Remember Slavery: Say It Loud

In 2007, the United Nations General Assembly designated March 25 as an annual International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

For white Americans, slavery is something that happened in the distant past and has nothing to do with them. Fact is, the legacy of forced migration and 400 years of free labor is evident today. It’s evident in the wealth gap, school-to-prison pipeline, inequitable school funding and desecration of the black body.

From my teenage fascination with the fictional Mandingo to the joy in knowing two colleagues discovered an Underground Railroad safe house in Philadelphia, slavery and the ancestors are never far from mind. Although I have read countless books about the “peculiar institution,” I still don’t know how the ancestors survived. But I am emboldened by their faith – and resistance – and revel in the rich cultural heritage that they bequeathed us.

So say it loud: Remember Slavery.

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I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water than ‘Monkey Cup’ Coffee

During the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the ships stopped along the way.

An estimated 100,000 enslaved Africans were brought to Venezuela where their descendants, Afro-Venezuelans, are subject to colorism. As in the United States, if you’re white, you’re alright. If you’re brown, stick around. But if you’re black, get back.

Afrodescendants face discrimination in a region that has a fondness for racial caricatures. The Mexican comic book character Memín Pinguín is popular throughout Latin America. Loathed by Afro-Latinos, the caricature has been denounced by Hispanic American civil rights organizations, including the League of United Latin American Citizens and UnidosUS (formerly National Council of La Raza).

A study on “Hate Speech and The Language of Racism in Latin America” found:

In Latin America where Jim Crow state-mandated exclusion never existed, racist speech about Afro-descendants is ubiquitous and facilitates the social exclusion of Afro-descendants. In addition, to the term “negro” (black/negro) being derogatory, Afro-descendants are stereotyped and referred to as inherently criminal, intellectually inferior, overly sexual, and animalistic. Because the racialized stereotypes of Afro-descendants are pervasive, they are commonly understood to smell like animals and in particular monkeys.

The Guardian US reported:

Racial caricatures have been used as brands across the region. In Colombia, Mimo’s ice cream flavours were depicted by race: a black man for chocolate, a white girl for vanilla.

A little over two years ago, a Venezuelan couple set up shop in Harlem. They chose to brand their products “The Monkey Cup.” The company’s logo bears a striking resemblance to Memín Pinguín.

The co-owner says the name stems from her husband’s love for monkeys. Truth be told, “monkey” is a common derogatory term Venezuelans use for people of African descent. Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s first president of African and Indigenous descent, was called “Miko Mandante” (“Ape Commander”) by his opponents.

With the help of a Georgia-based company whose New York City marketing team is lily-white, the couple plans to open a second location on the street named after Adam Clayton Powell Jr.Adam Clayton Powell Jr., an iconic historical figure who fought against Jim Crow laws and practices.

There is a long history of monkey iconography that depicts blacks as less than human. The caricatures are used to support a system of white supremacy and racial discrimination.

The use of a name and image associated with American – and Venezuelan – racial exclusion effectively denies access to a public place to people of African descent. In Venezuela, I would be considered “brown” or “mestizo” so maybe I would be welcomed. But I’d rather drink muddy water than a drop of whatever they’re brewing at “The Monkey Cup.”

Public Art Matters in Stone Mountain

I lived in Atlanta-DeKalb County for three years. Although Stone Mountain is in DeKalb County, I never went there. For most of the 20th century Stone Mountain was effectively a “sundown town” which African Americans entered at their own risk.

Stone Mountain, the birthplace of the modern Ku Klux Klan, was called out by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I Have A Dream” speech. The city is home to the country’s largest Confederate monument.

In the wake of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, cities across the country have removed Confederate monuments. However, Stone Mountain, which is now overwhelmingly black, can’t touch the symbol of hate and white supremacy. The reason: In 2001, the Republican-controlled legislature passed Ga. Code § 50-30-1.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy used public art to propagate the “Lost Cause” mythology and romanticize the Confederate generals who tried to destroy the Union. The false narrative is believed by alleged child molester and sore loser Roy Moore who longs for the good old days when his ancestors could buy my ancestors:

I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery — they cared for one another…. Our families were strong, our country had a direction.

This short documentary by Field of Vision shows how fake news was embedded in white Southerners’ psyche.

National Museum of African American History and Culture Turns One

September 24 marked the first anniversary of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, more affectionately known as my home away from home.

From Day One, NMAAHC has had the people’s stamp of approval. In its first year, the museum has welcomed nearly three million visitors. Lonnie G. Bunch III, founding director of the museum, said:

We are so grateful to America for making this first year unprecedentedly successful. This first anniversary gives us at the Smithsonian the opportunity to thank everyone for this incredible gift and for making it possible to continue our mission to help America grapple with history by seeing their past through an African American lens – and ultimately help Americans find healing and reconciliation.

NMAAHC has received the stamp of approval of the U.S. Postal Service which issued the “Celebrating African American History and Culture” Forever stamp.

The numbers show that the National Museum of African American History and Culture is a gift to the American people:

• Almost 2.5 million visitors walked through the 400,000-square-foot building.
• Of those visitors, 922 were ambassadors.
• About 10,000 of all 2.5 million people who passed through were between the ages of 4 and 7 years old.
• About 3,000 objects were on display while NMAAHC’s permanent collection is more than 13 times that size, at almost 40,000 objects.

For more info, check out “NMAAHC’s First Year by the Numbers.”

