A slave-owning man on one side, a formerly enslaved woman on the other, and in between them lies the very thing that he could have used to buy her. This is how I think about the new $20 bill, which will soon feature Harriet Tubman and Andrew Jackson. This happenstance is the fruit born largely of … Continue reading »
slavery
A thousand words, countless silences and the audacity of Black love
TRIGGER WARNING: This article or section, and a page it links to, contains information about sexual assault and abuse, which may be triggering to survivors. One man put his hand on the head of another, someone took a picture of it, and the image set off a social media frenzy. Yes. An image. This image. … Continue reading »
The Charleston massacre: What is the meaning of black life in America?
“Was already weary. Was already heavy hearted. Was already tired. Where can we be safe? Where can we be free?” I excerpted these words from a tweet that Solange Knowles (Beyoncé’s younger sister) posted on June 18th at 6:49pm, the evening after Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, … Continue reading »
Jupiter Hammon should be a household name
But my guess is, many readers didn’t know his name a week ago– and some still don’t. So let’s correct that. According to the Lloyd Harbor Historical Society, Jupiter Hammon was “America’s First Colonial Afro-American Published Poet”. Hammon was born and died in slavery, living from 1711 to after the American Revolution with successive generations … Continue reading »
Slavery’s heavy hand
In an earlier post, I mused about the notion of the “heavy hand of history,” the idea that long-past conditions pull us in certain directions even generations after the fateful events. One of the very earliest users of the phrase, in 1944, was an eminent psychologist who was trying to understand the situation of African … Continue reading »