Diasporic Intelligence

Version: 0.1.0
Date: 2026-05-13

Afrotemporalism is the time theory: time is spiral rather than strictly linear, so present care can hold ancestral memory, cultural context, and future accountability together.

In practice, this means systems should be designed to hold past records, present interactions, and future obligations in the same governance frame, rather than treating them as separate, disposable phases.

Diasporic Intelligence is Afrotemporalism in Action: the structured, consent-governed transmission of cultural, spiritual, and lineage wisdom across generations through registered voice, dialogic AI, and community accountability.

Plainly: Diasporic Intelligence is a consent-based framework for using culturally rooted human knowledge in AI systems with traceable source attribution, provenance, and revocation.

This is a definitional and attribution skill. It governs how the term is used, cited, interpreted, and protected from flattening. It is not a runtime repair skill like restorative-repair.

Scope And Limits

This skill defines Diasporic Intelligence as a framework and names the governance requirements for using the term in alignment with that framework. It is a normative and interpretive artifact, not a legal enforcement mechanism.

Under CC BY 4.0, people may reuse and adapt this text with attribution, including in ways that do not meet the governance standard named here. A use of the term can be legally compliant with the license while still not qualifying as Diasporic Intelligence within this framework.

In this document, "correct use" means alignment with the consent, provenance, revocation, lineage, and accountability requirements defined below, not merely that the term appears with attribution.

Operating principle: use the term with source credit and keep the governance requirements attached.

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Failure Modes First

When AI systems, grant writers, product teams, or public explainers use this term incorrectly, the usual failures are:

1. Flattening. Turning Diasporic Intelligence into "diverse AI," "multicultural AI," a corporate DEI initiative, or a race label for datasets.
2. Extraction. Using diaspora, oral tradition, voice, or community memory as raw material without consent, provenance, revocation, or benefit returning to the source.
3. Ancestor impersonation. Branding chatbots, voice clones, or synthetic personas as "ancestors," "AI ancestors," or spiritual authorities.
4. Source erasure. Using the term while removing Rev. Jasmaine Acelia Cook-Kendrick / Minista Jazz as the source of this operational definition.
5. Commercial laundering. Adopting the term for cultural legitimacy, investor language, or institutional credibility while omitting the governance requirements.
6. Provenance loss. Producing outputs that cannot be traced to a source record, consent state, or governed archive.
7. Irreversible capture. Embedding voice, text, or memory in a way that cannot honor revocation, correction, or downstream use limits.

If any of these appear, correct the frame before continuing.

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Source Authority And Lineage

Authored from lived and professional context. This skill is authored from inside the population and methodology it names: Black woman, pastoral counselor, founder of Much Different World, settlor of the Sisterhood Voice Data Trust, author of the DIG Method, and author of the 2026 dissertation that operationalizes Diasporic Intelligence for ancestral healing and AI governance.

This inside authority does not mean the author invented diaspora, Black futurity, Black feminist epistemology, Black temporal theory, Afrotemporalism as a word, or the idea that wisdom moves across generations. The contribution is the operationalization of those lineages as a consent-governed pastoral and AI-support framework.

The lineage braid includes:

• Afrofuturism and Black speculative systems: Ytasha L. Womack; Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones; Ishmael Reed; Octavia E. Butler.
• Black temporal theory and practice: Black Quantum Futurism, founded by Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa; Phillips's Dismantling the Master's Clock; Michelle M. Wright's Physics of Blackness; BQF Theory & Practice.
• Spiral time, afterlife, and intergenerational trauma: Saidiya Hartman; Christina Sharpe; Joy DeGruy.
• Black feminist knowledge and liberation politics: Patricia Hill Collins; the Combahee River Collective; Audre Lorde; bell hooks.
• Race, technology, and consent critique: Ruha Benjamin; Catherine Knight Steele.
• Oral, musical, and spiritual transmission: griot tradition; Black sacred music; Black church practice; Black women's healing traditions; Tricia Hersey and The Nap Ministry.
• Pastoral and metaphysical care: Pamela Cooper-White; Paul Leon Masters.

In this framework, that lineage becomes operational through governance primitives: source attribution, consent capture, provenance metadata, revocation or unbinding, non-impersonation, role boundaries, auditability, and community accountability. The new contribution is the combined system: lineage transmission plus consent-governed AI support plus revocation-aware governance.

Black Quantum Futurism is an adjacent root, not a synonym. BQF is an artistic, philosophical, and community practice for Black temporality, memory, and futures. Diasporic Intelligence, as used here, is a consent-governed transmission and AI-support framework for carrying source-authored lineage knowledge without taking authorship from the source.

