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 o...
