When History Starts Looking Like a Cycle The older I get, the harder it becomes for me to think about history as something that simply happened and disappeared. I can listen to Black leaders speaking in 1961, 1962, and 1963 and hear arguments that still sound familiar today. They were talking about voting rights, police
There Is No Past When the Same Questions Keep Coming Back Read More »
The Promise of Finding What Was Taken For Black Americans, ancestry is not simply a matter of curiosity about an old family tree. Slavery separated families, changed names, disrupted languages, and made it difficult for many descendants to trace an unbroken line back to particular African communities. That is why modern DNA testing can feel
When DNA Meets the Stories We Tell About Our African Roots Read More »
Everybody Wants Better Until Better Gets Expensive I have heard people complain about struggling neighborhoods most of my life. We want the abandoned houses repaired, the streets cleaned, the schools strengthened, the businesses reopened, and somebody to finally invest in the place. We want grocery stores instead of empty buildings and safe parks instead of
When the Neighborhood Gets Better, Who Gets to Stay? Read More »
Looking at American History From Another Angle One of the most revealing ways I have learned to study American history is to examine what happened whenever the country considered creating something for the public good. I look at health care, Social Security, public education, housing, parks, swimming pools, and other institutions that were supposed to
When the Public Good Had to Include Everybody Read More »
A Question I Cannot Treat Lightly I have heard the argument that a religion teaching people to love their enemies must be dangerous because oppressed people sometimes need to resist those harming them. I understand why that argument can strike a nerve, especially when Christianity is placed beside the history of slavery. Black people have
When Faith, Slavery, and Freedom Collide Read More »
Buying Power Is Not the Same as Wealth Every year somebody reminds Black America that we have enormous buying power, and the number usually lands somewhere around the trillion-dollar range. The figure sounds impressive because trillions sound like economic strength. But I have learned that money moving through our hands is not the same thing
We Keep Celebrating the River Instead of Building the Reservoir Read More »
Nobody Alive Today Owned American Slaves Let us begin with something that ought to be simple enough for everybody to understand. Nobody alive today personally owned enslaved people in the United States before slavery was abolished in 1865. A white person living today is not personally guilty for something done by somebody who lived generations
We Do Not Inherit Guilt, but We Do Inherit History Read More »
When Reading Was Considered Dangerous There is something powerful about remembering that there was a time in America when teaching an enslaved Black person to read could bring punishment. South Carolina’s 1740 Negro Act placed severe restrictions on enslaved people after the Stono Rebellion, and literacy became part of the larger struggle over control. Other
They Once Made It Illegal for Us to Read Read More »
What the Citigroup Study Was Really Saying A 2020 Citigroup study estimated that racial inequality affecting Black Americans had cost the United States economy about $16 trillion over the previous twenty years. That number has been circulating again, but people sometimes describe it in a way that changes what the study actually argued. Citigroup was
Diversifying More Than Our Investments Read More »
The Man Who Heard Africa in the Language I recently found myself thinking about Lorenzo Dow Turner, a scholar whose work helped change the way people understood the Gullah language. Turner was not Gullah Geechee himself, but he listened closely enough to hear what other scholars had overlooked. While teaching at what is now South
Hold On to the Words That Carried Us Read More »