Thread by @gindaanis

If you want to understand contemporary race relations you have got to understand history as a hand over hand transmission of ideas and beliefs that show themselves in connected events.

We are taught history as eras, each one giving way to the next in progression

That is false.

My father was born in the 40s. He remembers his grandfather who was born in the 1880s. That means I have second hand accounts of life at the turn of that century. Ideas about race. Indigenous people's place in Canada.

Isaiah was a Hudson's Bay man in Northwestern Ontario.

Your Black friends have similar stories. Grandparents who would have heard first or second hand accounts of slavery. Of the end of slavery. Maybe first hand accounts of Jim Crow and everything that replaced slavery.

Your white grandparents also have first or second hand accounts of that time period from a very different perspective.

We need to see and read history differently. The ideas that resulted in the reserve system, slavery, residential schools, Jim Crow, dispossession.

These ideas did not just go away. They just found other ways of existing.

Why do you think that the American 13th amendment includes a provision in which slavery is still legal?

Why include that exclusion?

Because the ideas remained even if the peculiar institution did not.

So read history. But think carefully about the timeline. Who, in your family tree, would have been alive at that time?

It's an interesting exercise. Drawing out your family tree and then overlaying it with historic events. Seeing how close and connected these things really are.