Black Americans are a creolized ethnic group in the United States of America (USA) who predominately speak Black American English (which itself is a derivative of Maritime English). The identity of our progenitors are often debated between being African (the accepted narrative) European (Admixture and/or Moorish) and Amerindian.
Many challenge the notion that Black Americans are indigenous to the Americas. They have been spoon fed a singular narrative of African origins that function more so as an origin myth than what was actually occurring.
If we are to be honest Black Americans currently are the ethnogenetic product of America itself in which races were shaped by eugenics. This makes us an indigenous people of the Americas by mere logic alone. We are indigenous to America as our language, culture, and identity were created here. Our ethnogensis was completed in the early 1800s (1820s or 1830s)
I ask you all these questions based on research I have done personally.
1.If only 305k–388k Africans were imported into the U.S. (per TAST database), how do you explain a jump from 697k enslaved in 1790 to nearly 4 million by 1860, especially when Caribbean populations declined under harsher regimes?
2.By 1790, the majority of enslaved people were already U.S.born. How do you separate those who were African descendants from those who were Indigenous captives reclassified as Negroes?
3.If U.S. slavery uniquely produced “natural increase,” why is it assumed to be purely biological and not also the product of classification drift?
4.If “Negro” in the 17th century always meant African, why do records distinguish “Negroes de la tierra” (Negroes of the land) from “Negroes de Guinea” (Africans)?
5.When Virginia’s 1705 slave code collapsed “Negro,” “mulatto,” and “Indian” into the same slave category, how do you trace which individuals were truly of African descent?
6.If Indian slavery was banned in multiple colonies, why do thousands of records show Indian captives being sold anyway often relabeled as Negroes or mulattoes?
7.Where are the 2–4 million enslaved Amerindians (Andrew Resendez) accounted for? Did they vanish, or were they absorbed into the “Negro” category?
8.How do you explain the consistent oral histories of Amerindian ancestry in Black American families if the documentary record insists on a clean African lineage?
9.Why are New England captives from the Pequot and King Philip’s wars documented as being shipped to the Caribbean as “Negroes”?
10.How do you explain chroniclers like Cabeza de Vaca (1542) describing Southeastern Natives as having “no other color than the Negroes of Guinea”? Was he confused or was he recording what he saw?
11.Why did Nicolás León (1901) describe a “Negro race” as one of Mexico’s primitive races? Was he referring to Africans or indigenous groups whose features Europeans called “Negroid”?
12.Given that the earliest Spanish chroniclers of the American Southeast (including those following Cabeza de Vaca and the De Soto Expedition) consistently recorded certain Indigenous groups, such as the people of Cofitachequi, as having a “very dark complexion” and “frizzled” or “crisp” hair features which they noted required the use of the descriptor “Negro” to convey their perceived color how can the subsequent, widespread colonial policy of legally classifying individuals with such phenotypes as “mulatto” or “Negro” (as seen in the Virginia Slave Code of 1705) be historically justified without admitting to either A pre-contact “African-like” phenotype existing naturally within the Indigenous American gene pool, or The deliberate, systematic legal erasure of Indigenous status by colonial powers who weaponized phenotypic ambiguity to expand the chattel labor base?
13.If DNA tests are definitive, where are the 17th-century reference samples of Indigenous, African, and Moorish groups to compare against?
14.Why do geneticists themselves (Bolnick, TallBear, ASHG) warn that DNA tests cannot prove ancestry or identity, only similarity to modern populations?
15.lIf identity is more than “spit,” why rely on DNA over the documented record of erasure and reclassification?
16.If you accept that mestizos in Mexico are considered indigenous despite their mixed origins, why do you deny Black Americans the same recognition as a creolized, indigenous ethnos of the United States?
James Hugo Johnston (1937) noted that the blood of the Southern U.S. Black population was “unquestionably Indian” and that “the Indian has not disappeared from the land but is now part of the Negro population”
Final Question for this long standing colonial propaganda:
If the goal of slavery was to secure a permanent, race-based labor supply, and if colonial laws (like Virginia’s 1705 code) were enacted to classify “Negro,” “mulatto,” and “Indian” under the same slave status, is the resulting four-million-strong enslaved population in 1860 a measure of purely African biological growth, or is it the inevitable product of a deliberately engineered legal status that systematically absorbed non-African people into the Black/Negro category?
Also because I know the response: If you define a barrel of apples 🍎 as containing only apples, but you later introduce just one orange 🍊, the barrel is no longer a “barrel of apples” it’s a barrel of fruit.
Bite the bait if you will
This debate is structurally category error.
Definitions to consider:
Indigenous means:
Originating in and belonging naturally to a specific place, land, or environment—prior to external settlement, conquest, or colonization.
Aboriginal means:
Existing in a land from the very beginning — from the first known presence.
Native means:
Born in, originating from, or naturally associated with a particular place.
Indian:
Originally meant “a person from the Indies,” a broad geographic term used to describe peoples living in the lands east and west of Europe that were believed to be part of a single extended world region.
