Americans Are At Risk of Forgetting Slavery and Repeating Our Mistakes

Americans Are At Risk of Forgetting Slavery and Repeating Our Mistakes
Juneteenth is a celebration of African-Americans’ emancipation and a reminder of the horrors the U.S. can’t afford to forget.
By Eddie Davis IV, Professor of Africana Studies and Anthropology, Malcolm X College, City Colleges of Chicago
Jun 19 2018
https://medium.com/aclu/americans-are-at-risk-of-forgetting-slavery-and-repeating-our-mistakes-6a748e97f129

Even historians find themselves startled by the past.

My blood ran cold on a recent visit to Montgomery, Alabama. I was there to experience something that didn’t exist anywhere in America just a few months ago, but which deeply resonated with me as a Black man: a museum and memorial sitededicated to recognizing our nation’s grisly history of slavery, lynchings, and mass incarceration.

The stunning new project spearheaded by NYU Law Professor Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative boldly confronts the legacy of the U.S. carceral state. Upon entering a dark tunnel, holograms of enslaved Africans speak to the museum visitor from behind the bars of an early 19th-century Montgomery jail, where they awaited the auction block. Passing into the light of day, one enters a timeline chronicling U.S. racial terrorism.

This project fills a critical void given an endemic lack of knowledge in this country of systemic cycles of inequality and the erasure of history surrounding anti-Blackness. Like the Legacy Museum, Juneteenth — the nation’s biggest celebration of Black freedom, marked every year on June 19 — offers an opportunity to remember the brutalities that have been hidden in plain sight from so many Americans.

A report published earlier this year by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project revealed that only 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors know the Civil War occurred because of slavery. Some textbooks have softened the language about the inhumane institution. So have some of our leaders. In 2017, HUD Secretary Ben Carson publicly referenced Black people who’d been kidnapped and transported to America via the Middle Passage as “immigrants” rather than slaves.

It is this willful blindness that enables the perpetuation of slavery’s legacy. Some of our nation’s top legal minds — such as Michelle Alexander, Bryan Stevenson, and Jeff Robinson — have revealed how slavery and segregation have evolved into new methods of racial torture and alienation. The racially biased war on drugs and disparate sentencing have led to more Black people being encaged by the criminal justice system today than were ever enslaved in America. Even in liberal cities like New York City, Black people are eight times more likely to be put in handcuffs for marijuana-related charges than white people, despite studies showing that they use the substance at the same rates.

In that same city, the blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved Africans fueled economic engines of industry, where Black people constructed the “Wall” and “Street” separating the Dutch from the Native Americans. The bones of thousands of African master-builders of America remain buried below City Hall and underneath the seats of the judiciary in Lower Manhattan.

A nation can’t expect its citizens to eradicate the deeply rooted anti-Blackness that fuels racial profiling and mass incarceration if its schools won’t educate the populace about the ways that Black Americans have been institutionally dehumanized. As stated by Jeff Robinson, “The admission of the true nature of our racialized past is a necessary part of real structural change leading to racial justice.”

There is power in wrestling with history, even when it’s uncomfortable. Many Americans would be surprised to learn, for example, that slavery lingered well beyond the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln in 1863. The first Juneteenth, the nation’s biggest celebration of Black freedom, took place when enslaved Africans in Texas found out the Civil War had ended — two and a half years after President Lincoln’s executive order had ended slavery in Texas.

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