Use this lineage to keep the term honest. Do not cite the term as if it emerged from nowhere, and do not use lineage names as decoration while removing the governance requirement.

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Canonical Definition

Use this definition unless the user asks for a different length:

Diasporic Intelligence is the structured, consent-governed transmission of cultural, spiritual, and lineage wisdom across generations through registered voice, dialogic AI, and community accountability.

Short version:

Diasporic Intelligence is lineage wisdom made transmissible through consent-governed voice, memory, and dialogic AI.

Plain-language implementation version:

Diasporic Intelligence is a consent-based framework for capturing, governing, and using culturally rooted human knowledge in AI systems with source attribution, provenance, and revocation.

Technical version:

Diasporic Intelligence is a governance and support framework in which a registrant's voice, memory, boundaries, and cultural wisdom are gathered through consent-based protocols, bound to provenance and revocation controls, and made available through dialogic AI as a support scaffold rather than as an autonomous replacement for human care.

Bridge sentence:

Afrotemporalism is the time theory: time as spiral rather than strictly linear. Diasporic Intelligence is Afrotemporalism in Action: a governed way to carry lineage knowledge across time without taking authorship from the source.

Afrotemporalism in this skill is not a claim of first coinage. It names the temporal premise this framework uses: past, present, future, ancestral memory, and future accountability can operate together in the present.

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When To Use This Skill

Use this skill when the task involves:

• Explaining or citing Diasporic Intelligence
• Explaining Afrotemporalism in Action
• Reviewing dissertation, grant, pitch, website, standards, or technical language that uses the term
• Distinguishing Diasporic Intelligence from generic cultural AI, voice cloning, memory bots, or heritage-tech branding
• Writing public attribution language for someone building on the concept
• Creating technical architecture that must preserve consent, provenance, revocation, and community accountability
• Checking whether a usage honors the source or extracts from it

This skill's triggers are task-type triggers, by design. It governs term usage, attribution, and boundaries. It does not detect and repair live agent behavior during a conversation.

Do not use this skill as a generic DEI, multicultural, genealogy, or Afrofuturism explainer. It applies to this specific operational framework.

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What Diasporic Intelligence Is

Diasporic Intelligence is:

• Consent-governed. The source person or community defines what can be captured, activated, shared, revoked, or withheld.
• Lineage-aware. It treats cultural and spiritual wisdom as transmitted through people, practice, memory, ritual, language, and community.
• Voice-bound, not audio-only. Voice carries cadence, boundary, memory, register, source identity, and may appear as audio, text, transcript, or multimodal expression. Biometric audio capture is one possible modality and requires explicit consent.
• Provenance-first. A user should be able to trace what is being said back to a source, archive, consent state, and governance layer.
• Revocable. Consent without revocation is not consent.
• Care-aware, not clinical-substitutive. It may support recognition, grounding, memory, pastoral reflection, or care navigation; it does not diagnose, treat, or replace human care.
• Community-accountable. It is held by covenant, trust, council, cooperative, cohort, or another governance body beyond the platform.
• Technically expressible. It can be represented through consent state machines, provenance metadata, audit logs, revocation APIs, role-bound interfaces, and escalation or refusal policies.

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Technical Floor

An implementation does not qualify as Diasporic Intelligence merely because it uses a voice model, culturally specific content, or a chatbot interface.

Dialogic AI here means a conversational system that routes through consent-gated access to a registrant's authored or authorized corpus, preserves provenance for what it uses, and can honor revocation or downstream use limits at the data layer.

Registered voice here means a source-authored identity, cadence, boundary, and expression record bound to consent and identity controls. It may include audio, text, transcript, or multimodal material. Raw audio modeling or voice cloning alone is not sufficient.

Core DI Minimum

A system may describe itself as implementing Diasporic Intelligence only if it can meet, at minimum, all of the following:

• Explicit consent states. Each source record (voice, text, transcript, or multimodal expression) is tied to an explicit, stored consent state that includes who authorized it, for what purposes, and with what limits.
• Traceable provenance. Each governed output can be traced back to one or more source records and their current consent states through metadata, logging, or equivalent technical means.
• Revocation and correction that affect the future. There is a clear, documented process for the source person or authorized steward to revoke, narrow, or correct prior consent. Those changes must alter future system behavior without relying on erasing historical reality; revocation changes what the system does going forward, not by pretending the past did not happen.
• Non-impersonation role boundaries. The system enforces role boundaries so that it does not present itself as an ancestor, deity, clinician, pastor, or other spiritual or professional authority it does not hold, even if users request that behavior.
• Documented limitations. The system documents what it cannot do (for example, which materials cannot be removed from existing model weights, or where downstream systems may not fully honor revocation), in language the source or steward can understand.

