Our inheritance hate, our legacy love
Pat Grauer,
DeWitt, MI.
We are the comma. We are the now. We are the small point between great ancient forces and a future of positive change in human relationships.
Miles, Duke, Ella. Music conquers race.
Ernie Hills,
Sacramento, CA.
“As a young musician growing up in a white bread and mayonnaise world, I revered the recordings of black jazz musicians. This, more than anything else, is responsible for erasing the lingering racial animosity that was part of my family’s unspoken legacy.
Thanks for being with us today!”
An unexamined legacy is still legacy.
Chad Campbell
Rochester, MN
For many of us, our legacies are unexplored. We don’t have instruction or guidance to explore them, but when we take that initiative we find the remarkable impact of our families, forbears, and legacies. But if we never take that examination, the impacts still reverberate.
Haitian Cuban fusion. Proud legacy continues.
Suzette Chaumette,
San Leandro, CA.
We speak of ourselves as a Caribbean family. We teach our girls about the significance of the drum, Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, Alexandre Petion, Hatuey, Anacaona, Jose Marti, and more. We love celebrating our respective cultures, which are unique, but also our similar backgrounds as Taino, Arawak, African, French and Spanish.
Wisdom truth and beauty dwell in every human heart
Rhonda McGinnis,
Wayne State
“We come from every corner. We speak in every tongue.
Brought here by a vision of what is soon to come.
No longer will we stand for bigotry and fear.
The call of peace and justice is what has brought us here.
The world that we’ve been given is not so large a place
That we can stand divided by philosophy and race.
Wisdom truth and beauty dwell in every human heart.
United we are more than we could ever be apart.”
Lyric from “Legacy” by Jiggernaut
Slavery’s legacy broke my family pride.
Katherine E. Byroade,
West Hartford, CT.
When I was a child, my southern grandmother took great delight in the fact that she was a Jamestown descendant and DAR member and saw her membership in those organizations as part of her legacy to her granddaughters, ensuring our social success. She was matter of fact that the family had owned slaves in the past, but emphasized that we did not come from plantation-type families, that our slaves had been trusted house servants. At first this seemed okay to me, because it was okay to her, but eventually I understood that the domination of another person’s free will was unacceptable. I became more and more uncomfortable with the legacy of my white privilege, knowing that it was tied to something I see as reprehensible.
Earlier this year a wonderful distant elderly family member shared some interesting history with me. Our mutual ancestor, Harriet Hamilton Austin immigrated to the US around 1845 from Ireland. Here is the story that broke my heart: “I had the only record which was the original Bill of Sale to Edward Clegg who purchased that little eight year old girl at a Slave Auction in 1844. Edward Clegg was bidding for his mother-in-law,Harriet Hamilton Austin. The Van Buren Courthouse burned completely down in the 1870’s and all records were destroyed. Harriet later gave the little girl to Maria Jane Austin Clegg, her daughter. Harriet, the Slave Girl, later became little Maud Clegg’s nanny. Her name was Harriet after her original owner, a custom in those days. After Maria Jane’s death little Maud was sent back to Arkansas and it appears that Austin H. Clegg, age 16, and the Slave Girl, Harriet, took little Maud back to Arkansas. Sydney Clegg Austin became the guardian of Maud and Sydney gave Harriet her Free Papers so she could make the trip without problems. Todd told me Harriet was allowed to disembark at Van Buren but her husband was not allowed to because he did not have Free Papers. This happened in 1860. Harriett and her husband returned to Van Buren after the war.” My five times great-grandmother, then middle-aged and upper-class, comes to the US and almost immediately an 8-year-old child was purchased for her use. What was the heartbreak she left behind? Why was my great-grandmother’s need of a servant greater than that heartbreak? We are very shy in this culture about calling out the great wickedness of slavery, and we should not be, we must not be.
America’s Legacy of Racial Terrorism Endures
Shirley,
Glendale, CA.
I find it heartbreaking and appalling when we have the likes of Bill O’Reilly and those in the conservative right say that say “All Lives Matter.” To me, that is as oppressive and violent as Jim Crow Laws. From a Latina feminist perspective, Black Live Do Matter as long as Black African Americans and communities of color continue to be violently oppressed and disadvantaged at the advantage of “white privilege.”
Let’s talk about “white fragility” which is the inability for all those who identify as “white” or just “Americans” to engage in conversations about the legacy of racism and racial terrorism that has afforded them their hierarchal and privileged place in this society.
Let’s talk about the legacy of racism that falsely justifies this myth of assigning value and ranking to individuals based on their presumed racial category. White people and those who identify with them by virtue of legalization of US Census racial categories through the years, and who by that virtue (Germans, Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans) assumed themselves to be superior in almost every form of human expression and activity including beauty, ability, potential, hygiene, health, intelligence, judgment, leadership as we have been witness to the nationwide blatant disrespect and believed incompetence of President Barack Obama.
Blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, Middle Easterns and Asian Americans will continue to be seen as the perpetual foreigners – let’s talk about that.
Thank you for the opportunity to offer these issues for dialogue
#mysoapbox
I am content being called “gringa.”
Nell Haynes,
Chile.
Sometimes it’s hard being the person that always stands out in a crowd, especially in an impoverished city in the middle of the Chilean desert (the driest place on earth). I get catcalled daily. I’m charged more for public transport and at the market. But I’m always surprised when people ask if I’m offended that they refer to me as a “gringa.” Especially because here it’s quite common to call people by the nicknames “Negro” [Black] “Gordo” [Fat] or “Flaco” [Skinny], such as “Oh my Gordo is so sweet, he cooked me dinner last night.” Having grown used to these terms, “gringa” seems pretty inoffensive. Of course it has colonialist connotations, but I also understand that as an anthropologist from the US researching people in Chile, well, I’m doing something that stems from colonial legacies, making “gringa” all the more appropriate.
A “melting-pot” of my past & future.
Holly Sandman,
Ione, CA.
I’ve been learning a lot about my ancestors and their immigration into America. I am Irish. I am Scottish. I am Dutch. I am German. I am Swedish, and these are only the ones I have identified so far. I am a melting pot of ancestors and struggles and successes. But I am here, and I want to do something positive with my time on this Earth. I have children, and they will carry my melting pot of history with them, along with that of their father, who brings to the table more German, and Greek. So how do I identify with a generic term of “white”. It’s not that simple, yet I do want to honor my heritage such as it is. I want to honor that the Irish were discriminated against when they first immigrated, yet they stayed and fought for their place here, as did many other immigrants. I don’t think any one race or nationality is better than any other. We all bring to the table unique histories and contributions. We all have the ability to love each other and lift each other up and encourage one another as fellow humans. That is the legacy I hope to leave my children. One of service to each other in wanting this world to be a better place because we were all in it.
Thank you for reading.
Showing my black daughter the cabins
Benjamin Baugh,
Athens, GA.
I am a white man and my daughter is a black girl. One day, I will have to walk with her down into the woods behind the old family farmhouse and show her the place where the short row of cabins once stood, and I’ll have to own that ancestral sin absolutely and without the equivocation my Southern upbringing inclines me to make.
She will own the old house, and the land it sits on one day, and it’ll be her decision how to handle that legacy. I hope I have it in me to always speak truth about these things to her.
I am probably not what you think.
Adriana M.,
Canada.
How about being the only-child black sheep of a Colombian mother and Irish/Ukrainian father? My mom could pass for Italian, but her Hispanic legacy is strongly expressed in me, all wrapped up in an Irish surname. I grew up without much diversity and didn’t even realise I looked different from everyone else until I moved to a big city for university. Getting asked what I am or labelled as purely Colombian gets so old at home, but when abroad I thrive in the confusion my appearance causes. I can “pass” for a lot of ethnicities – First Nations, Turkish, Hawaiian, half Asian, a dark Eastern European. Fun, but it still doesn’t quite make up for the identity-angst I often feel.
Race’s Reality and Historical Legacy Matter
Gabriel Rossi,
Jersey City, NJ.
As a white male I want to learn about the realities people from all nations experience in the United States and around the world. I hope to do this by listening and educating myself through building relationships. I believe walking with and having real relationships with people who have different realities than me will inform my own understanding on the complex issue of race. This will hopefully form the way I treat others and hopefully transform the structures in society that perpetuate injustice.
This history My life My legacy
Saundra Thomas
New York City, NY
My life began at the start of the civil rights movement. 1962. the music of the civil rights movement is the soundtrack of my childhood. I grew up black in a mixed community, too black to befriend the whites and too “white” to befriend the blacks….and lesbian. my legacy is building community and finding common ground.
Our legacy is students, not law
Martha S. Jones
Ann Arbor, MI
Submitted via Twitter: @marthasjonesUM
Slavery’s legacy haunts “value” of blacks
Piper Kendrix Williams
Wyndmoor, PA
This morning (6/27/13) I heard the story on Morning Edition’s Race Card segment of the sliding fee scale based on the race of a child being adopted. The conversation touched on the difficulty and complicated nature of assigning differing “value” to black, bi-racial, and white children. It seemed clear to me, that like many things, value and race are haunted by the legacy of slavery. Black children had literal/monetary value to their slave masters (sometimes fathers as well) but NO value as a human being with equal right. In the still questionable “freedom” we exist in today can any honestly say the America “values” all of its children equally?
Racism is stealing this President’s legacy.
Tisha Johnson,
Submitted via Twitter: @TheShenme.
