Introduction
You live in a society shaped by a foundational rift. Historical violence and systemic racism continue to dictate the boundaries of Black life, freedom, and safety. When you witness police brutality, mass incarceration, and enduring economic disparities, you face the pressing need to understand how the past bleeds into the present.
The anthology edited by Jesmyn Ward confronts this reality head-on. The central idea is that contemporary African American writers must bear witness to ongoing oppression by mapping the continuous line from slavery and Jim Crow to modern state violence and quiet bigotry.
The book moves through historical roots, systemic injustice, daily survival, and community strategy. You will encounter the answers to several vital questions as you read:
- How do historical myths conceal the true reach of American racism?
- In what ways does institutional power maintain white supremacy today?
- How do Black artists and activists transform grief into resistance?
1. Historical Roots and Northern Memory
Racial injustice and the history of slavery extend far beyond Southern plantations into Northern towns, operating through sanitization and cyclical backlashes.
You often assume slavery was strictly a Southern phenomenon confined to plantational landscapes. Cultural memory associates bondage with agricultural regions turned into tourist attractions. Yet the physical landscapes of slavery extend far into Northern towns and coastal areas.
Wendy S. Walters discovers that her ancestors' history and African burial grounds exist in towns like Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Newport, Rhode Island. These sites remain hidden beneath streets and modern buildings.
The Geography of Slavery
Urban development in Northern towns routinely paved over African burying grounds. City expansions and infrastructural installations disturbed historic remains. Builders treated sacred ground as mere intersections for manholes, gas lines, and sewer pipes.
In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, city workers discovered human remains while digging a manhole near Court and Chestnut streets in 1705. City officials had approved that space for a Negro Burial Ground, but houses covered the site by 1813. Archaeologists initially removed 13 human remains from the location.
Examination of the remains reveals severe physical trauma and hardship. Enamel hypoplasia indicates nutritional stress, and individuals suffered from bone infections.
In Burial 6, archaeologists found the remains of a woman whose lower legs were cut off by a sewage pipe. Her upper central incisors were shaved in a possible West African cultural tradition. The individuals were interred during the 18th century, including a child in Burial 7 aged between 7 to 12 years old.
New England history relies on euphemisms to sanitize this deep involvement in the slave trade. Local historians and museum docents frequently use the term servant instead of slave. They promote the misconception that enslaved Africans in the North were treated better or were smarter.
At the Strawbery Banke Museum, docent Charles occasionally used the word servant but never slave while guiding visitors through Portsmouth's colonial history. This sanitization ignores that more than a thousand slave-trading trips were made from Newport to Africa between 1725 and 1807, following the original settlement of Puddle Dock founded in 1630.
Cyclical History and Backlash
American history operates in a recurring feedback loop of major black achievements followed by violent racial backlash. Spectacular advancements by African Americans, such as Reconstruction senators or the election of Barack Obama, trigger a counterreaction that threatens to erase those gains before a slow climb begins again.
Following the leaps made after enslavement during Reconstruction, a conservative counterreaction gutted civil rights laws and established the Jim Crow caste system.
Six million African Americans fled the Southern caste system during the Great Migration, voting with their bodies when denied the ballot. Faced with constant lynchings for mundane infractions under Jim Crow, millions relocated to the North and West.
African Americans fled the South seeking asylum, but upon arriving in the North, they were met with redlining, overpolicing, and hypersegregation.
Modern police violence against Black Americans forms a second Nadir where killing rates surpass peak historical lynchings. Recent assaults and killings of black individuals by authorities for ordinary behaviors signal that the racial caste system has merely mutated.
There was a lynching every four days in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is estimated that an African American is now killed by police every two to three days.
2. Systemic Injustice and White Rage
Respectable legal mechanisms and economic structures persistently dismantle Black advancement while historical narratives are distorted by racial bias.
Carol Anderson argues that white rage operates not through street protests. It uses the veneer of law and order to rollback Black progress. Following the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, 101 members of Congress issued the Southern Manifesto in March 1956. Southern governors instituted massive resistance, shutting down public schools and funding private academies for whites.
Legal and Economic Subjugation
Voter suppression relies on similar legislative maneuvering. 6 million African American voters are affected by voter ID requirements according to an NAACP report. 25 percent of black Americans lack a government-issued photo ID compared to 8 percent of white Americans.
