It’s interesting seeing the kiddos here talking about black history month. It reminds me of my own time in high school…and makes me worry again about American education. Some of this resentment is unsolvable I think, at least temporarily. it’s being a teenager coupled with, I don’t know, some black kid in your class has behavioral problems and you can’t stand or understand him, and you don’t like the Toni Morrison you keep having to read, lol. So you dig your heels into being racist like you’ve rediscovered punk or something.

American cooking and music are strongly influenced by West/Central African culture. Black people did all the cooking on plantations, and they also performed, and they had personal connections with their enslavers, both being human, after all. And white people here liked what they made and brought. It is part of America now. I would say fashion too but I think that’s primarily a Louisiana thing.

Also, even in the area of agriculture they were not “machines.” Slave traders sought out slaves from specific cultures–did you know that? It’s not just because those people were readily accessible, but because plantation ownerss did not always know the first thing about rice planting or indigo making, and they wanted to kidnap a highly skilled workforce. Factors (middlemen in the slave trade, posted on the African coast paid big bucks for people who /already knew what they were doing/. And these people, who came from indigo areas or cotton areas or wherever, they made so much money for this country that we literally could not pay it back even if we tried. The entire American economy is built on their work. As with cooking for plantation ladies, Southern aristocracy looked like not doing your own work–even the brain work, often.

I could tell you some stories about how this has affected my family personally–and I don’t mean just slavery, which my great-great-grandma was in when she was my age, or Jim Crow and living under essentially a terrorist regime, which my great-grandma and grandma had to do, or the crack epidemic and increase in policing, which damaged my father beyond repair.