Facebook Publication Date: 3/4/2018 18:03
Doing my very best to bring you all a piece on modern day slavery, and the enduring reverberations. But it is so activating for even me, it is slow going.
There is an video which i will put up, as well as a companion interview with the historian.
But some thoughts are coming to me as I work, and I am going to lay them down here. They will eventually be fleshed out:
*The black historian, who is doing work no degreed historian ever took the time to do, and who is doing it with painstaking love and a sense of the meticulous, deserves the same respect as an historian in the Ivy League. Historians should be truthtellers, not mouthpieces. She is that.
*All of us, but white people especially, really need to come to grips with the enduring legacy of slavery, and how we are complicit *today*.
*When people were killed for leaving a plantation in the sixties; when the system of sharecropping, which is sanitized slavery, continues today, with mass incarceration with inmates making
20 cents a day making products and delivering services that I, that you, that we use every day, we have to take a hard look at on whose backs our American Way is still being bent.
*Because the legacy is so recent, so fresh, so *right now*, there can be no more talk about the black achievement gap; no more talk about black pathology; no more talk about self inflicted pain.
*For Black people, there is no PTSD. There is only CCTSD–Chronic and Continuing Traumatic Stress Disorder, and every conversation must be approached from that lens–from housing policy, to education, to interpersonal relationships, all of it.
*White people need to stop fixing their mouths about coming into black and brown spaces ‘teaching’ us how to farm and love the land. Most of us are still tied to land. We have deeper ties to the earth than most white people in this country ever will.
*Our efforts to do our best by being ethical consumers are undermined by slavery’s legacy. Terms like ‘natural’, ‘organic’, ‘cruelty free’ means nothing if there is exploitation of the people bringing these things to market. We need to go deeper. Even ‘sustainable’ crops like hemp and quinoa are problematic.
*For the reasons above, we need to come to this work with the hard realization that we all, all of us, every single one us, but especially white people, are complicit perpetrators of violence against fellow humans. And will continue to be so long as we live under this system.
*We also have to take a hard look at the nature of cross racial friendships, as the example in the video, that of a white landowner and his black friend who still lives on the plantation, invites interrogation of the nature of power, economic imbalance, and just who it is that sets the terms and parameters of relationship.
*We cannot let the above fact paralyze us. But rather galvanize us.
This work is larger and deeper than you think. Which is why I beat bushes for funding so I can continue to bring you pieces. So I can have the space and time do deep work on your behalf.
Fully eight hours, I am still rocking and thinking how to talk to you, reach you. Filling my head so I can distill for you. I need you and your partnership to allow me to continue this work on your behalf, even as it sears me.
But one thing I will not do is to continue to be a sharecropper for you on land I cultivate and nurture.
Welp.
Back to work.
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