15 March, 2015

The Men Who Left Were White

The Men Who Left Were White:

But there's
a history of abandonment in America, a history of leaving black women
and black children, and it did not start with black men.

I
want to tell America: you can't escape my story. After all, mine is a
storyline threaded through all of humanity, the price women have been
overpaying since the beginning of time and sex. As long as men have been
fucking, they've been disappearing. Because women carry life we are
also forced to harbor fear; history is saturated with the stories of
babies born of coercion, of aggression, of deceit, of abandonment, and
the stories of those babies turned full-grown.

When
we talk about what slavery meant we talk about the ephemeral – what was
and what ended. The details: plantation hierarchy, middle passage. We
think That's it.

But
what it meant – what it means – is worse than all of the details. What
it means is a legacy of genetic material that courses through my own
veins.