The Living Consequences

As I returned to the U.S. from Havana last night, the Associated Press released a story on our visit, “US family finds traces of slave-trade past in Cuba.”

The article has been running prominently in the U.S. and abroad, making the A.P.’s daily top stories list as their third-listed international story in the world.

I spent ten days in Cuba with Katrina Browne and Tulaine Marshall, and the article focuses on our visit Sunday to the site of the Mount Hope coffee plantation owned by my fifth-great grandfather, James D’Wolf.

The article, written by the A.P.’s Will Weissert, is quite impressive, and I’m particularly pleased with the way it ends:

While both she and Perry have worked to uncover their family’s role, they say no Americans – even those whose descendants came to the U.S. after slavery was abolished – should feel unaffected. The early U.S. economy so relied on slavery that it fueled a boom, making America an attractive destination for immigrants ….

“None of us,” Perry said, “are untouched by the legacy of slavery today.”

Click here to read the rest of this entry

I can now share that three of us from Traces of the Trade—director Katrina Browne, Tulaine Marshall, and I, are scheduled to travel to Cuba next week for the visit of the Amistad.

We are scheduled to sail into Havana’s harbor on board the Amistad on March 25, in conjunction with the United Nations International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

We also expect to hold the Cuban premiere of the documentary, which was filmed in part on location in Cuba, in Havana on March 27.

Katrina and I have not been back to Cuba since filming Traces of the Trade, and we are eager to share the film with the Cuban people, as well as to engage in further historical research on the D’Wolf slave trade, continue the search for slave plantations owned by the D’Wolfs, and look for descendants of those enslaved by the D’Wolf family. We are also looking forward to reuniting with those who helped us make the film, including Cuban filmmaker Boris Crespo, who was our Cuban line producer.

Click here to read the rest of this entry

It’s official: The Amistad will sail to Cuba next week.

The schooner Amistad, the replica of the famous ship which experienced a slave revolt in 1839 and a subsequent court case, will sail to Cuba next week for a ten-day visit at the conclusion of its 2010 Caribbean Heritage Tour.

Amistad is scheduled to arrive in Cuba on March 22. The vessel will first visit Matanzas, a port that is closely associated with slavery in Cuba and the site of a UNESCO-sponsored slavery museum. On March 25, Amistad will sail to Havana for a week-long port call and a variety of public events.

The Amistad‘s visit to Cuba coincides with the United Nation’s International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade on March 25. Activities will include a three-hour simulcast to the United Nations in New York. This will also be the tenth anniversary of the launching of the replica Amistad from Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.

Those of us associated with Traces of the Trade and the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery are proud to be partnered with Amistad America in support of this tour.

Today is the first anniversary of remarks by actor and activist Edward James Olmos at the United Nations about the idea of race as a social fiction.

I posted about these remarks at the time, but I want to use this occasion  as an excuse to highlight once again what Olmos had to say that day, and I’m even going to take the unusual step for me of embedding the video of his remarks here.

The reason I’m doing this is that I’ve never heard this idea expressed with more power and conviction. Each time I see this, I’m reminded of just how powerful the myth of race is, and how important it is for those in the public eye to speak the plain truth that the emperor has no clothes:

Click here to read the rest of this entry

One of our toughest challenges in presenting Traces of the Trade is to help audiences acknowledge the often-hidden complicity in slavery, not merely of our slave-trading family, but of all of New England (and, indeed, the entire nation).

Tonight, I’m attending a screening and discussion of the documentary in Concord, Massachusetts, hosted by the Drinking Gourd Project and featuring Dain and Constance Perry, from the film, and Jayne Gordon, director of education and public programs at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

See if you can spot anything problematic in the press release for the event:

The Drinking Gourd Project will present a screening and discussion of Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. … A discussion with DeWolfe family members will follow the film.

Historian Jayne Gordon will link the film to local history – discussing the life stories and struggle for freedom of early African residents of Concord, as well as the town’s leadership in the Abolitionist movement.

