I disagree, the "Indian" statement is a phenotypical term to denote a native look. One sees for example in the Dominican Republic the term Indio to describe a look but the racial terminologies of Afro-Latino peoples is hard for people to grasp.
It's like the term Jabao: very flat, wide and thick features, pale skin, blonde or red hair
I also believe many "Indians" in black American families are simply Malagasy, I have Malagasy Ancestry and cousins have Malagasy genetic Markers it's easy to see how a Malagasy can be perceived as being half Native American if you had no concept of and Asian in pre-Antebellum South.
Muhammad Ali, Benjamin Jealous, and many other black Americans also have Malagasy ancestry that is mistakenly referred to as Indian, hell my (maternal) grandma said she was Madaglasski Creek Indian. To be far though Malagasy Slaves were rather racist towards Bantu so it's easy to see why they were differentiated in our collective memory.
I was referring to some studies done using genetic markers a la 23 And Me. Enough people expecting to find Amerind ancestry due to family legend found nothing of the sort, and just a mix of markers that almost always come from either European or African origins. People started wondering why that was so; and the theory that it was a family history with more agency than the reality seems believable enough.
And wouldn't Malagasy ancestry being a half step above Equatorial kind of go to that as well? One assumes there was a power differential there, certainly not as much as there was between white and black, but present none the less.