My Ancestors Did NOT Build This Country
Peter Gordon, An Escaped, Enslaved Man From A Louisiana Plantation, via House Therapy
I want to invite people to interrogate a little bit deeper[into] what that means, making a choice to leave a violent situation from a place of empowerment versus abandonment. People leave relationships when they identify that they are harmful or not serving them. People leave cities and states for other opportunities for a better life and quality of living. That is literally the same thing that many of our ancestors did, from the enslaved people who were led by Harriet Tubman and escaped plantations, to the Black folks escaping the South to the North starting in the early 1900s during The Great Migration.
I consider us as Black Americans to be in a toxic and abusive relationship with the United States. I'm not abandoning anything because I am a Black American with a blue passport no matter where I go. The fact is that my ancestors built that country, though against their will and through tremendous suffering, violence, terror, and exploitation that continues to this day. That is my twisted and complicated legacy and connection to that country, and my passport is the least it owes me. I believe that freedom means choice. If we are truly free, then we should have a choice where we can live and thrive and have rest and joy and peace and pleasure.
*Excerpt from an interview conducted by Nicole Cardoza with Tina Strawn.
Forced To Stay Vs. Choosing To Leave
Now, it is one thing for Black Americans to choose that they don’t want to leave the United States for any number of reasons. But it should be the right of every American, Black or otherwise, to choose to stay or choose to leave. Is it freedom if we are forced—directly or indirectly—to stay?
It is something entirely different to ascribe a sense of ownership, pride, and even strange (fruit) tradition to feeling compelled to stay in the country that enslaved and abused our ancestors and us, to this very day.
Trauma bonding is a muthafucker. It is not unusual for an abused person to develop sentimental feelings and attach value to people and places that are responsible for, or complicit in, their abuse.
However, my confusion around the discourse of whether or not Black Americans should, or have the right to, leave the United States isn’t with the people who want to stay. My confusion is what’s up with the animosity towards those of us Black Americans who dared find a way to escape the MAGA plantation… as if WE were the perpetrators, as if we weren’t all the victims of a nation that never wanted us to live, let alone thrive, outside of their very specific purposes of dehumanizing and using us to build the white man’s wet dream of a “land of the free, home of the brave.”
I have heard the criticism of Black Americans like me who have chosen to leave Amerikkka, and what it implies is that our patriotic duty is somehow to stay on the plantation and die in the field. So we, Black folk, who found a way to get free should just get back over there and be good little nigger slaves on stolen land? Telling Black people to accept a less-than-human status, embedded in the very document that governs that nation, is anti-Black.
They have never stopped lynching us. I have spent the past five years leading groups of people through the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. My nephew was lynched in Stillwater, Oklahoma, just last April, and he won’t be the last. So this liberation strategy of breaking free from the mental, and psychological chains of the unique brand of American exceptionalism is very personal to me. But this is not just Tina’s opinion. We, as a people, must reckon with the reality that the United States of America has a particular appetite for Black bodies hanging from proverbial and literal trees.
Leaving a country that harms us to find a safe space is not abandonment; it is liberation.
I, a descendant of enslaved Africans, was born, raised, and lived 43 years in several different states in that country. Now, at the age of 47 and having lived in Costa Rica for the past three years, I consider myself someone who has escaped the American plantation and found (some degree of) freedom in another land… you know, like what Harriet Tubman and the hundreds of enslaved people she led off plantations did.
And so I would like to interrogate and clarify some things about this statement about WHO, which, in fact, built this country. Because the “land” was actually very specifically not made for you and me as the descendants of enslaved Africans. And yet, the contradiction is that we, our enslaved ancestors, very specifically did “make” it. Sort of.
Stop me when I tell a lie. I just want us to be clear…
Who Exactly Are You Referring To When You Say “Our Ancestors Built This Country”?
There is no dispute that our enslaved African ancestors, in chains and by the whip before 1865 and then in racist policies and institutional power after that, “built” many, many things, such as buildings and dwellings, roads, and the infrastructure of cities and towns that made up the states.
Our enslaved African ancestors cultivated the stolen land and developed methods that grew the products, such as cotton and tobacco, which built the American economy and empire.
