I’ve had many lively over-the-fence conversations with my Salvadoran-born neighbor, who moved into my primarily black Los Angeles neighborhood with his wife and children three years ago. Rene and I banter easily about a whole host of things that we have in common, from our shared love of animals to our growing dismay about the fate of justice for nonwhite folks in Donald Trump’s America.

This kind of friendly interethnic connection is common, and has almost always been effortless. But these days, the connection feels deeper. Living in this nakedly racist political climate, something has changed.

I have to confess, the tendency of many Americans to collapse black and brown into an ethnic monolith — a single political idea, a single struggle, too often fused by media and activists into a single phrase — has made me uneasy. I’ve watched people on both sides of the liberal/conservative divide habitually conflate two different histories. I’ve seen how eager many Americans are to soften the sharp edges of African-American history, either because we think solidarity and connection are more important or (more likely) because black history indicts American history and American founding ideals in very particular ways.

Latino history does this too, especially in the West. But it’s important to keep clear the history of black oppression, not least because it helps us understand how so much other codified oppression has followed from it. Black people have grievances that are uniquely ours and that have to be addressed as such. The black/brown monolith puts everyone on the same plane in a way that can blur critical edges of our unique experiences and expectations.