Comic: When white people think ancestry is easy
White people don't get to benefit from our oppression and then have the nerve to sweep the details under the rug like it never happened.
by JeCorey Holder
The information regarding ancestry of African Americans is spotty at best. It will be a while before any of us can trace our roots to find out what families or tribes we came from. And that’s if we find out at all.
“Ancestry” by JeCorey Holder
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It’s a weird sort of dysphoria to hear white Americans go on about where their family immigrated from and then to hit a wall in your own search.
As an African American, that tells you that not only were your ancestors forcibly brought here to suffer hundreds of years of oppression, but there’s also a chance that you will never know where they came from.
What makes it even worse is the ever-growing erasure of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in school textbooks. We’ve got folks teaching children that Africans simply immigrated here for work. Immigrated. For work. You know what calling it “immigration” implies? That people who were brought here from Africa HAD A CHOICE in the matter. Saying that they came here “for work” implies that they were compensated for the back-breaking labor they were forced to do.
No. Absolutely not. White people don’t get to benefit from our oppression and then have the nerve—the caucasity—to sweep the details under the rug like it never happened.
White people don’t get to pretend that African families weren’t destroyed because of whiteness. They don’t get to act like my ancestors weren’t snatched away into the night and forced into boats. They don’t get to gloss over the fact that fellow Africans were forced to sell their own people to invaders. They don’t get to omit that my people were raped by those that purchased and/or fathered them, and by the folks who held the whips on the plantation.
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America was built on the backs of Black slaves and I will not sit quietly and let white people forget as they do their little ancestry tests while reaping the rewards of what their thieving, raping, and enslaving ancestors wrought.
Gamer, geek, and social activist. JeCorey Holder has been weaving tapestries of shade and fury since the early 2000’s. Pro-LGBTQ, pro-black, and pro intersectional feminism, he is full of feelings and opinions that try to call out and tear down the oppressive status quo.