Descendants of American slavery are a distinct people formed in the United States, not in Africa. Our ancestry is African, European, and Native American, forged together over centuries of chattel slavery, racial caste laws, and forced assimilation on American soil. Africa is part of our ancestry, not our nationality or ethnic identity. We did not arrive as immigrants with languages, nations, or intact cultures. Those were stripped, replaced, and re-created here. Through slavery, segregation, and