Our enslaved African ancestors made the food, created the art, wrote the songs, hymns, and spirituals to believe and dream their way free.
Our enslaved African ancestors utilized their wit, know-how, and ingenuity to survive.
They embodied resilience and faith.
They built an entire culture that was born not out of choice, but by force and out of suffering and driven by a desire for freedom.
Therefore, in that sense, yes, our enslaved African ancestors provided the free labor that made the country grow and thrive. But our ancestors’ legacy is much greater than a country.
What Did They Build?
America is made of genocide, white supremacy, patriarchy, and exploitation. My ancestors didn’t build that.
America was founded on white Christian nationalism and a whitemalegod religion that reigns supreme TO THIS VERY DAY.
Did I miss where our ancestors signed their names on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?
What part of putting us in ships across the Atlantic to then be separated from our tribes and families did our ancestors agree to?
Were they given the choice to leave Africa to go build America for the European boys who fled England?
What part of these past 248+ years
of the genocide of the Indigenous Peoples
of the enslavement of Africans
of these past 46 presidents
of this Congress and House of Representatives that does NOT reflect or represent the actual will of the people
Ok, so our ancestors literally built the White House, as in they erected the beams, painted the halls… but they had no say in how said nation would be formed, would be run, or would be ruled.
My ancestors were, and we still are, in servitude which is and has always been their/our permanent position for the complete and total duration of the life of this wretched nation.
Therefore, which part of this failing empire, which part of this genocidal war machine, terrorist corporation, must we feel obliged to lay claim to?
No, my ancestors did not build this shit that we struggle with and against—to survive, to thrive, to live despite its attempts to kill us every single day.
The Biggest Fucking Asterisk*
If it must be said that, “our ancestors built this country,”* may we include an explanatory asterisk:
*Against their will
*Without giving their consent
*With their blood, sweat, and tears, with no compensation, payment still owed, payment still denied to those of us left behind to fucking figure it out
*In chains and were designated and treated as chattel, for the very purpose of building the white men’s nation that they were trafficked to
*having had nothing to do with the laws that would govern
Beloveds, what I can and do emphatically say is that MY ANCESTORS BUILT ME, and built in us the will, ingenuity, perseverance, and faith to survive… by any means necessary. I would argue that YOU and I are the hope and the dream of the enslaved. Not America.
If You Must Stay, If You Must Leave
Maybe once this evil empire ceases to be
we can build something worthy of every person who gave their lives for this to be a place of freedom for all.
This is why we must fight to build
a place worthy of and for our descendants
so as this nation goes down in flames
maybe then we can finally begin to build a country
worthy of our ancestors
in honor of our ancestors.
So stay and fight if you must
go down with the sinking ship if you feel so inclined
but have a little understanding and some compassion
for those of us who didn’t choose to drown
those of us who swam to safer shores
those of us who escaped burning buildings
those of us who fled so we wouldn’t be raped, lynched, and gunned down by the state that some credit my ancestors with building.
Let us come together and defy, disobey, and disrupt that country. Let us do everything in our power to get ourselves free. It is my hope, my wish, and my prayer that others will join me/us who have left that country and chosen to be some version of the global orphans that we already are and find/make/build a home for ourselves, our families, and our communities, where we can try to live a life of dignity and not be under constant threat of and by the state.
That country is no place to be proud of. That country is not a place to aspire to or save.
Perhaps if my ancestors had built America, I wouldn’t want or need to leave. And perhaps if yours had, you wouldn’t resent staying. Many of us CHOOSE to leave and live in ways our ancestors NEVER had the chance to choose, and it is through this decision that some of us honor them.
“I can’t tell the story of you, America, without telling about the way you began, with the genocide of millions of Indigenous people. I can’t tell the story of us, of me and you, America, without telling about the brutal enslavement and exploitation of my ancestors bought and stolen from the shores of Africa, where I was supposed to and should have been born in love. But instead, you brought my people here to be born in your original sin. Now the time has come for me to leave so I can be reborn, so I can give birth to my freed self, in love.”
(Excerpt from the book, Are We Free Yet? The Black Queer Guide to Divorcing America)