This article examines contemporary separatist communities among racialised artists and cultural workers in the Nordic region, with an emphasis on their emotional politics concerning the experience of racial othering within the nation. Affect analysis of qualitative data from seven collectives is related to a document analysis of cultural policy initiatives for diversity after 2000, in particular in Norway and Denmark. Three metaphors recur in the seven collectives’ motivations for separatism across the region: the separatist collective as a breathing space, as an army, and as armour. Separatist organisation can be understood as a reaction to the constructed national community and its experienced limitations. The comparative reading of joy in Norway and anger in Denmark among the collectives is contrasting and interpreted as resonating with persistent, long-term, and knowledge-based diversity work in Norway, and withdrawn and silencing diversity work in Denmark, based more on fear of terror and parallel societies than on a vocabulary of inclusion, antiracism, and difference. The article concludes that the emotional politics of separatist collectives do not isolate racialised citizens from national communities but strengthen both subjects and communities over time.