How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

“That’s not the story of who we are,” he said, referencing the language of Make America Great Again, “but some people really, for whatever reason, they want to believe that and they want to go back there, right? They want to go back to something that never existed.”

This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained

This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence.

If in Germany today there were a prison built on top of a former concentration camp, and that prison disproportionately incarcerated Jewish people, it would rightly provoke outrage throughout the world.

“I think that’s the biggest challenge more than anything else,” he continued. “Not the work but just the mindset of being there and knowing you’re kind of reliving history, in a sense. I’m going through the very same thing that folks fought and died for, so I wouldn’t have to go through it, and here it is all over again.”

What would it take—what does it take—for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life?

Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it. Just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.

Each generation has to know the story of how we got where we are today, because if you don’t understand, then you are in the position to go back to it.

“In both situations, in slavery and colonization, what you have is a system of plunder. First, in slavery, we have a plunder of human beings. Africa had been ripped of its people. And colonization is a plunder of natural resources. We have been exploited by the colonizers.

Her voice is the front porch of a home with everyone you love waiting inside.

The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.