International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition

August 23 is the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. UNESCO designated August 23 because it marks the beginning of the 1791 slave rebellion in Santo Domingo (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic) led by Toussaint L’Ouverture.

The 2017 theme, “Remember Slavery: Recognizing the Legacy and Contributions of People of African Descent,” focuses on the ways in which enslaved Africans and their descendants “influenced and continue to shape societies around the world.”

The under-told story of the Transatlantic Slave Trade is also the focus of a TED-Ed video that has garnered 2.5 million views.

For more info, go here.

Slavery in Black and White

HBO’s planned drama series, Confederate sparked a fierce backlash organized by April Reign, creator of the Twitter campaign #OscarsSoWhite. During a recent tweetstorm, I, well, tweeted up a storm. This tweet got the most response.

Some draw a comparison between HBO’s alternate-history and Amazon Studio’s Black America. But that’s like comparing apples and oranges. The differences between the two creative teams are more than skin deep.

The creators of Confederate, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, are in thrall with an evergreen racist fantasy that the South won the Civil War. Their “vision” is ripped from the headlines.

Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members rallied in Charlottesville to “take America back.” They were protesting the planned removal of a statute of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park, formerly known as Lee Park. For HBO, reality bites. The audience for its “alternate” history was on full display this weekend.

In the unrepentant South, black bodies were used and abused. For HBO showrunners, that’s entertainment.

In contrast, the creators of Black America, Will Packer and Aaron McGruder, envision an alternate history in which emancipated slaves received reparations in the form of their own sovereign states. From Deadline:

It envisions an alternate history where newly freed African Americans have secured the Southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama post-Reconstruction as reparations for slavery, and with that land, the freedom to shape their own destiny. The sovereign nation they formed, New Colonia, has had a tumultuous and sometimes violent relationship with its looming “Big Neighbor,” both ally and foe, the United States. The past 150 years have been witness to military incursions, assassinations, regime change, coups, etc. Today, after two decades of peace with the U.S. and unprecedented growth, an ascendant New Colonia joins the ranks of major industrialized nations on the world stage as America slides into rapid decline. Inexorably tied together, the fate of two nations, indivisible, hangs in the balance.

Black Americans have sought reparations since Reconstruction. At the start of every Congress since 1989, Congressman John Conyers Jr. has introduced H.R. 40 which calls for a commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans. The bill number recognizes the unfulfilled promise to give freed slaves 40 acres and a mule.

When I was a student, I met civil rights leader Floyd McKissick, the founder of Soul City.

Soul City was a multi-racial community in Warren County, North Carolina developed and managed by African Americans. The project was supported by then-President Richard Nixon and financed by $14 million in loans guaranteed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In a 2016 story, The Guardian reported:

Soul City was born under the federal government’s Model Cities programme, which began in 1966. A plank in President Johnson’s anti-poverty efforts, it funded housing, employment, infrastructure and planning. Of the programme’s 14 new developments, Soul City was the only one to be built from scratch, with no pre-existing infrastructure – and the only one by a black developer.

Although Soul City failed, McKissisk’s vision was about “the freedom to shape their own destiny.” HBO’s Confederate is destined to fail. In the name of a resurgent Confederacy, an American was killed and 19 injured. Charlottesville was White Privilege literally run amok. #NoConfederate

#NoConfederate TV Series

Nobel Prize-winning American novelist William Faulkner observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner was born in Mississippi where the Confederate emblem is embedded in the state flag.

In 2015, Bree Newsome climbed a flagpole in front of the South Carolina capitol and took down the Confederate flag.

Fast forward two years, HBO is planning a new series, Confederate, an alternate-history in which the South won the Civil War. Truth be told, the story of the “Lost Cause” is far from past. It is told in Confederate monuments from Maryland to Texas and the “Black Codes” enacted at the end of Reconstruction.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Newsome wrote:

The roots of mass incarceration in the 21st century trace directly to the period immediately after the Civil War and the emancipation of slaves. Between 1865 and 1866, Southern states passed a series of laws known as the “Black Codes” designed to grant local authorities power to arrest black people for virtually any reason at all and force them to provide free labor via convict leasing programs. Some of the most notorious prisons in the South would be built soon after: Parchman in Mississippi, built to house black male prisoners, where Rep. John Lewis would later be held during the Freedom Rides in 1961; and Angola Prison in Louisiana, erected on the site of a former plantation, purchased with profits from a slave-trading firm. Angola remains the largest maximum-security prison in the country and is notorious for its extremely high prisoner death rates.

Newsome added:

Given that the true cause of the Confederacy was slavery, did the Confederacy really lose altogether? Confederates were only out of power for roughly 12 years during the period of Reconstruction (1865-1877). Campaigns of terror led by groups such as the KKK were overwhelmingly successful, and despite a brief period of gain for African Americans during which time seven African Americans from the South were elected to the U.S. Congress, by the beginning of the 20th century, white supremacists in the South had succeeded in returning blacks to a condition as close to slavery as possible, and many of those abuses endure today.

[…]

Imagining a world where the Confederacy won, where the legacy of slavery is fresh and the terror of it ever-present may seem like fantasy for white creatives, but ask most black people living in the United States today. They’ll tell you it’s their reality.

With his white privilege on full display, HBO President of Programming Casey Bloys asked critics to withhold judgment:

My hope is people will judge the actual material instead of what it could be or should be or might be. We’ll rise or fall based on that material.

What is there to judge? The ancestors’ humanity?

The backlash has begun (and here).

For updates, follow @NoConfederate on Twitter.