Looking through racially charged Facebook posts and YouTube videos I see the same comment over and over again, "black people use slavery as a crutch."
Those who don't fully grasp the struggles within the black community may wonder African Americans don't just move on and let go of the past. They fail to recognize how slavery that ended in 1865 affects us today in 2017.
Unlike several other ethnicities, the African people did not voluntarily come to the United States during the slave era. Africans were taken from their homes and families, shackled, and placed on a boat where many were unable to survive the difficult trans-atlantic trip. Instead of being seen as humans, the enslaved africans had become property, that could be easily bought and sold.
Most of us are able to acknowledge this part of the African-American struggle.
The problem arises when African-American people bring up these facts to explain the struggles that we encounter on a daily basis. Some argue would argue that slavery ended more than one-hundred years ago, and that we need to move on. Others may wonder why we bring up the subject if we were never actually slaves. Our ancestors are the ones that should be upset because they were the people that were enslaved. Slavery has ended and the african- american people living in the United States in 2017, are no longer affected by slavery. This is one of the biggest misconceptions regarding the black community in the United States. While we we never enslaved, we are still working through the after effects of enslavement
After the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, the slaves did not have the resources to go back to Africa to learn about where they had come from. Slavery lasted for 245 years. By the time slavery ended, the African people had lost their language and culture. They no longer knew where the came from from because their heritage was robbed from them. We don't know where we come from because that was robbed from us.
We aren't asking others to feel guilty, we just want others to understand that we are trying to figure out who are as a people.
