We are a sad lot churning inside the repetitions and insistences of the “afterlife of slavery.” Notes and Sources Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route: “If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education,
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