Most people treat “Black nationalism” and “white supremacy” as opposites that never touch.

But there’s a specific overlap that keeps reappearing: racial separatism, the belief that Blacks and whites should live apart. When that becomes the goal, you get some very strange meetings.

In 1922, Marcus Garvey met with the KKK’s acting leader Edward Young Clarke. Garvey recorded Clarke’s view that America is “a white man’s country,” and aligned, at least tactically, with the idea that Black Americans “should have a country of [their] own in Africa.” Garvey even framed the Klan/UNIA aim as “completely separate black and white societies.”

Then in the 1960s, Elijah Muhammad invited American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell into the NOI orbit. Rockwell talked down about Black people, yet Muhammad still treated him as “honest” on the key point: “the same goal: separation of the races.” The NOI even sent Malcolm X to a clandestine KKK meeting to negotiate a truce-for-segregation arrangement.

I’m not claiming “they’re the same movement.” I’m claiming a narrower pattern: when politics becomes “separation-first,” alliances get weird fast, because the mechanism is shared even when the morality isn’t.

Here’s the machinery:

Shared end-state (separation) makes temporary coordination feel “practical.” Propaganda value: each side uses the other as proof the conflict is fundamental. Modern version: “cross-ideological populist fronts” can repackage grievance coalitions across lines that used to be hard boundaries.

If the goal is truth (not comfort), focus on the incentives + coalition math, not the comforting story that “these worlds never overlap."

Question: What evidence would convince you a present-day coalition is “separation logic” in disguise vs just opportunistic clout-chasing?