When people were taken by force across an ocean, they brought not only seeds but the skills and customs needed to grow them, and those carried skills built new economies. Rice crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Africans to Brazil, the Caribbean and the southern United States, and in South Carolina their work produced one of the most profitable economies of the eighteenth century.
When the people in bondage hold knowledge their owners need, they can use it to reshape the terms of their own domination. On rice plantations, the task system, where each worker owed a set amount of work rather than a full day, opened some room for freedom inside slavery.
The standard story said Europeans brought rice to West Africa and then taught its growing in the Americas. This story wipes out where the crop came from and who actually moved the seed, the skills and the practices. Racism shaped what got remembered, and observers simply did not see the complex adaptations made by the people they ruled.