10/06/2026
🤬😥😩Meet Abraham D. Juste (standing next to 50 cent)
You probably know him as Da’Vinchi, the Haitian-American actor from Brooklyn who has built a rather impressive career playing roles rooted heavily in Black American life and culture.
He played Darnell Hayes on All American. Cash Mooney on grown-ish. Terry “Southwest T” Flenory on BMF. He has also appeared in The Boys, Jessica Jones, Lethal Weapon and other productions.
Recently, Da’Vinchi sat down with former NFL MVP Cam Newton on Newton’s podcast, Funky Friday, for an episode titled “Da’Vinchi on Why BMF Ended, Fame, Acting and What Really Happened Behind the Scenes.”
And somewhere along the way, the conversation went someplace it did not need to go.
Newton raised the tension that has existed in some corners of the Black diaspora and asked about the perception that Caribbean, African and British Black people sometimes believe themselves superior to Black Americans.
Da’Vinchi responded:
“I think that’s true.”
To be fair, he also indicated that he did not believe that attitude was right.
But the conversation didn’t stop there.
Discussing American work ethic, Da’Vinchi said, “I do think the work ethic of Americans is one that people in a higher position, it’s hard for them to trust it.”
He talked about being raised in a Haitian household and learning independence early. Then, speaking about American culture, he said:
“You’re just incompetent for a really long time.”
He argued that America does not sufficiently promote critical thinking, thinking outside the box or hard work.
And social media promptly caught fire.
I understand why.
Because I am a generational Black American. My family has been on this soil since the 18th century, when this nation did not yet have half the states it has today. My ancestors worked its fields, traveled its roads, survived its racial caste system and lived through a country that demanded their labor while denying their humanity.
So, yes, I found this conversation offensive.
And people keep responding, “Well, maybe there is some truth in what he said.”
They are missing the point.
This isn't about pretending every Black American is hardworking, brilliant and industrious. No people can make that claim. It is about the exhaustion of hearing variations of this same conversation about Black Americans from some members of the Black immigrant diaspora: Don't become like them. Don't trust them. They don't work hard enough. They complain too much. We immigrants work harder.
Enough Already.
And the irony of saying any of this while sitting across from Cam Newton should have been impossible to miss. This is a Black American man who became the first Black quarterback to win the NFL's Most Valuable Player award outright, built a career at the highest level of professional sports, became a businessman and father, then reinvented himself as a media entrepreneur.
Whatever criticism one wishes to make of America, Cam Newton is a rather inconvenient person to use as the backdrop for a conversation about Black American laziness.
Some of our Black immigrant brothers and sisters need to learn the history of the people they encounter when they arrive here. Because Black Americans were not sitting around waiting for somebody else to save us. We were fighting the geopolitical power whose decisions affected not simply Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, but Haiti, Africa, the Caribbean and much of the world.
We were physically being fruit on trees.
Bombed. Beaten. Disenfranchised. Driven from and had our land stolen. Locked out of universities, unions, neighborhoods and professions.
And still we organized. Still we built. Still we fought. Still we forced America, kicking and screaming, to begin reconciling the soaring promises written on its parchment with the bloody reality beneath our feet.
Black American blood is literally mixed into the soil of this country. And since we are talking about Haiti, perhaps Da’Vinchi should learn the name Frederick Douglass.
The formerly enslaved Black American who became one of America's greatest abolitionists was appointed United States Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti in 1889. Douglass developed such respect for Haiti that American critics later accused him of being too sympathetic to Haitian interests. After leaving the diplomatic post, he served as commissioner for Haiti's exhibit at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.
Think seriously about that history for a moment.
More than a century before Da’Vinchi sat on a podcast explaining the superior work ethic he associated with his Haitian upbringing, a formerly enslaved Black American was representing the United States in Haiti while defending the dignity and sovereignty of the first Black republic.
And immigration itself deserves some history.
For decades, American immigration law was structured around discriminatory national-origin and racial restrictions. The great Black freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s helped transform the moral and political landscape of this country. The Civil Rights Act came in 1964. The Voting Rights Act came in 1965. And that same year, the Immigration and Nationality Act abolished the old national-origins quota system, dramatically changing who could immigrate to America.
That law ultimately opened doors much wider to immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Black Americans accomplish this. You cannot separate the transformation of America's immigration system from the civil-rights revolution that forced this nation to confront racial discrimination.
And Black Americans were at the center of that revolution. Even before then, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem had introduced legislation seeking paths to citizenship for Asian immigrants while simultaneously fighting segregation, lynching and employment discrimination.
There is a lineage and a debt here. Not a debt requiring anybody to bow or a debt requiring immigrants to surrender their cultures. Just a debt requiring something much simpler:
Respect.
The opportunities Da’Vinchi enjoys did not materialize from thin air either.
Before Da’Vinchi could portray Terry Flenory on BMF, generations of Black American actors, writers, producers and activists fought an entertainment industry that barely wanted Black faces on television unless they were carrying trays, shining shoes or making white audiences laugh.
Our people broke those doors down.
That lineage includes people like Tyler Perry. You may love his work or hate it, Lord knows I have my own opinions, but nobody with functioning eyes can accuse that man of being lazy. He built an enormous Black entertainment enterprise and created opportunities for Black actors Hollywood routinely overlooked.
Da’Vinchi himself has spoken about working within Perry's famously demanding production system. So perhaps before diagnosing Black America with a work-ethic problem, one should examine the shoulders upon which one's own career stands.
I want the diaspora that migrates to American tp please stop arriving at Black America's doorstep carrying somebody else's mythology about Black Americans. The very same mythology that was created by those who destroyed your countries. Yes, why would you repeat those talking points? Please stop defining yourself by how unlike us you believe yourself to be. America has a lesson it teaches Black immigrants eventually, whether gently or brutally: The policeman who stops you does not ask whether your grandmother came from Port-au-Prince, Kingston, Lagos or Birmingham, Alabama before deciding what your Blackness means.
You don't escape America's racial history by declaring yourself different from the descendants of the people who survived it. Black Americans, by and large, are not sitting around our dinner tables obsessively discussing Haitians, Nigerians, Jamaicans, Ghanaians or Trinidadians and warning our children not to become like them.
Most of us simply expect you to come here, build your life and become part of the enormous, complicated thing called America. So it is bewildering to repeatedly discover that somewhere in somebody else's house, we have apparently been assigned the role of cautionary tale.
Why?
Why are you talking about us like this? Why must Black American supposed pathology become the measuring stick by which somebody proves his immigrant virtue?
Just stop.
We have enough people in this country invested in telling the world that Black Americans are lazy, deficient, criminal, unintelligent and responsible for every structural injury ever inflicted upon us. We do not need that rhetoric recycled by people whose faces look like ours.
He needs to apologize and learn our history.
Learn Frederick Douglass, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., my frat brother A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Queen Fannie Lou Hamer, and Mrs. Ella Baker.
Learn the Black soldiers who came home from wars abroad and demanded democracy at home.
Learn the people who marched until America's immigration laws, voting laws, employment laws and public accommodations began changing.
Learn the people whose work made possible an America where a Haitian-American kid from Brooklyn could grow up, become an actor, portray Black American stories on television and sit across from a Black American NFL MVP on a Black-owned media platform to discuss it all.
Then perhaps we can finally retire this tired competition over which branch of the African diaspora works harder.
We have spent centuries being divided according to somebody else's hierarchy. We should know better than to build one of our own.
