This is about what I’m doing right now in Reparational Genealogy, what you can do, and how you can help me help others.
As white genealogists, we have a better opportunity than any in history to get honest about how we and our ancestors benefited from black chattel slavery in the United States. We have the online tools, the documents, and the archives to help us find the truth as no other generation before us has.
I’m not talking about other countries, because I’ve only ever lived in the US, but if you’re honest, you can find how this is true for you regardless of location: your ancestors, and by descent, you, have benefited from the enslavement of human beings. Your ancestors’ white skin made them capable of disappearing into society and transforming themselves. This wasn’t, and isn’t, true of black America.
It’s time to stop being polite about whiteness, and time to start serving black America. Let’s initiate with some self-examination. Look to your tree, and instead of finding reasons to say why your family DIDN’T benefit from institutionalized racism, find reasons how it DID. Join me in doing better than employing hashtags on social media. You don’t have to march to say BLACK LIVES MATTER.
Read more about The Reparational Genealogy Project here.
Contribute to my research on living and deceased reparational trees.
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