The Great Recession disproportionately targeted Black communities. Researchers at Brandeis University calculated in a 2013 report that half of the collective wealth of African-American families was wiped out during the foreclosure crisis. Before the recession, white families held four times the wealth of Black families, a ratio that increased to six times by 2010.
Literary and Cultural Revisions
Biographical narratives about the poet Phillis Wheatley and her husband were largely shaped by a white descendant's unverified and racially biased memoir. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers discovered through archival research at the American Antiquarian Society that Margaretta Matilda Odell's 1834 biography of Phillis Wheatley lacks genealogical proof connecting Odell to the white Wheatley family. Odell depicted John Peters as a lazy, arrogant hustler who drove his wife to ruin, projecting nineteenth-century white racial stereotypes onto a free Black man of the Revolutionary era.
Odell portrayed John Peters as wearing a wig and carrying a cane to act out a gentleman while being too indolent to work. This characterization influenced literary history for nearly two centuries despite a lack of documentation. 1790 was the year John Peters appeared on the Boston census as a free man of color, and 1801 was the year John Peters died at age fifty-five. 1773 was the year Phillis Wheatley's book of poetry was published, and 1834 was the year Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley was published.
Viewed through eighteenth-century realities rather than racist tropes, John Peters was an ambitious free Black man striving during a severe economic depression. Vincent Carretta's research shows that Peters engaged in various business enterprises and was imprisoned briefly for unpaid bills during the severe post-Revolutionary economic downturn in New England. 1791 was the date of the unpublished letter between printers Ebenezer T. Andrews and Isaiah Thomas discussing Wheatley's poems with Peters, though it never materialized. Peters continued trying to publish his late wife's second book of poetry for 16 years after his release from jail.
John Peters left behind items such as a horse, a desk, leather-bottomed chairs, and books at his death in 1801. These belongings indicate literacy and steady aspirations.
Genetic testing companies like 23andMe provide families of color with concrete proof of ancestral mixes that official historical records and the one-drop rule obscured. Jesmyn Ward ordered DNA tests for her family, revealing complex ancestral compositions that subverted or confirmed family lore. 99 dollars is the cost of a 23andMe genetic test kit.
Her father discovered he is 51 percent Native American alongside sub-Saharan African and European heritage, while her mother is 55 percent European alongside African and Native American percentages. Jesmyn Ward found 40 percent European ancestry in her own test results. Jesmyn Ward's father registered with the Choctaw tribe of Slidell, Louisiana, after learning he is 51 percent Native American through his 23andMe test results.
Kevin Young examines the phenomenon of white individuals like Rachel Dolezal adopting superficial markers such as tanning, wigs, and fabricated biographies to impersonate Black people. Rather than a private sentiment of connection, such hoaxes seek to gain professional authority in Black institutions by reducing complex cultural identity to hyperbolic skin tone and external performance. Rachel Dolezal lectured on Black studies and led a local Oregon NAACP chapter while shifting her stories about her birthplace and family background before being publicly unmasked.
3. Surveillance, Mourning, and Resistance
Black life in America requires constant vigilance against institutional violence, transforming grief and systemic oppression into artistic and activist survival.
Urban Mobility and Surveillance
Moving through American cities subjects you to intense suspicion. Garnette Cadogan left Kingston, Jamaica in 1996 to attend college in New Orleans. Free street wandering in Jamaica contrasted sharply with American cities where suspicion and police harassment dominated his daily walks.
To survive, you must adopt strict behavioral rules:
- no running, especially at night;
- no sudden movements;
- no hoodies;
- no objects, especially shiny ones, in hand;
- no waiting for friends on street corners;
- no standing near a corner on a cell phone.
Cadogan was detained at gunpoint by police in New York simply because he was jogging to catch up with friends, and officers told him that his run triggered suspicion. This pantomime undertaken to avoid the choreography of criminality is what walking while black demands.
Public art and modern technology empower you to document and contest police harassment. Artist Dasic Fernández painted Know Your Rights murals across New York boroughs in 2011 in Bushwick and 2012 in Long Island City. These murals feature instructions on how to handle police encounters and depict individuals using mobile phones to document arrests.
If you are harassed by police, practical guidance protects your safety:
- write down the officer's badge number, name, and/or other identifying information;
- get medical attention if needed and take pictures of any injuries;
- state that you do not give permission for a search of yourself, your car, or your house.
