Whenever I teach AFC 101: Introduction to Africology and African American Studies, I ask my students to reflect on the significance of Douglass’ testimony. These are the words of Frederick Douglass from his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but before I waked she was gone…” She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at sunrise…she was with me in the night. She made her journeys to see me in the night, traveling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her day’s work. Stewart, who lived about twelve miles from my home. “I never saw my mother to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life and each of these times was very short in duration and at night. (See, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons by Imani Perry)īut here is the reality, in the words of someone who lived through the slave era: The blindness to this history and its legacy is found contemporarily in the seemingly innocent remark from white parents to black parents: “It must be terrifying to raise a black boy in America”.
This ideology is passed down from generation to generation, both directly and indirectly, in thought and in deed. It was this reasoning that made it possible for enslaved mothers to be sold away from their babies-oftentimes before the babies were weaned-especially if a white mistress needed the enslaved mother’s breast milk for her own baby. We also need to remember that during the slave era there was the wide-held belief that Black parents did not have the same emotional attachments to their children as white parents. The legacy of those first enslavements also lives on. Our oppression began well before the “20 and odd” Africans set foot on the shores of a place named Point Comfort, Virginia in August 1619!!! African people and people of African descent have been suffering under these systems of oppression-without respite-for OVER 400 years. Because we must understand that the nature of the way that this land was dominated and colonized and developed means that my experience as a parent of color in 2020 is grossly different from those who are white.Īnd before we even do that let’s set the record straight. I, an African American mother of a beautiful young man who is spookily smart and gifted and one of the most caring people I have ever met, would, without hesitation, lay down my life for him.īut this is where history is important and where too many of our paths diverge. I know what you’re thinking: “So would we all.” I write this because I have a son for whom I would lay down my life in a second.
SICK AND TIRED OF BEING SICK AND TIRED WINDOWS
I write this because I have two brothers with whom, growing up, I shared countless little things like candy bars and secrets and arguments over who got the remote control brothers who took the blame for me when windows got broken at home and defended me from bullies at school brothers who make me laugh like no one else can. I write this short personal reflection because, like many of us, I was heartbroken and enraged by having to, yet again, bear witness to a Black man - someone’s son, father, brother, cousin, friend- being murdered by a white police officer as other officers stood by. People of color must take up the space to speak our truths. Congress about the injustices she faced as a black woman sharecropper was blocked for fear of the outrage that her truth-telling would unleash. Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist whose 1964 testimony before U.S. George Floyd on Memorial Day (a holiday that originated with newly freed African Americans in 1868, by the way) I stopped to linger over the photo of an African American woman holding up a sign that read, “I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired.” Her sign, poignant in its simplicity, recalls the famous statement by Mrs.
While browsing the countless images of protestors of racial injustice in the wake of the murder of Mr.