In Pt.1 of this powerful reasoning, James Early explains why the popular claim that Black people descend from African kings and queens is itself a kind of erasure, one that flattens who Africans actually were. According to Early, the deeper struggle is reckoning with how the European Atlantic slave trade deliberately stripped Africans of their names, languages, and cultures, forcing many distinct peoples into a single imposed identity as a matter of survival. Early traces this erasure from Amiri Baraka’s writing on Black identity to African-derived surnames still found in Colombia, and connects it to a resurgent, racialized nationalism in the U.S. today, including recent remarks from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He also reflects on how the names passed down by his own family carried his elders’ deliberately chosen memories, and how embracing that inheritance became the true source of his identity and strength.