I have mixed feelings about the 400th anniversary of the arrival of African slaves, my ancestors, to Jamestown, Virginia. That’s in part because, earlier this year, while working as a visiting scholar at James Madison University in Virginia, I made my first trip to Jamestown.
From grade school through high school, I barely was taught anything about slavery—how my ancestors had been stolen from Africa, stripped of their names, languages, cultures, and identities. But still, I knew that they were not “indentured servants,” as there was never a choice to not be a slave. I knew that, from 1619 to 1865, they were beaten, raped, terrorized, reduced to human property, and killed as they literally built the economic infrastructure of America for free.
As I walked through that Jamestown settlement, I could feel the energy of those first slaves. I struggled to read the history the way it was told in parts, as if slavery was not so bad. Yes it was so bad, and we still deal with its legacy today.
Many of the Founding Fathers were slave owners, even as they were declaring that all men were created equal. Several of the early Presidents of the United States participated in slavery. Much of what slaves were taught continues to trigger blacks—from divisive conflicts around skin color, to diets born of necessity and desperation that wreak havoc on our health.
The year 1619 undermines the morality of America from the beginning.
The year 1619 means, to me, the mental brainwashing and physical and spiritual devastation of an entire race of people. It undermines the morality of America from the beginning; and we are paying the price for it in this twenty-first century, when so many people are still trafficking in the hatred, violence, and fear-mongering that was levied against my ancestors back then.
What we need in America, what has not happened, is an honest national conversation on race that tells the entire truth about the legacy of slavery. We must acknowledge, per Dr. Ivan Van Sertima’s landmark book, They Came Before Columbus, that this part of the world did not begin with European history, and that black people and other people of color have been in these spaces and places all along.
We need American schools, public and private, and educators of every background, to not whitewash slavery (and not ask black children, when discussing slavery, to play the role of slaves). What we need in America is a steady gaze in the mirror, accepting that any talk about our history—from 1619 to the Civil War to Dr. King to Black Lives Matter—is the story of people brought here as slaves, and that the painful legacy of white supremacist thinking and behavior remains a nasty open sore on American democracy.
In my K-12 education, despite being a straight-A student, I learned little about the reality of slavery as practiced in the United States. Nor was I taught about the civil rights movement and its efforts to right wrongs.
As a result, I grew up as dutifully self-hating as a black slave on those plantations. It was not just me; it was most blacks in my community. It was not until I got to college, Rutgers University in my home state of New Jersey, and began to study American history through a different lens—my lens—that I came to realize what slavery had done to us.
I cried that day earlier this year when I walked the grounds of Jamestown, wondering how enslaved people could still manage to worship God.
I cried reading slave narratives and historical texts. I cried as I imagined what it must have felt like to be un-free for one’s entire life. I cried at how ashamed I had been for so long of Africa, of how I had swallowed whole the distorted and racist images of that motherland from whence my people had come.
And yes, I cried that day earlier this year when I walked the grounds of Jamestown wondering how enslaved people could still manage to worship God; to build and invent; to put forth songs and sounds that are the foundation for much of American music; to be so patriotic that we fought in virtually every American war, even as we were being denied our own freedoms; and to be so resilient that we have bounced back time and again, even as what began in 1619 birthed, for many of us, including my single mother and me, generations of poverty and hand-me-down depression and traumas we can never seem to escape.
This is why there have been calls for reparations from descendants of African slaves across decades and eras. There has never been a true and consistent repairing of the human damage done.
So, if 1619 should mean anything now, it should mean it is past time to pause, to be equally comfortable and uncomfortable in our American skin, as we face this tragic history, and ourselves, once and for all. Otherwise, it is just another celebration, another anniversary, that will fade away like the haunting cries of those packed at the bottom of those slave ships so long ago.