history staring you in the face
2021-06-04 00:19:25.008019+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
You are looking at a photograph of me and my cousin Shannon Lanier. It’s a photograph that illustrates why the 1619 Project is such a white supremacist’s nightmare, teaching that racism and slavery played a major role in the founding of this nation. It’s a photograph of the truth exposed, at least in part, by critical race theory, an academic discipline that teaches the same thing. It is not only a photograph, it is a fact. It is history staring you in the face, history in flesh and blood, history that cannot be rewritten, cannot be buried, cannot be denied, because we are alive to tell it.
That’s Thomas Jefferson’s grave we’re standing on. We are 6th great grandsons of Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president long idolized as a founding father of the United States. Shannon is descended from Jefferson’s 36 year relationship – if relations between an enslaved person and a slave owner can be called that – with Sally Hemings, who is his 6th great grandmother. I am descended from Jefferson’s relationship with his wife Martha, who is my 6th great grandmother. Shannon’s great grandmother was enslaved by my 6th great grandfather. We are tied together not only by blood but by the stain of slavery on our family and our country. We are cousins, and we are also blood brothers. We carry in our souls the legacy of the slavery that brought our great grandparents together. We are descendants of slavery. It lives within us.
The whole damned thing is worth reading.