After a conversation I had last night, plus a thread posted by Pariah, I just realized something.
When people ask African Americans to “get over it”, for us to move beyond slavery and Jim Crow, I wonder if they’re aware of just how long we lived under both. Not just on this continent, but this hemisphere. The first African slaves were brought to the Americas in 1501 (in modern Haiti/Dominican Republic and Brazil); the first person to be declared a slave in North America was in the Virginia colony in 1644. Slavery was last abolished in the Americas in 1888, in Brazil; in the United States, in 1865. This is a difference in hundreds of years. For the United States, it’s a difference of 221 years. Thanks to “partus sequitur ventrum”, a 1662 policy in Virginia which mandated the inheritance of slavery regardless of one’s portion of White English parentage, multiple generations were born, raised and died in slavery. That’s a culture.
Jim Crow: Reconstruction ended in 1877, thus signifying the beginning of the Jim Crow regime. The last outstanding vestiges of Jim Crow were federally dismantled by 1968, the year MLK was murdered. That’s a difference of 91 years. Again, multiple generations were born during this period, even those who were locked into the underclass thanks to the state-level “one-drop rule”. A large portion of our living population was born prior to 1968. That’s a culture. 221 years of chattel slavery, followed by 91 years of violent civil and economic segregation. We’re asking or demanding people who went through a generational culture of state/economic violence, only 47 years out, to “get over it”? 47 years? That’s just two generations away!
So if you wonder about how long it will take for us to “get over slavery” or “get over Jim Crow”, you will probably get an answer from us African-Americans some 312 years from 1968, in the year 2280. Because that’s how long it will take for us to build a longer history and culture than both slavery and Jim Crow combined. That’s how long it will take for generations of culture under both systems to be subsumed into a history of civic equality (if not equity), to adapt even further to this system on our individual terms, to form nostalgias which harken to far more than just those two systems. Until then, don’t expect us to “get over it”.
