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…