Update on Cultural Homelessness
On April 17th, a few days after I posed about my thoughts on the effects of not knowing about MY cultural heritage because of slavery, Ancestory.com released a new advertisement depicting a black woman, a slave, and her white owner having seemingly mutual relationship to the point of the white guy wants to marry the black woman.
Black Twitter wasn't having it and Janina M. Jeff (@inthosegehespod) had something to say that I've been talking about all along. She said,
"The idea that a Black woman might be reminded of the rape of her ancestors still present in her DNA through her European ancestry is never addressed by these companies or even a thought because no one who makes these decisions really understand the impact of this trauma." She goes on to say, "stop pretending that interracial romance was possible with such stark power differential; or that it can be conflated to pervasiveness of sexual abuse against Black women."
The thought that a "relationship" with someone who owns you, or at least is capable of owning you, is coercion AKA Stockholm Syndrome. In reality, it's rape. Coming to terms with that kind of history written in your bloodlines can be traumatizing to say the least.
For those of you not aware of the book, "kindred" it is about a Black woman (Dana) married to a white man in today's society (really 1970s society because the book was written in 1979). Dana experiences time travel and travels as a black women to antebellum Maryland where slavery is practiced. Here she meets her ancestors: a proud black free-woman and a white planter who has forced her into slavery and concubinage. As Dana's stays in the past become longer, she becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community. She makes hard choices to survive slavery and to ensure her return to her own time.
Taking a DNA test to find out my heritage, I think, would feel a bit like Dana going back to Maryland. I wonder what choices I would need to make to come to terms with slavery, rape, and loss in real life...not just a story in a book somewhere.