Mourning and State Violence
The condition of Black life in America is defined by a continuous state of mourning driven by the constant, pervasive threat of institutional and racial violence.
Claudia Rankine argues that no amount of white liberal empathy can replicate the daily strain of knowing a Black person can be killed simply for existing. Living while black creates an ambient environment of fear and grief that permeates every normal daily activity. Historical and contemporary violence, such as the September 15, 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama where four black girls were killed, reinforces this ambient terror. Fifty-two years later, the Charleston church shooting repeated this historic trauma.
Mamie Till Mobley demanded an open coffin and published photographs of her brutally murdered son Emmett Till in 1955 to force the public to confront the reality of racial terror. Activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi founded Black Lives Matter to address the unequal playing field created by systemic racism. This movement functions as a sustained intervention that refuses forgetting and demands internal recognition of Black humanity.
Raising Black children in America requires complex, cautionary instruction to protect them from systemic dangers that white parents do not have to navigate. A widely circulated cartoon by Ben Sargent titled Still Two Americas depicts a white mother telling her son to put on his jacket, contrasted with a Black mother giving an intricate warning.
A Black parent must issue detailed behavioral instructions:
- put on your jacket;
- keep your hands in sight at all times;
- don't make any sudden moves;
- keep your mouth shut around police;
- don't run;
- don't wear a hoodie;
- don't give them an excuse to hurt you.
Two seconds was the duration of time it took police to arrive and shoot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice.
4. Legal Rights and Community Strategy
Grassroots activism, public education, and organized disruption provide tactical armor against stop-and-frisk policing and systemic precarity.
Activism and Legal Defense
People's Justice for Community Control and Police Accountability organized against stop-and-frisk policing. From 2004 through 2012, authorities recorded 4.4 million stop-and-frisk actions. Ninety percent of these actions targeted African Americans and Hispanics.
Grassroots organizations used public art murals in marginalized neighborhoods to educate residents. Artist Cekis painted the first mural in Washington Heights next to a laundromat. Other artists like Sophia Dawson and Dasic Fernández painted murals in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the Bronx.
You can use specific legal guidelines during police interactions:
- ask: "Am I being detained, or am I free to go?"
- if detained, stay silent and demand a lawyer;
- write down the officer's badge number, name, and/or other identifying info;
- say loudly if police try to do a physical search beyond a pat down: "I do not consent to this search.";
- get medical attention if needed and take pictures of injuries.
Mentorship and Revolution
Mitchell S. Jackson argues that boys without present biological fathers can compose a composite father figure from men around them. You can piece together a functional framework of manhood from various figures. Mitchell S. Jackson composed his father figure from multiple men: his mother's ex-parolee boyfriend Big Chris, his grandfather Sam Jackson, Jr., his uncle Ant who trained him in track, his uncle Henry who taught him hustling maxims, and eventually his biological father Wesley.
Challenging oppressive state structures requires organization rather than mere reaction. During the Ferguson uprisings and subsequent national protests, demonstrators shut down bridges, highways, and intersections across the United States to disrupt business-as-usual and demand accountability. Over three hundred black lives were taken by police in the year following Michael Brown's death.
10 Key Ideas
- Racial injustice and the history of slavery extend far beyond Southern plantations into Northern towns, operating through sanitization and cyclical backlashes.
- American history operates in a recurring feedback loop of major black achievements followed by violent racial backlash.
- Carol Anderson argues that white rage operates not through street protests, but uses the veneer of law and order to rollback Black progress.
- Biographical narratives about the poet Phillis Wheatley and her husband were largely shaped by a white descendant's unverified and racially biased memoir.
- Moving through American cities subjects you to intense suspicion, forcing you to adopt strict behavioral rules to survive.
- Public art and modern technology empower you to document and contest police harassment.
- The condition of Black life in America is defined by a continuous state of mourning driven by the constant, pervasive threat of institutional and racial violence.
- Raising Black children in America requires complex, cautionary instruction to protect them from systemic dangers that white parents do not have to navigate.
- Grassroots organizations used public art murals in marginalized neighborhoods to educate residents about stop-and-frisk policing and legal rights.
- Challenging oppressive state structures requires organization and disruption rather than mere reaction to demand accountability.