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

by Clint Smith

Jefferson was not singular in his moral inconsistencies; rather he was one of the founding fathers who fought for their own freedom while keeping their boots on the necks of hundreds of others.

“Slavery’s an institution. In Jefferson’s lifetime it becomes a system. So what is this slave system? It is a system of exploitation, a system of inequality and exclusion, a system where people are owned as property and held down by physical and psychological force, a system being justified even by people who know slavery is morally wrong. By doing what? Denying the very humanity of those who are enslaved solely on the basis of the color of their skin.”

Jefferson believed himself to be a benevolent slave owner, but his moral ideals came second to, and were always entangled with, his own economic interests and the interests of his family.

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 it.

oppression is never about humanity or lack thereof. It is, and always has been, about power.

It’s a feeling of ‘discovered ignorance.’ I don’t know how else to explain it. When you wonder, How could this have happened and I didn’t know about it? How could that happen?”

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 imagine there would be international summits on closing such an egregious institution. And yet in the United States such collective outrage at this plantation-turned-prison is relatively muted.

People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege,

That’s when things work, when we all understand, participate, and care about each other’s story.

“If there’s anything I can leave you with, question everything. Myself, everything you read, everything you hear. Fact-check, fact-check, fact-check.”

“Don’t believe anything if it makes you comfortable.”

“I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts, and somewhere in between is memory.”

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.

At some point it is no longer a question of whether we can learn this history but whether we have the collective will to reckon with it.