That’s right: they’re planning to discuss a film about the hidden complicity of New England in slavery, and about the difficulty many white people have in acknowledging that history, by talking about how their own New England town featured free blacks and abolitionists.

Click here to read the rest of this entry

If you’ve watched our documentary, Traces of the Trade, then you’ve seen that one of the DeWolf slave-trade descendants in the film is Dain Perry.

Of the ten of us who took the journey shown in the film, Dain and I were usually closely in sync on issues involving race, much more so than either of us was with anyone else. This is particularly surprising because, although Dain is my uncle, as he explains in the film, he grew up surrounded by intense racism in the Jim Crow South, while I was raised in a progressive, racially mixed environment many years later.

Click here to read the rest of this entry

On tonight’s episode of “The Simpsons,” Lisa Simpson explores her family’s historical connection to slavery and presents the results at school for Black History Month.

This was fascinating for me to watch, as my own family’s powerful connection to slavery has taken up much of my time and energy over the last decade. Being a direct descendant of the leading slave trader in U.S. history, I think I can also relate to Lisa’s worry that her family tree sometimes seems dominated by scoundrels.

Disappointingly, however, this episode perpetuates some of the most common stereotypes that dominate public perceptions about the connections of American families to the nation’s history of slavery. For, immediately after learning that the Simpson family had a connection to slavery, we hear that this story involves Simpson ancestors living in the South, and that they were, in fact, anti-slavery and risked everything they had to take part in the Underground Railroad.

Click here to read the rest of this entry

Slavery in New England was brutal and lasted, in its official form, for 150 years. Enslavement greatly enriched the colonists and, later, citizens of New England, and only died out gradually and fitfully.

This is the proposition of an op-ed appearing in tomorrow’s Boston Globe, entitled “New England’s scarlet ‘S’ for slavery,” in honor of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The op-ed suggests that the northern states lag behind the South in acknowledging the difficult truths of race buried in our past, and that we cannot skip this step if we are to make progress on race relations.

The essay is written by C. S. Manegold, who is the author of Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North (2009), published last month by Princeton University Press.

Click here to read the rest of this entry

I had hoped that the imbroglio over Harry Reid’s remarks on race would have died down by now, but unfortunately that is not the case.

Those who have read my previous post about Reid’s remarks know that I don’t see any reason why Reid should resign as Senate majority leader, or even why his remarks should be considered scandalous.

I do believe, however, that this situation, unlike the dispute between Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Sergeant James Crowley, genuinely constitutes a “teachable moment.” This is why I’m not surprised that the public back-and-forth about what Reid said has continued so vehemently, and why I want to take the time to elaborate on several issues I raised on Monday.

Specifically, I want to say more about the truth of what Reid said about how people respond to skin tone and dialect, elaborate on the history and meaning of the word “Negro,” and say one or two things about how even plain truths can be sensitive to discuss in the context of race.

Click here to read the rest of this entry

Yesterday, the blogosphere erupted in a firestorm of controversy over remarks by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in 2008 that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was “light-skinned” and spoke “with no Negro dialect.”

This is the second time in recent weeks that Senator Reid has found himself in hot water over issues relating to slavery and race. Last month, Reid drew controversy for comparing Republican opponents of health care reform to those who resisted abolishing slavery.

This time, he is facing calls from Republicans to step down as majority leader because of ill-considered remarks about the leader of his own party.

Reid’s comments were revealed in a new book about the 2008 presidential campaign, entitled Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Pain, and the Race of a Lifetime, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. In the book, the authors say that while Reid was officially neutral in the primary fight between Obama and then-Senator Hillary Clinton, in private he was “unequivocal” in his encouragement of Obama:

He was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he said privately. Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.

This passage from the book appears to have been reported first by The Atlantic on Friday, and Senator Reid apologized for his choice of words on Saturday.

What, exactly, is this controversy about?

Click here to read the rest of this entry