Reimagining Pangaea, Indigenous Black Identity, and the Stories History Tried to Erase

What if the story we’ve been told about how Black people came to America was not only incomplete, but intentionally deceptive?

What if our origins aren’t rooted in the bottom of slave ships, but instead in the soil of this land — long before it was ever called “America”?

Let’s start where the Earth started — with Pangaea.

One supercontinent. One unified landmass.

Before tectonic plates shifted and split the continents into pieces.

Before names like “Africa,” “Europe,” or “North America” were even imagined.

Back when the world was whole — and maybe our people were too.

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Rethinking the Transatlantic Narrative

We’ve been conditioned to believe that the only reason Black people are in the Americas is because we were stolen from Africa, packed onto ships, and enslaved by the millions.

And yes — the transatlantic slave trade did happen. There’s no denying its brutality, scale, or trauma.

But something about that story — the way it’s told — doesn’t sit right.

We’re told that over the course of centuries, millions of African people were transported on wooden ships. With no medicine. No sanitation. No modern navigation. Through storms. Through cold Atlantic winters. Through disease outbreaks.

And somehow, ship after ship landed successfully in the Americas, loaded with hundreds of people in each voyage — alive?

It defies logic. It defies maritime history. It even defies basic survival odds.

So what if that story — the only story we’ve been given — is not the full truth?

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Howard Zinn and the Power of Questioning

Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, spent his life urging us to question dominant narratives.

He wrote,

“If history is to be creative, it should not just inform us — it should upset us. It should challenge the myths of the past and the present.”

Zinn teaches us that history is not a neutral record — it’s a reflection of power. And the ones writing it often have the most to gain by erasing, reshaping, or distorting truth.

In Zinn’s work, we see how stories of colonization, slavery, and “discovery” have been cleaned up, made palatable, and published in school textbooks to preserve control and white supremacy.

What if the same thing happened with the story of Black people in America?

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Colonizers Learned — Then Manipulated

Here’s a possibility few people talk about:

What if the concept of enslaving people, trading them, and extracting labor wasn’t invented by Europeans — but borrowed?

Africans had long-established tribal trade systems. Some tribes traded with each other — not just goods, but in some cases, people. These systems were often based on restitution, war consequences, or alliance-building — not systemic, racialized, dehumanizing chattel slavery.

So what did the colonizers do?

They observed. They learned. Then they twisted what they saw.

They took these trade customs, extracted the mechanics of them, and turned them into something monstrous and global.

Then they came to the so-called “New World” — but they didn’t discover it.

They arrived with a blueprint they had already formed by watching and exploiting other cultures.

They saw that the Indigenous Black people and Native peoples on this land maybe lacked certain weapons, certain systems of defense, or simply trusted too easily — and they applied what they had learned to dominate and reshape the land and its people.

And then — they had the audacity to write that version of history into textbooks.

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My Family History: A Living Rebuttal

Let me tell you something personal.

My paternal grandmother grew up in the South — and from what she recalls, our family was never enslaved. They always owned land. Land in Ehrhardt, South Carolina, that we still own to this day.

That’s not the story of people brought here in chains. That’s the story of people who have been rooted in the land — long before any boat landed on a shore.

On my maternal side, our lineage traces back to the Shinnecock tribe and Southern roots as well. And once again — there’s no recollection of slavery in our family’s oral history.

We don’t carry those stories of bondage — we carry stories of land, blood, and belonging.

And when I look around, I can’t help but ask:

How were we “brought” from Africa — yet we don’t look like Africans?

We don’t carry the same features, cultural markings, or histories.

We look like what we are — Southern Black Americans, deeply tied to the land and legacy of this continent.

Could it be that while all humanity may trace back to Africa through Pangaea, some of us never left?

That we remained here — before there was a border to cross or a ship to sail?

Could it be that we’ve been tricked into believing we were immigrants to a land that was already our home?

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Rewriting the Narrative: What If We Were Always Here?

This is not about erasing the trauma of the slave trade — it’s about widening the lens.

It’s about reclaiming the possibility that some of us were never brought over — we were already here.

It’s about unlearning the version of history that only sees Black people as descendants of slaves.

Because even that label — “slave” — tries to define us by what was done to us, instead of by who we already were.

Howard Zinn would tell us this is the work of empire.

To define people by their suffering.

To reduce them to footnotes.

To turn landowners into trespassers.

To make the original people feel like foreigners.

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Why This Matters Now

If we were taught in schools that Black people were indigenous to the Americas — how would that change how we see ourselves?

How would that shift the way we think about reparations, land, identity, and belonging?

What if our story didn’t start with whips and chains, but with agriculture, community, ceremony, and land ownership?

What if instead of telling our kids they come from “survivors of slavery,” we told them they come from builders of nations?

What if we no longer accepted the lie that we were brought here, but embraced the truth that we’ve always been here?

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We Were Always the People

Zinn wrote:

“The memory of the oppressed is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for that reason, it must be destroyed.”

But our memories live.

They live in our grandparents.

In the soil of Ehrhardt, South Carolina.

In the blood of the Shinnecock.

In the way we look, speak, move, and remember.

History may be written by the victors —

But the truth? The truth is written in our bones.

So here’s the real “what if”:

What if we were already here — and we’ve simply been told to forget?

And more importantly…

What if we never forget again?