Why Talk About American Slavery in 2024?

Nothing is gained by dwelling on long-past injustices

American History

WHY TALK ABOUT AMERICAN SLAVERY IN 2024?

Nothing is gained by dwelling on long-past injustices

W. F. Twyman, Jr.

Why is it important for me to talk about American slavery in 2024? It's really not important. I could live a fine and wonderful life and not give a second thought to American slavery. I think infinitely more often about dodging the homeless in downtown San Diego or about my daughter becoming Little Miss Social on her college campus. I care far more about moving my oldest son into his new dorm at Stanford. 

Isn’t that progress? Some people, such as my lovely wife, say they are not ready to let go of slavery. A woman born in 1967 in Brooklyn is not ready to let go of slavery. When we hold onto resentments and grudges, we are not hurting the slave owner. Nor are we helping the slave. They are all dead and buried and turned to dust and bones and non-existence. 

For me, progress is the ability to let the dead rest undisturbed and to not have to talk about past horrors today. My co-writer on Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America,  Jennifer Richmond, might argue it is nonetheless still important to talk about slavery so that we never forget. Okay, but I reached that realization in the 4^th grade. Presumably, other 4th-graders will, too. Why should a 62-year-old man talk about American slavery in the year 2024? It doesn’t make sense to me.

One could say we must talk about slavery in 2024 because of the lingering effects of slavery in poverty and crime. Those homeless people you are dodging every morning are the living consequences of a sinister institution. This argument appeals to the compassionate heart but it falls short upon closer inspection. The majority of the homeless I encounter every day are not homeless as a result of past slavery. These people are mostly white drug addicts and the mentally disturbed, the white oppressed as it were. There is no nexus or logical connection to slavery as a Caucasian disheveled man pulls down his pants and exposes himself in broad daylight on a busy city street. Even if a disproportionate number of the homeless are black Americans, correlation is not causation due to long ago slavery. There are too many intervening events such as Reconstruction, the rise of stable black families before the 1960s, and the impact of drug  addiction in the 1980s and 1990s to claim that the enslavement of an ancestor in the 1600s, 1700s, or 1800s caused a black man to be homeless on San Diego streets today. Such an assertion would be an insult to the man’s ancestors, his grandparents and great-grandparents. 

Another argument for talking about slavery today is the need for reparations for the unpaid labor of American slavery. Generations of people were uncompensated for their labor. As a matter of equity, we must bring their slave claims into the present. In “Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved,” the authors estimated that back pay for slave labor would amount to $6.2 quadrillion at 6% interest, payment for loss of freedom would come out to $16 quadrillion at 6% interest, with $22.2 quadrillion for pain and suffering for a total reparations payment of $44.4 quadrillion. The total annual U.S. Government budget amounted to $6.13 trillion in fiscal year 2023 for comparison. That’s 0.0138% of the total reparations supposedly owed.

An activist ensconced in her faculty office at Harvard (or Howard) might say we must talk about slavery today, tomorrow, and always because of the psychological impacts of slavery, including a black inferiority complex that has been transmitted down the generations. Although there are exceptions, too many American descendants of slavery bear the mental stigma of ancestral enslavement. Descendants carry the burden on their shoulders of past slavery every day. Sigh. If I had grown up in an affluent and mostly white Boston suburb or a wealthy and mostly white San Francisco bedroom community with no personal knowledge of black American culture and consciousness, I might as a Leftist white American be lulled by this argument. I grew up with and among black people for nearly all of my life. I know better. If there are over 40 million black Americans, there are over 40 million mindsets and stories about engaging the world. My ancestors in Chesterfield County, Virginia lived closer to slavery than I and yet the people I call grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents lived in a tradition of church membership and property ownership, in self-reliance, in duty to achieve. They loved themselves, their ancestors, and their posterity. My people were “based” before being based was a thing.

Finally, there is the argument that our ancestors were done wrong. They were enslaved and we need to keep their enslavement in our hearts. No...we don’t. Our ancestors would be pained to know their descendants were holding onto a nightmarish past while living in a blessed present. As the artist Adrian Piper put it to Thomas Chatterton Williams, “if the pain and guilt isn’t there, why introduce it?” Keep that thought right there as you consider my position. No living man or woman owes any allegiance to the pain and suffering of the deceased. Our duty is to do our best in this life as we live to the fullest in the here and now. Suppose I were denied tenure unfairly in the year 1997 because I was too black for some, and too white for others? Would I want my great-great-grandchildren to carry around that wound in the year 2160? The answer is the loudest possible “NO” that I can express without breaking the keys on my keyboard. 

Never bring the sorrow of the deceased into the future potential of our posterity. 

In my daily life, I step around mentally-ill homeless people who happen to be mostly white, not descendants of slaves. My heart is thrilled on the weekends when I hear about college social life from my daughter at Yale. And I feel a wonderful sense of fulfillment as my son works to finish his MBA degree at Stanford. These are the moments in life I cherish.

I am not talking about slavery. 

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W. F. Twyman Jr., a former law professor, was born in Richmond, Virginia. He came of age in the New South in the 1970s. A graduate of the University of Virginia and Harvard Law School, Twyman is the co-author (with Jennifer Richmond) of the acclaimed book, Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America. He appeared with his co-author on the Free Black Thought Podcast to discuss the book with host Connie Morgan. His essay in the Pennsylvania Lawyer Magazine inspired the posthumous admission, in 2010, of the first black lawyer in New York state, George Boyer Vashon, to the Pennsylvania State Bar, which had denied him twice, in 1847 and in 1868. His previous article for the Journal of Free Black Thought was a defense of George Washington. He writes at Substack here.