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

by Clint Smith

He wrote that African history, whatever there was of it, contributed nothing to global development and world history.

A prime example is Immanuel Kant, who wrote, “In the hot countries the human being matures earlier in all ways but does not reach the perfection of the temperate zones. Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race.

Fatou brought up that she believes colonization has affected how people in Senegal, and people throughout Africa, think of themselves. “Africans always have the mind, the conclusion of, ‘Europeans are better than us,’ ” she said. “It’s like a complex.”

people have internalized the idea that they are more valuable and more important if they live and work in Europe or America. “Africans don’t believe in Africa,” Fatou said.

Gaps that David Thorson spoke of at Monticello when he said, “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.”

There are the gaps that exist inside me, a Black man in America unable to trace my roots past a certain point in history. Whose lineage beyond the plantations where my ancestors were held remains obscured by the smog of displacement. They are the gaps that I am trying to understand, the gaps I am trying to fill.

The year my grandfather was born, twenty-one people were lynched and no one heard a sound. The trees died and the soil turned over and the leaves baptized all that was left behind. The year my grandfather was born, there were full trains leaving Mississippi, and only empty ones coming back.

She spoke, regretfully, about the way she was taught to think about people on the African continent, how those caricatures specifically were designed to make them think of Africans as less than human, and how it contributed to making Black Americans feel as if slavery had somehow rescued them from the backwardness of their ancestral homeland.

When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was This museum is a mirror. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was My memories are an exhibit of their own. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was Always remember what this country did to us. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was Don’t let them tell you we didn’t fight back. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was I did not die. I have somehow made it here when so many did not. I escaped the jaws of a cruel thing and lived to tell this story. When my grandmother said, “I lived it,” what I heard was I am still alive.