I've made this post before but the recency of legal chattel slavery in the usa drives me crazyyyy. Obviously chattel slavery is an unmitigated pit of evil no matter when it happens but like. the 1860s???? the 1860s. that's like YESTERDAY that's insane!!!!!
Fun fact, I would have been legally entitled to USA citizenship had I set foot in the accursed place before I turned 18. That's because my grandfather was born there, in the 1930s. My grandfather was born in a country full of living survivors of slavery. Like actual living survivors. Who had the DIRECT scars on their bodies and minds from being enslaved.
(And that's just the DIRECT scars I know well from my own family how the abuse my grandmother suffered at the hands of that grandfather impacted my father and became trauma I had to endure as a child. I can't even imagine how the legacy of trauma filters down through the families of the formerly enslaved.)
So I was born in the 1990s with a legal right to citizenship in the former slave colony, because of my grandfather being there 60 years earlier. 70 years after the abolition of slavery. I am one degree of separation from someone who lived enslaved. One degree. My grandfather shared subway cars and streets with the survivors of slavery. And he taught me how to feed chickens. One degree of seperation. For you reading this, two degrees.