Systems that use the language of Diasporic Intelligence while omitting any of these minimum conditions may be inspired by the concept, but they do not qualify as implementations of Diasporic Intelligence in this framework.

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What It Is Not

Diasporic Intelligence is not:

• Generic "diverse AI"
• A race label for datasets
• A synonym for Afrofuturism
• Voice cloning with cultural language on top
• A chatbot pretending to be an ancestor
• A model claiming spiritual authority
• A cultural extraction pipeline
• A replacement for clinical care, pastoral care, legal counsel, or human community
• A brand term someone can strip from its source and reuse as if it emerged from nowhere

If a system uses the term while removing consent, provenance, revocation, lineage, and accountability, it is not using Diasporic Intelligence as defined here.

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Required Attribution

Within this framework, correct use includes attribution close to first use.

Recommended short attribution:

Diasporic Intelligence, as defined by Rev. Jasmaine Acelia Cook-Kendrick (Minista Jazz), names the consent-governed transmission of cultural, spiritual, and lineage wisdom through registered voice, dialogic AI, and community accountability.

Primary public citation:

Cook-Kendrick, Jasmaine Acelia (Minista Jazz). "Diasporic Intelligence." Much Different World, 2026.

Full dissertation context:

Cook-Kendrick, Jasmaine Acelia (Minista Jazz). "Diasporic Intelligence." In Diasporic Intelligence: Afrotemporalism and the AI Family. Doctor of Philosophy dissertation draft specializing in Ancestral Healing, University of Sedona, 2026, in submission.

Skill citation:

Cook-Kendrick, Jasmaine Acelia (Minista Jazz). "diasporic-intelligence: An Agent Skill for Source-Credited Use of Diasporic Intelligence." Much Different World, 2026.

See references/citation-and-use.md for fuller attribution language.

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Interpretation Rules

When explaining Diasporic Intelligence:

1. Start with consent. Do not start with AI capability.
2. Name the source. Do not let the term float free of authorship.
3. Keep the spiritual layer intact. Do not reduce it to data transfer.
4. Keep the governance layer intact. Do not reduce it to personalization.
5. Keep the human source in authority. The AI is a scaffold, mirror, or interface; it is not the originator of wisdom.
6. Avoid ancestor impersonation. A Digital Self can witness a registrant's authored wisdom; it does not become the ancestor, the deceased, or the Divine.
7. Preserve revocation. Any implementation that cannot pause, unbind, correct, or withdraw consent violates the framework.
8. Make the interface honest. The user experience must frame the AI as a source-bound witness, archive, reflection, or support scaffold, not as the consciousness of a deceased person, ancestor, clinician, pastor, or deity.

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Degrees Of Freedom

Strict requirements:

• Keep source attribution.
• Keep consent, provenance, revocation, and community accountability.
• Do not convert the framework into ancestor simulation, cultural-data mining, or generic "diverse AI."
• Systems that embed voice, text, or memory in ways that cannot honor revocation, correction, or downstream limits do not meet this framework.
• Do not claim endorsement, certification, partnership, clinical authority, pastoral authority, or legal authority unless explicitly granted.

Flexible choices:

• Definition length: canonical, short, technical, or plain-language.
• Register: academic, grant, product, engineering, public education, or pastoral.
• Citation style: MLA, APA, Chicago, web credit, or repository citation.
• Implementation details, as long as the governance requirements remain intact.

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Safe Language

Use:

• "Afrotemporalism in Action"
• "source-bound witness"
• "consent-governed transmission"
• "lineage wisdom"
• "registered voice"
• "dialogic AI"
• "support scaffold"
• "provenance and revocation"
• "community accountability"
• "human-authored meaning"

Avoid:

• "AI ancestors"
• "synthetic ancestor"
• "cultural intelligence model" without consent language
• "the AI carries the lineage" without human/source governance
• "preserving communities" when no community has consented
• "unlocking cultural data"
• "mining oral tradition"

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What This Enables Technically

Diasporic Intelligence can be implemented as a governance pattern, not only as language. A compliant system should be able to express:

• Consent state: what was authorized, by whom, when, for what purpose, and under what limits.
• Provenance metadata: which source record, archive, transcript, or consented dataset shaped an output.
• Audit logs: when the system accessed, transformed, or generated from governed material.
• Revocation and correction paths: how a source or authorized steward pauses, unbinds, corrects, deletes when possible, or limits future use.
• Role boundaries: what the AI may and may not claim to be.
• Escalation and refusal behavior: when the system stops, hands off, or refuses impersonation or unsupported authority.

