I have had the great fortune of being taught and mentored by historians who have shared with me the wonder, insight, and complexities of the past. There is “us,” now, and there is “them,” then. There is also “us,” then and “them,” now. None of these categories are discrete and static; they are ever-shifting, constantly changing as we mine archives, reconstruct and deconstruct narratives, imagine lives, and give more and more attention to those at the margins and in the gaps. History is dynamic and so too should be our understanding. Dominant narratives are displaced every day.
I have considered not only larger histories this way but also my own. There are many gaps in my familial history, but census records, conversations, graveyard visits, letters, and photographs have slowly filled interstitial spaces and revealed to me more than I previously knew. Before my grandfather died, I knew this—he was born in the Deep South in the 1930s, the child of farmers, and reared under Jim Crow regimes. In his late teens, he moved to Augusta, Georgia to attend Paine College for a year before heading to the Midwestern city of Youngstown, Ohio to seek a job in a steel mill. Passed over by many foremen, he moved West to Los Angeles in the mid 1950s. The rest is more easily traceable. I am the granddaughter of migrants; this is central to my origin story. This is my origin story.
After my grandfather’s death, even more emerged. He was the grandchild of Mary and Law, a woman and a man born into bondage in the early 1850s. They spent their most formative years enslaved and the rest of their lives not yet free. Their youngest daughter, Methel, my grandfather’s mother, was born in the late 1890s. She was part of the first generation of her immediate family born and reared in a post Emancipation (and post-Reconstruction) Era. By the time my grandfather was born, she’d already had a teenage daughter. This daughter, Eula, helped her raise my grandfather. Methel’s father had long passed, but her mother, Mary, who would die before my grandfather’s tenth birthday, was also an integral presence in my grandfather’s life. She fed him, bathed him, rocked him to sleep, and held him while her daughter and granddaughter worked the fields. My grandfather was the grandchild of a formerly enslaved woman who loved and cared for him. This is central to his origin story as well as my own.
My grandfather died in February 2018. During his final days, he’d cry for his mother and grandmother, calling out their names in the middle of the night. At his life’s end, they were his lifelines. These women and their histories were not so distant. In those moments—and in what I imagine were many moments before then—they were past, present, and future all at once.
As the U.S. prepares for the 2020 presidential election, multiple Democratic politicians have tossed their hats into the ring. Reparations for the descendants of Black American slaves has become a frequent point of discussion that many hopeful candidates have announced as part of their platforms, from Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren to former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, amongst others. Putting aside interrogations of just what type of reparatory justice these candidates imagine as well as the theoretical underpinning upon which these candidates have based their support of reparations (and these are just a few of the questions that need to be posed, but not because we should question the validity and necessity of reparations; the opposite is true. We should, however, always be wary of political elites appropriating the language and visions of the dominated, particularly when histories of policy and advocacy and voting records show us that these elites are more hostile than embracive of liberation and liberatory futures), I’d like to think through some of the language invoked.
On March 18, 2019, Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced via Twitter, “Slavery is a stain on America.” As such, Warren “support[s] the bill in the House to support a congressional panel of experts so that our nation can do what’s right and heal.” I circle back to these words: “Slavery is a stain.” Slavery is a stain. Slavery is a stain. Slavery is a stain. They repeat and repeat until I am unable to unstick them from my thoughts. To be clear, I understand that, in part, Warren is referring to the institution of slavery as a deeply immoral violence, and in that respect, I wholeheartedly agree. There is no other way to describe such a brutal system that served to subjugate, dominate, and dehumanize. Instead, what I am referring to is the insinuation that slavery can be addressed and effaced, that we can think of slavery as aberration and departure. A stain is a taint, an accidental spill, an unwanted blemish—something that one works diligently to scrub away in order to leave a surface clean and unmarked. But when the stain is foundation and architecture, how do we wipe it away?
For Black folks in the Americas, slavery is central to our family histories, our cultural practices, our memories, our grievances, our joys, our realities, and our dreams. Our roots are wide and varied, and we are a diasporic group, forever linked to many peoples and cultures across the African continent and elsewhere. But the Middle Passage, slavery, and slavery’s afterlives, are central to understanding who we are and how we have fashioned our lives, how surviving in spite of, in the midst of, and because of are all part of our generational inheritance.
One cannot understand the development of capitalism in the U.S. without understanding slavery; one cannot understand the history of American law without understanding slavery; one cannot understand American political development—and by that I mean both the creation of the American state and the evolution of American political institutions, without understanding slavery. The origins of the police, histories of globalization, constructions of gender, relationships of domination, the history of science and medicine—all of these things and so much more can only be unpacked fully with deep engagement with “the peculiar institution.” From that perspective, we see that slavery wasn’t so “peculiar” indeed; it was omnipresent. Slavery’s ties to social, legal, political, and economic histories transcend the geopolitical boundaries of the U.S. They carry us to the Caribbean, to Central and South America, and elsewhere, crossing borders, negating time and space.
In the past couple of years, it has become woefully clear that both the political elite and the public at large have a very distorted view of slavery and its afterlives. In 2017, then White House Chief of Staff John Kelly opined that a “lack of ability to compromise,” not the institution of slavery, was the root cause of the Civil War. More than one-third of American social studies teachers don’t teach students about slavery, and, to the extent that slavery is taught, many students learn from textbooks that undermine the violence of enslavement and the social, political, and economic centrality of slavery to the North, South, East and West.
I worry about what this means as we move into an election that posits that “reckoning” with enslavement is central to “moving forward.” What precisely does it mean to “move forward,” particularly when political elites consistently demonstrate that they lack comprehension of slavery’s depth, breadth, and centrality to who, what, and how we (and this is a collective, and in some ways, imaginative, we) are? We can never “rid” ourselves of slavery; such an aspiration is misguided and, to put it plainly, downright impossible. Yet I believe that this is precisely what many politicians believe that reparatory justice can and should do. Such a suggestion should give us immediate pause.
In the final year of my graduate program, I took a political theory seminar entitled, “Mitigating Historical Injustice.” Reparations loomed large in the course, and we returned to the topic time and time again. The professor once asked us, “What happens after reparations?” By this she meant reparations in a broad sense, within the context of many forms of historical wrongs and injustice, not solely within the context of American slavery. My classmates, a gathering of graduate students from South Africa, Germany, the UK, and the U.S., were silent. One eventually responded, “Well, I guess we will have done the work we needed to do. We’ll all be able to move on.” When I think of that conversation now, I return to my memories of my grandfather calling for his mother and his grandmother in his final days. Mary and Methel had never left him; they were always with him. Moving on from them was never an option for him, just as moving on from him will never be an option for me. Histories—personal, familial, social, political, legal, economic and otherwise—don’t fade away. We must be skeptical of those who imply that they can and do.
On Becoming 