It's Time For a Reckoning

With the holidays approaching, some travel, and less daylight (which means less energy for me), I've been a little off my writing game. Although not writing much, I have been doing quite a bit of reading, diving more into fiction books than I have for awhile. One such read was "Homegoing" by Yaa Gyasi. This amazing novel starts in Africa at the start of the slave trade and follow's generations of a family - one branch that stays rooted in Africa and the other thrust into America through slavery. Like most historical fiction books, the characters themselves were not real people but their stories are historically accurate. It's a fiction book but the reality of slavery and its aftermath are very real and true.

I hear so often from white people "but my ancestors weren't slave owners - why is this my problem? what does this have to do with me?" In reading this book, thinking about it, pondering this question, I question how we can ever make things right especially if we are not willing to face the harsh reality of not only slavery but generations of systemic racism. My ancestors were not slave owners either but segregation, red lining, forced labor, racism...has made me and mine more able to buy homes, get an education, get jobs, be free from the stress and the toll of institutional racism. We worked hard and we have struggled but systemic racism was never a ball and chain trying to keep us down, making our struggle that much more challenging to overcome.

How many stories of slavery, fiction or non-fiction, have you read (I highly recommend this one, btw!)? Through these stories, I imagine as a mother, a daughter, a sister, a human, the atrocities, the horror, the unbelievable trauma. As a country we have never reconciled with this past, this past of treating a people worse than we treat animals, and then continuing to oppress them for generations. Laws were made all over this country (not just in the south) to keep people down who had once been enslaved. America, we have a truth we need to reckon with. I don't know the answer. I don't know what a reckoning would look like all these years and generations later but a reckoning must be had. European Americans did this whether it was your European American ancestor or someone else's....we did this. America, we did this. We created the systems and laws that have kept a people enslaved well beyond the 13th Amendment and we are a product of that system. Unknowingly or not, we have benefitted. It is time for a reckoning.