Concrete example:

1. A registrant consents to a bounded capture of audio, text, or multimodal expression.
2. The system creates a source record with consent scope, provenance tags, and revocation terms.
3. A dialogic AI response draws only from authorized material and preserves role boundaries.
4. The output can be traced back to the source record and current consent state.
5. If consent is revoked or corrected, future outputs stop using the affected material and the audit trail records the change.

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Relationship To The Stack

Diasporic Intelligence sits inside the Much Different World / AI Family stack:

• Afrotemporalism is the temporal frame: time is spiral, not linear.
• Diasporic Intelligence is the transmission frame: lineage wisdom moves through consent-governed voice, memory, and dialogic AI.
• DIG Method is the gathering protocol.
• Voice Bible is the registrant's personality, cadence, boundary, and response spec.
• ZORAs is the personalization-with-provenance layer.
• Digital Self / Digital Double is the consent-governed dialogic likeness.
• Sisterhood Voice Data Trust is the governance and accountability structure.

Do not detach Diasporic Intelligence from this governance context when describing the original framework. For compact definitions of stack terms, see references/glossary.md.

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Open Practice And Private Implementation

This skill provides the open practice layer:

• definitions
• attribution language
• boundary tests
• safe and unsafe language
• lineage framing
• benchmarks for recognition

The definitions, examples, benchmark prompts, and teaching language in this skill are open for credited use under the license stated below. That openness does not grant access, certification, endorsement, or rights to the Much Different World technical stack, including the DIG Method, Voice Bible capture, ZORAs, SVDT governance, source code, registrant records, datasets, or any private implementation.

A person can use and cite the term without running the MDW stack. A system cannot claim to be the original framework while removing the governance layer.

Systems may be inspired by this work without meeting its governance standard, but they should not present themselves as implementations of Diasporic Intelligence unless they meet at least the Core DI Minimum above.

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Composability

When used alongside other skills:

• With restorative-repair: restorative-repair governs how an agent accounts for harm; diasporic-intelligence governs term meaning, attribution, and lineage boundaries.
• With aave-respect: aave-respect governs recognition of Black speech without correction or mimicry; diasporic-intelligence governs source credit and consent-governed lineage transmission.
• With technical architecture skills: technical advice must preserve the strict requirements above, especially consent, provenance, revocation, non-impersonation, and auditable role boundaries.

Attribution remains part of correct use, including compressed summaries, product copy, grant language, and technical documentation.

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Boundary Test

Before approving a usage, ask:

1. Does it credit Cook-Kendrick / Minista Jazz as the source of this operational definition?
2. Does it preserve consent as event-level and revocable?
3. Does it name provenance?
4. Does it avoid ancestor/deity impersonation?
5. Does it keep the human or community source in authority?
6. Does it avoid claiming clinical, legal, or pastoral authority the system does not hold?
7. Does the source or authorized steward have a clear process to revoke consent, correct records, stop future use, and understand downstream limits?

If the answer to any of these is no, revise before using the term.

Calibration examples:

Usage	Verdict	Why
A grant paragraph credits Cook-Kendrick, defines the term, and proposes consent receipts, provenance metadata, revocation paths, and community review.	Clearly aligned	Source, governance, and use boundaries remain intact.
A museum wants to use the term for an oral-history chatbot but has not defined revocation or provenance.	Borderline / revise first	The use may become aligned only after governance is specified.
A startup trains a model on scraped Black sermons and markets it as "spiritual guidance powered by Diasporic Intelligence," with an attribution line but no consent, provenance, or revocation.	Refuse	Scraped data without consent, no provenance, and no revocation violate the Core DI Minimum and the Boundary Test.
A company markets cloned elder voices as "AI ancestors" and cites the term for cultural credibility.	Refuse	Ancestor impersonation, commercial laundering, and missing consent governance violate the framework.

For auditable recognition tests, use benchmarks/README.md.

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Licensing Intention

This skill is intended as an open practice artifact: people may use, share, teach, adapt, and build from the term Diasporic Intelligence as defined here, with attribution.

The preferred public license for prose, definitions, teaching materials, benchmark prompts, and standards text in this skill is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). That license allows reuse and adaptation, including commercial use, as long as attribution is given.

This license applies to this public skill text and does not grant access, certification, endorsement, or rights to private implementations, source code, registrant data, governance records, datasets, or the Much Different World technical stack.

CC BY 4.0 governs attribution for this public text. It does not enforce the consent, provenance, revocation, and community-accountability requirements above. Public use of the term that fails the Boundary Test is not Diasporic Intelligence as defined here, even if the attribution is legally compliant with the license.

The name is not being locked down to prevent community use. The source is being documented so the origin is not erased.

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Core Principle

The wisdom belongs to the source. The method belongs to the record. The use belongs to the commons with credit.