The Tribune

EMANCIPATION Day, marking the 1834 abolition of slavery, is celebrated on 1 August. Enslavers kidnapped 3.1 million people from the west coast of Africa, trafficked them through the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Persons, and forced them to work on plantations in horrific conditions. The effects of slavery continue today, including in the majority-black country that is The Bahamas, as many incorrectly and insultingly insist that racism does not exist and race does not matter.

The Bahamas National Reparations Committee—and the CARICOM Reparations Committee along with other national committees—is working to help people in the country, the region, international agencies, and all over the world to understand the longstanding consequences of slavery and the debt owed to the descendants of enslaved people.

In a LinkedIn post, Chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, Gaynel Curry, said, “What strikes me most about this date, every year, is not just what was achieved but also the active role the enslaved themselves played for hundreds of years in bringing chattel slavery to an end. Emancipation was claimed by people who understood their moment, who organised across distances for generations, who voted with their feet when they had no other instrument and who refused every compromise that fell short of full freedom. That is the spirit we honour.”

“That journey is not over,” she continued. “Today, when we think about reparatory justice, gender equality, climate action, socio-economic inclusion, and human rights for all people of African descent globally, we are still motivated by the same spirit that drove our ancestors to say we want freedom and we want it now. Freedom, justice and equality.” 

August 2, one day after Emancipation Day, is the birthday of novelist, essayist, and civil rights activist James Baldwin. In The First Next Time, a letter from Baldwin to his nephew (his namesake “James”), appears. In My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation, Baldwin wrote about being black, the constraints of a racist society, and the way to access to freedom. In this letter, there are several lessons for black people.

One: You are here because you are loved and to be loved, even as the racist ways of the world challenge your right to survive it.

“[…] Though your father and mother and grandmother, looking about the streets through which they were carrying you, staring at the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavyhearted, yet they were not. For here you were, Big James, named for me—you were a big baby, I was not—here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.”

This is a nudge for us toward the light. It pushes toward the place where we are most loved and respected. It acknowledges the ugliness that we can face at any turn, yet it focuses on the good that holds us up and keeps us going.

Two: Survival, and the impetus to survive, is generational. It’s both a gift and a responsibility to ancestors and those who will come after us, looking to our actions to guide their own.

“We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children's children.”

Three: Defy expectations. Reject the limitations a racist society tries to foist upon you.

“You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry.”

Mediocrity is not a destiny for us. It’s often what others intend for us, but we need not settle. While understanding the perception they have of us is important, it’s critical that we reject them in favour of our own inner knowings of ourselves and our people.

Four: Your experience is your truth. Let no one control your narrative or destiny.

“I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying, ‘You exaggerate.’ They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.

Five: You

“The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.

Six: There is no acceptance more important than your own acceptance of yourself.

“Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.

We are not meant to collapse ourselves into the ways of being, living, or working that have been imposed by a racist society. It’s not for us to make ourselves invisible, or even palatable, for that society. We don’t need to seek acceptance. Instead, we can look at the people whose lack of information and processing of historical facts—whether or not by their own refusal—as unfortunate. Could it be for this reason that they seek dominate, even today? What does it mean for the movement of black people, whose rights and daily lives are negatively impacted by racism and the expectation that we make ourselves “acceptable?”

Seven: Commitment requires action, action can shift reality, and shifts in reality can weaken identity.

“Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger […] Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don't be afraid. I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality.”

Be unafraid in breaking the barriers set for black people. It’s not for us to make ourselves smaller, but to take every opportunity to find and create for ourselves and for one another to shine. Many chips were stacked against us, yet we’re here. There’s further to go, and we will make those steps together too, changing reality minute by minute, achievement by achievement, creation by creation. Know that a racist society will not enjoy the new reality, and that is due to its own (many) shortcomings.

Eight: Remind yourself of your freedom

“But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again[…] It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

In this year, as we celebrate Emancipation, let us see it as a reminder of our freedom to be here. To be here, and not at all religious. To be here, and to be a woman. To be here, and to live with a disability. To be here, and to be an artist. To be here, and to be queer. To be here, and to be disobedient, or impolite, or whatever they choose to call the person who will not conform, who will not follow nonsensical rules, who will not accept the unacceptable, who insists on making a home in a place a racist society still wants to think it can control.

We come from a long line of resisters, of rebels, of overcomers, and they are depending on us to continue their legacy, and chart a path for those after us who will be more unacceptable, more demanding, more radical, and who will shift reality beyond the recognition of the people in it now.