UNSETTLED: Bloodlines Beyond the Atlantic — Reclaiming the Sovereignty of Black America

 

For centuries, Black Americans have been told who we are — Africans by default, descendants of a continent we’ve never touched, tethered to a history that begins with chains. But what if the story is more complex, more sovereign, and more unsettling than that?

The dominant narrative says we are African. DNA tests echo this, assigning us to modern-day tribes and countries with percentages and pie charts. But these tests rarely account for the rupture of slavery, the forced migrations, or the possibility that some of us were already here.

Some scholars and activists argue that haplogroup E1b1a, commonly found among Black Americans may not have originated in Africa at all, but instead reflects return migrations or forced relocations from the Americas into Africa during and after the transatlantic slave trade. If true, this challenges the foundational assumption that all Black Americans are “from Africa” in the way DNA companies suggest. It reframes E1b1a not as a marker of African origin, but as a genetic echo of American indigeneity scattered across the diaspora.

This matters. Because if we are not simply “Africans in America,” but a distinct people forged through genocide, erasure, and survival on this land then our claims to reparations, land, and cultural sovereignty are not inherited from Africa. They are rooted in the soil beneath our feet.

Why This Distinction Is Revolutionary

- Reparations: If Black Americans are a distinct people with a unique lineage and historical trauma, then reparations must be tailored to that specificity — not diluted into pan-Africanism or diversity initiatives.

- Cultural Sovereignty: Recognizing our unique identity allows us to reclaim our languages, spiritual systems, and ancestral practices that were born or reborn in the Americas not borrowed from elsewhere.

- Indigenous Presence: This opens the door to interrogate the erasure of Black Indigenous people, the reclassification of tribal members as “Negro,” and the theft of land and identity through colonial census and legal systems.

A Call to the UNSETTLED

This is not about denying African kinship. It’s about reclaiming the full truth that we are not a people in exile, but a people whose roots run deep in the Americas, whose bloodlines defy colonial borders, and whose identity cannot be outsourced to a continent we are told to romanticize but rarely allowed to define for ourselves.

We are not lost. We are UNSETTLED not because we lack a home, but because the world refuses to recognize the one we’ve always had.