to carry both resistance and reverence. To be doubted by your own blood. To constantly code-switch your way into safety, into softness, into survival. And yet, it is also to be radiant. To be ancestral convergence. To be a walking answer to questions our communities pretend not to ask.

If we say we are for the people, then we must be for all of our people. Not just the ones who make us feel comfortable. Not just the ones who look how we want. Not just the ones who say what we expect to hear.

Because the children of both worlds deserve more than our silence. They deserve to come home and be seen.

Beyond Aesthetic: Practicing Real Solidarity

Solidarity is not a filter. It’s not a trending sound. It’s not quoting a line from a Kendrick song while scrolling past news of another Black life stolen. It’s not tagging #BLM in 2020 and staying silent every year after.

Solidarity is what you do when no one’s watching. It’s how you speak when your uncle says something anti-Black at the fa’alavelave. It’s whether you show up when it’s not your family grieving—but still your people.

Too many of us have mistaken proximity for practice. We think because we grew up near Black families, dated Black partners, listened to Black music, that we are excused from the work. But solidarity is not a vibe. It’s not about aesthetic. It’s about commitment. It’s about unlearning what we inherited and choosing something more just in its place.

And it’s not theoretical. It’s personal.

If we say we love Black culture, then we need to:

• Speak up when anti-Blackness shows up in our homes, churches, and online spaces.

• Stop using the N-word—especially if we’re not Black.

• Credit Black creators when we imitate their dances, styles, or speech.

• Teach our kids Black history alongside Pacific history—because our struggles have always been connected.

• Support Black-owned businesses, Black organizers, Black-led movements—not just when it’s trending, but when it’s quiet.

• Listen when we’re called in, and resist the urge to be defensive or fragile.

Real solidarity also means creating space for Black-Pasifika people to lead. Not just to be present, but to be centered. To write the story, not just be included in the margins.

This is the uncomfortable truth: if your “solidarity” ends when it’s no longer convenient, it was never solidarity to begin with.

Love isn’t what you say. It’s what you do.

So if we love Black people—and not just Black culture—then we must show it.

If the Ocean Could Speak, It Would Name Us Kin

If the ocean could speak, it would tell you: this was never about distance. We were never as far apart as we believed.

Black and Pacific histories have always touched—sometimes through violence, sometimes through love, sometimes through silence. And it’s that silence we’re breaking now. Because pretending these connections don’t exist only protects the systems that tried to erase them in the first place.

Today, the United States honors Juneteenth—a holiday that belongs specifically to Black Americans. It marks the day in 1865 when the last enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas were finally told they were free. Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Two and a half years of stolen time. Two and a half years of deliberate silence by those who knew and chose not to tell.

Juneteenth is not just a celebration—it’s a reckoning. A reminder of how freedom for Black people in America has always been delayed, negotiated, and resisted. It is a day that speaks to a very specific pain and a very specific joy. And honoring it means honoring that specificity.

And still, Pacific people know something of that delay. We know what it means to wait for truth. To be occupied and renamed. To be called “territory” but never fully sovereign. To be told we are free when systems still hold our homelands, our languages, our stories. Our freedom, too, came in pieces. It came with treaties we didn’t always write. With independence layered in dependency. With promises that still haven’t arrived.

So when we remember Juneteenth, we must not see it as ours to claim—but as ours to respect. And as a mirror. As a warning. As an invitation to learn from the brilliance and resilience of Black struggle. Because no one has taught America more about survival, joy, protest, and refusal than Black people. And no one has paid more for the delay.

We are not strangers. But kinship is not just something we claim—it’s something we practice.

It looks like teaching our kids that Blackness isn’t a trend, it’s a legacy.

It looks like showing up. Speaking out. Staying in the room when things get hard.

It looks like recognizing that we can’t ask for justice for ourselves if we stay quiet when others are dying.

Solidarity, like love, is not a performance. It’s a posture. A choice. A discipline.

Juneteenth reminds us: freedom delayed is still freedom worth fighting for.

And the ocean—like our ancestors—remembers all the ways we are bound.