The Middle Passage dissolved ethnic identities into a single African people

Evidence

When it occurred, no one can say for certain. Perhaps it was in the second week, or the third, but surely by the fourth, when they had not seen their land or any land for so many days that they had lost count. It was after fear had turned to despair, and despair to resignation, and resignation to an abiding understanding. The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so completely from what had once been their home that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, as if everything and everyone they cherished had simply vanished from the earth. They were no longer Mbundu or Akan or Fulani. These men and women from many different nations, all shackled together in the suffocating hull of the ship, they were one people now. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 167

Categorization

• CANDY: The compressed list of lost ethnic identities — Mbundu, Akan, Fulani collapsed into ‘one people’ — is a vivid, shareable image of how the crossing erased nationhood.
• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s origin-story-as-infrastructure frame: the Middle Passage is the true origin moment that made diaspora identity, reframing ‘when did Black America begin’ from Jamestown to the ship. — connects to: Lumping all non-Black multiracial people into one category erases their distinct experiences. — Tatiana I. Zamora and Amado M. Padilla, Making sense of conflicting messages of…, 51