“We are not our ancestors” is a powerful warning to the oppressors eager to step backward in time. Don’t think you are putting us in chains without a fight.
Black people have known what Donald Trump was about for a long time, and every time I predicted his actions, I was accused of hyperbole. Unfortunately, I continue to be correct. He will push as far as possible, and his success rate is kind of fire if I’m being honest. When it comes to politics and life in general, he wins even when he loses.
Trump’s continued tyrannical actions and successes have led some people to believe new forms of Jim Crow or slavery are not off the table. The day after the election, I had students asking me if slavery would return.
It is hard to put them at ease when Trump is rolling back Civil Rights and his supporters are sending Black people messages about reporting to the cotton fields.
I want to believe the idea of slavery is hyperbole, but this is how they work. It all feels impossible until it is happening, and once it is happening it feels too late to stop it.
New Slavery
They’ve been trying to bring back slavery since they abolished it. Slave Codes were replaced by Black Codes. Depending on the state, Black people were not allowed to earn certain property or learn certain trades. If an adult wasn’t employed, they could be arrested under vagrancy laws and then leased out as free labor. The same thing would be done to Black orphans. Slavery under another name.
The American prison system and controlling Black people have been linked since the start. Slave patrols evolved into the police officers who spend so much time monitoring Black neighborhoods but also take thirty minutes to arrive when someone actually needs help.
Post-slavery, convict leasing was key to obtaining free labor. Black people were arrested for any minor crime, even if it was “imagined” by the arrester. The more people they arrested, the more free labor to lease out.
This evolved into the prison industrial complex. In short, we ended up with a system motivated by profit and control. The people in power are rewarded for more arrests, and marginalized groups are criminalized by politicians and the media to justify those arrests. Do you want to guess what group is usually criminalized the most? (Although it is important to note darker immigrants and LGBT people have been receiving a ton of heat in recent years.)
Prison labor is still a key part of America’s economy. Companies from Walmart to Victoria’s Secret take advantage of the extremely cheap (and sometimes completely free) labor.
Under the new presidential regime, I expect the prison industrial complex to expand its reach and solve for some of the political problems Trump will inevitably create.
For example, many farmers stated they would lose most of their workforce with Trump’s tough immigration plan. They argued they could lose their farms, food prices would increase, and even gaining access to food would be difficult.
Is it hard to see prisons leasing out laborers for these farms? Is it hard to see Black and brown people arrested for no reason to keep the prisons and farms full? We already see people having visas revoked because they chose to protest. It is always hyperbole until it starts to happen.
We may not be our ancestors, but they aren’t going to call it slavery. It will be easy to miss until it is too late. Also, if I’m being honest, when I hear someone say we aren’t our ancestors, I worry they’ve already missed something.
Stop disrespecting the ancestors
“When you hear about slavery for 400 years … For 400 years? That sounds like a choice….You were there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all. It’s like we’re mentally imprisoned.”- Kanye West
I’m trying to be more sensitive to Kanye’s mental health, so I will just say this 2018 take encapsulates what “we are not our ancestors” feels like.
I specifically want to reach certain people in this section. I know some people who say “We are not our ancestors” do so knowing the true weight of the threat.
Others use the phrase believing the school and the media’s portrayal of slavery. Black people just kind of sat around smiling at their ancestors and happily doing their jobs.
There are over 250 documented rebellions in the United States. This doesn’t factor in the ones lost to history, other forms of escape, or the planning that often goes into rebellion. Black people were in a constant state of fighting for freedom.
This is especially significant when I’ve heard so many people feel they need to “back away” from the world after Trump's most recent victory. Don’t get me wrong, I get it. The fight to be viewed as a human is tiring but imagine what our ancestors were going through.
If we look beyond the United States, the constant state of rebellion is even more visible. I’ve written about Haiti’s successful rebellion and its response.
These revolts were usually only temporarily successful at best, and the consequences were sometimes sweeping, not just hurting the slaves who attempted to rebel, but the entire Black population. Consequences were real and harsh.
Yet, the rebellions continued. The fights continued.
There seems to be this belief that Abraham Lincoln and the Union saved the slaves out of the goodness of their hearts. I believed this to a certain extent as a child. I still remember someone telling me during my freshman year in college, “Yo, you know Lincoln didn’t care about Black people, right?”
I didn’t know. I just accepted the history fed to me.
This isn’t to discredit Lincoln’s historical significance or his open mind considering the time period, but it is necessary to point out how Black people do not receive enough credit for obtaining their own freedom.
As the thirteenth amendment became a possible reality, Frederick Douglas said:
“ It is a significant fact, it is a marvelous fact, it seems almost to imply a direct interposition of Providence, that this war, which began in the interest of slavery on both sides, bids fair to end in the interest of liberty on both sides. [Applause.] It was begun, I say, in the interest of slavery on both sides. The South was fighting to take slavery out of the Union,3 and the North fighting to keep it in the Union; the South fighting to get it beyond the limits of the United States Constitution, and the North fighting to retain it within those limits; the South fighting for new guarantees, and the North fighting for the old guarantees — both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro. Yet, the Negro, apparently endowed with wisdom from on high, saw more clearly the end from the beginning than we did.”
Abraham Lincoln
The North wasn’t motivated by its love for Black people or its disgust with slavery. Lincoln was antislavery, but he believed in the superiority of white people and integration wasn’t even a serious consideration. Nevertheless, Lincoln was open to listening and the Civil War created the crack in America. Black leaders just needed to whisper suggestions into Lincoln’s ear.
Douglass in particular convinced Lincoln to weaponize freedom. The North wins the war and Black people gain freedom. Yes, Lincoln was the steward but Black people were not mindless benefactors. Our ancestors worked for freedom. It was the more than 250,000 soldiers who turned the tide in the Civil War. They escaped from plantations and joined the Union army, destabilizing the South in the process.
We aren’t our ancestors, but we should be ready to fight like them.
To be a Black American is special. The process of learning one’s past is usually like peeling an onion. The truth hides in the center, and getting there will involve a lot of tears.
If you are still able to dismiss the work of our ancestors, you haven’t cut deep enough yet. If you aren’t proud of where you’ve come from, you still have a few layers to go.
Once you hit it, you’ll know. The desire to keep fighting will spark. Allowing hundreds of years of work and progress to slip through our fingers will become an unacceptable outcome.
We aren’t our ancestors, but we stand on their great shoulders. We know what they’ve been through. We need to find the knowledge they left for us and apply it.
We are not our ancestors, but we can make them proud.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of LG Ware's work on Medium.