400 years ago, in 1619, our ancestors were taken
and brought here on a ship called the White Lion
a whole year before the Mayflower arrived.
The funny thing—and by funny is meant weirdly stupid—about the negative reaction to the 1619 Project and the use of it in schools to teach kids American history is that there is very little in the project that is surprising about the specific fact that slavery existed in America and as a result created systemic racism. It is hardly a great big secret that white Americans owned black African like property. The only information that will be new and come as a surprise to most Americans are details that do reveal the broader context of slavery and racism not to the detriment of historical fact but just the opposite. For instance, how many people reading this learned in elementary school—or middle school or high school or even college—that Africans were brought to the New World in bondage before the vaunted Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock. Oh, wait, that’s right, most people did learn that the Mayflower made its landing at Plymouth Rock even though, well, it actually did no such thing.
The Kingdom of Ndongo
was nestled between
the Lukala and the Kwanza Rivers
on a high, high plateau
in West Central Africa.
One of the things which sets this history of the slave trade apart from most textbook accounts is the precision. The people who are abducted are not just Africans in the vague meaningless sense which is usually engaged to describe this process. The ancestry that the grandmother shares with the little girl is extremely precise, describing a kingdom with a name and a place. And the people who live there are also individualized, including the name of the language they grew up speaking, Kimbundu, and how they used shells as currency operating with a stable economic system in which the currently reflected the value of work just like a dollar does to Americans.
Ours is no immigration story.
This powerful line does not show up just once. It becomes sort of the thematic centerpiece of the entire text with its insistence up learning and the remembering that America is an experiment in voluntary immigration but that the history of those forcibly brought here from Africa is not part of that experiment. The difference is everything and when one understand this one begins to comprehend how galling it must be to represent a culture being told to go back where they came from. Unlike literally every other ethnic culture making up America, the descendants of those Africans forced into slavery did not choose to come here and thus this widespread view that is prevalent among an ignorant minority that African Americans seem to be demanding special treatment misses the point entirely. This is a sizable section of the American experiment that actually is deserving of special treatment—whether it is actually being asked for or not—because it is about people who from the beginning were the recipient of special treatment of the most abominable kind that, notably, was not extended to or demanded from any other.
