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

by Clint Smith

In my experience—as both educator and student, as researcher and writer—there was little mainstream discussion of who Black people were before they reached the coasts of the New World, beyond the balls and chains. This was something I had heard when I lived in Senegal, a decade prior, that we Black Americans were taught so little of our traditions, our cultures, our voices before we were taken and forced onto ships that carried us across the Atlantic. As Sue pointed out, the risk is that Black Americans understand our history as beginning in bondage rather than in the freedom of Africa that preceded it. Sue contended that these conversations rarely happen in our own community largely because there is a fear of whom it might offend. Specifically, in the states of the former Confederacy. “In the South, I think there’s a hesitance to talk about it openly because nobody wants to offend white people,” she said. Sue believed there was an unwillingness “to look at the ugliness of slavery and discuss it, because you talk about what whites did to us, and there’s a hesitance to talk about that. They don’t want to hear it, so we don’t want to say it. You know what I mean?” Her voice grew lower. “Or because it conjures up so much pain, people don’t want to talk about it.”