Thread by @KosherSoul

Ok so here we go. #1619Project thoughts

First thing. My thoughts expressed here are mostly independent of what I've read thus far and reflect my need to adjust some commonly held perceptions re: the African American story #1619Project so this is a commentary about the whole narrative not a critique

#1619Project the "20 and odd Negroes" were a complicated lot not just the first boatload of Blacks delivered to "git to work!" Many were Christians. They had been Christians in Africa thanks to the Portuguese introducing Roman Catholicism. They were multicultural&multilingual.

#1619Project They found themselves caught up in the wars of trade&mercantilism in the newly born Atlantic World. They were Atlantic Creoles. They were not deep in the interior-never saw a white man-folks. They lived in a very cosmopolitan post-colonial Africa.

#1619Project their cosmopolitan Africa had already sent emissaries and ambassadors to the Vatican. Had Bibles in KiKongo and KiMbundu&had failed attempts by royals to refuse involvement in the trade in enslaved chattel. They had warrior queens& mercenary tribes&savvy traders

#1619Project the Central Africans invented Black Jesus. Through Kongo-Angola the diet, words, spiritual beliefs and self image of Black Africans began to change. Nobody was ready for the flood of sea changes that were about to happen.

#1619Project first lesson. The most interesting facts are these...1. British Mainland North America was a backwater. 2. If it were not for wind, storms and pirates, Black America would have merely been a trickle offshoot of the Caribbean. 3. The 1619 crowd were an anomaly

#1619Project many of the descendants of the original group became the forebears of mixed families. Many would eventually pass for white or become part of triracial Southern minorities like the melungeons. Others died out within a few generations. Others seeded Black America.

#1619Project these Ancestors were part of a global system. They were part of the African Diaspora and the African Atlantic. It is important to understand that African America was not an orphan, roots were not torn overnight& that not all African enslaved had the same experience

#1619Project the most remarkable thing about African cultures in the Afro Atlantic is how many similar responses they developed independently of each other to similar challenges of oppression, sexual imbalance, forced assimilation&tortuous exploitation.

#1619Project but these were also flexible, dynamic, clever people. They were quick to incorporate other artifacts, ideas and social customs by grafting them onto an African tree. Some of these transitions pre-date New World arrivals. In other words the process had already begun.

#1619Project It is interesting and heartbreaking that Anglo American ideas about freedom were juxtaposed against racial chattel slavery in a country largely supported by the same with a war/debt repayment funded partly by the production of the labor of the enslaved.

#1619Project but...here is the scary part...it takes 20-30 years for a semi-equality to erode any chances for their to be equality among the colors of early America. Some of the first arrivals, some of whom had limited terms of indenture, enjoyed rights that would be respected ..

#1619Project for another 250 years. British mainland North America decided it would not copy Spanish colonial flexibility. It would invent a rigid racial caste system where faith, nor money, nor "lightening the race," nor clout would change the leopard's spots. Worse it made

#1619Project it made the Black body a commodity and unlike anywhere else in the New World, it enshrined whiteness as a passively earned value, a vested authority and commodified white supremacy under an Anglocentric lens of authority..

#1619Project this didnt make enslavement in other areas ANY less brutal or horrific.Brasil.Haiti.Jamaica come to mind with 5-7 year lifespans. But the cruel joke in what would become the US was this."freedom"&"liberty"& "equality" had to go for Blk&Brown ppl in the 17th century

#1619Project so for me while it is sobering to look at the long duree it is really useful to look at the incredible histories written in the past 50 years about the deterioration of ideas abt rights and equality vis-a-vis Indigenous folks and Africans. In 30 years we were nothing

#1619Project the question is this...why why why why why
Did that first generation of white people begin to invest in a system of belief that was only fairly mild in Europe and used it to order their New World..why did they choose separate&unequal and want to damn Black America?

#1619Project they were like nope. You're not going to marry us,u can't have land, you cant testify against us, your faith or father's status will not free u, there will be 8 ways to be enslaved then more,we will deputize both white &Native males against you m&limit your commerce

#1619Project what made them loose their damn minds to the point where we want these people to be perpetually under our foot? Or to go further, we want them underfoot and we want to be more free than we've ever been anywhere at anytime on their backs and G-ds watch....

#1619Project I also want to throw out there that Black acculturation was never a one way street&it did not take place overnight but over generations. An d I feel the need to say emphatically we were never orphans of Africa or the West. Our identity has never been a tabula rasa.

#1619Project one of the most dangerous myths about African American culture are the tropes of the fading roots and dying gods, cut ties and shadows and other nonsense. That's not how it happened.

#1619Project that myth makes us comfortable with overall ignorance of African and Afro-Atlantic civilizations or even African responses to different colonial systems which mirror some of the responses in the Americas from a century before

#1619Project just because most people don't know how to see those roots, connections&cultural continuities has no bearing on their existence. To evaluate African American history by comparing it to a mythical static African culture/identity is harmful bc it removes our agency.

#1619Project we are a unique people but we are part of a continuum and a global civilization and we have much to be proud of as we responded and respond to unasked for hardships and terrors. We are here for a reason. We were made for our crown. End.