Justice For Our Ancestors

The brutality of the French plantation system was well known during its time, and led to high mortality levels and short life expectancies for enslaved people. Over 800,000 Africans were sent to the colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti), almost double compared to those sent to North America. Various uprisings took place as a result, but the most successful was the Haitian Revolution which started August 21, 1791 and lasted 13 years. At the end 350,000 Black people were killed in contrast to the 75,000 white French who died. And the first independent and free Black nation was created in the Americas.

Haiti continues to pay for that dreaming and freedom making by the West to this present day. (I recommend following Dr. Bertrhude Albert ok Tik Tok for more)

30 years later on the exact same date Nat Turner led a rebellion in Southhampton County, Virgina that led to 55 white Southerns being killed. Those who participated in the revolt were captured, some were hanged and others sent to Liberia. Turner would be captured 2 months later, was tried in court and subsequently hanged. In retaliation Southern white vigilantes enacted a reign of terror on both enslaved and free Black folks in “fear” of more uprisings. And as a result laws were tightened even more around enslaved people as punishment for daring to want their freedom.

Why do I bring these two events up?

They are examples of what PEOPLE do when they are being subjugated by powers who see THEMSELVES as somehow superior and therefore justified in their brutal dehumanization of a population they are also exploiting for profit.

These are examples of PEOPLE who dared to dream of something different. Who saw their own humanity even as they were told to be grateful for their inhumane treatment. Who remembered in one way or another that there was another way to live, because what they were in was a walking death.

There is more than one way to die, and death is not just a physical taking of one’s life.

The human spirit is meant to be free.

The spirit of life is meant to be free, to flow freely. Not be bounded by borders and boundaries that are policed in one way or another through violence

In the late 1800s journalist and anti-lynching advocate Ida B Wells (later Wells-Barrett) starting documenting the lynchings of Black Americans in the South. By the early 1900s she had written two pamphlets: “A Red Record: Lynchings in the United States and Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” She launched this public campaign to highlight the state-sanctioned violence against Black people and to show how the excuse of Black men raping white woman to justify these acts was a lie.

Imagine of book “A Red Record”

The non stop violence Black folks faced on a daily was determined by the mood of the white folks around them, which meant many Black folks had to defend themselves. The law was not, nor has ever, been on the side of those who were once rendered down to chattel to build the “free nation” of the United States. And those who took up arms against their oppressor were the ones demonized by the state.

And there was ALWAYS resistance to this system and its dehumanization. It was never just accepted “as is”.

So what is “acceptable” resistance to inhumanity? And why do those who created the violence system get to determine what the “appropriate” response to it should be?

In 1951 Paul Roebson and William Patterson submitted a petition from the Civil Rights Congress the United States called, “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People.” This petition carried on the work of Ida B. Wells and the anti-lynching campaign as it also documented the ongoing violence faced by Black Americans while also charging the US with genocide against Black Americans. The petition was stopped behind the scenes by the US, and Patterson was even admonished by an American UN delegate who told him that he was “going against his government".

This is just one reflection of a long history of violence enacted and justified by the US nation-state against a population it also claims to “protect” as American citizens. And there are many more populations who tell a similarly violent history as well.

And please do not think this is a linear and progressive timeline. I just present it in chronological order, but my goal is that you can see the curricular nature of violence and its justification by the nation-state. This is why the past is always in the present - but whose lens and telling of the past are you privileging to make sense of your present?

So what is justice for our ancestors when we see through time and space that the state will always defend itself? When it will justify HOW it defends itself?

We can’t even teach the depth and breath of slavery in the US without being accused of being “woke” or trying to make “white people feel bad” - which in itself is a very telling reaction. So then how can we get to present day conversations of the violence of the state when we won’t see where it came from?

Our memories and history are purposefully narrowed and shortened so we feel stuck in THIS now. This articulation of time and history that wants us to live in 4 year political cycles, that just repeat, but each repetition erodes more and more of those so called “freedoms” folks in the past fought for, and conceded too.

So for me the final question is not “what can we do"?” instead it is “what do we need to completely break?”