It seems like it's picking up steam and it's the most bizarre shit I've ever seen. None of it makes sense to me, but I'm analytical to a fault. I don't see (or know of) any cultural connections between us and the indigenous of the United States, but there's countless remnants of Africanisms that still carry with us today: Call and Response, our sense of rhythm and music structures, handshakes, words that carried over like "Okra" and "Yam", pronouncing "th" words with a "d" (they=dey, that=dat, etc). Where are the indigenous connections?
The silver bullet seems to be
"How did they bring that many people on ships all this way?"
Me:
"How do you think European immigrants got here?!
"
You're late. It's not picking up steam, they've been full steam ahead with this for years now.
Christopher Columbus documented that indigenous people had been trading with African people before he washed up on these shores. So some Africans were already here and, presumably, had stayed and mixed it up with the people native to these lands.
Fast forward to slavery and, yes, many indigenous tribes did participate in the institution. Like us, however, they are not a monolith. Some tribes aided, protected and gave refuge to Africans who managed to escape from their captives. In both instances, whether enslaved by indigenous tribes or given shelter by them, some Africans were allowed varying degrees of social status and, once again, mixed it up with people native to these lands.
Children were born and the rest is history.
People are taking this small subset of African people and now saying that ALL natives were Black and that we are all indigenous to this land and not Africa.
They use the "where are the slave ship" questions, because they haven't taken the time to research the answers and when others try to supply them with such, they refuse to believe.
I'm of the opinion that all of this (and similar narratives proclaiming we're the "true XYZ non-African people") are the result of our loss of history and memory. That and the fact that Africa has been so demonized, along with Blackness, until these people are grasping for anything to help fill the void they feel in identity as long as that identity isn't Black African (which is why they tried Egyptian first... and, yes, I know there were and are Black Egyptians, but they aren't who that wave was trying to identify with).
Keeping in mind that children were born of the aforementioned relationships with indigenous people and it's true that a few of us really do have native ancestry, but the rest take these few and run with it believing those people's story to be
every Black American person's story.
We have to be patient in that we've been brainwashed for 400 years. An element of that brainwashing has also been a faulty educational system that has many of us trying to fill in the blanks with social media memes and the Internet at large. Sifting through all of this takes critical thinking skills, which a lot of people lack across the board (not just Black people). Reversing all of the damage done will take time.
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