Description
"In telling the story of the African American past The Cause of Freedom demonstrates how difficult it is to answer this question. Even if we somehow ignore for a moment that the history of the African American presence in North America predates the establishment of this country by over 150 years, we are left with the puzzle: the United States of America takes great pride in its commitment to freedom and yet somehow accepted the preservation of slavery in its founding documents. Similarly, in a country that places so much rhetorical importance on the equality of opportunity, we have reconciled ourselves too easily to the sense that there's little more to be done to make accommodations for the structural inequalities that were birthed by racialized slaveryand that remain with us in the present day. Answering what it means to be American, however, does not go far enough in terms of capturing the totality of the African American past. Other deceptively brief questions speak to similarly complicated answers.For example, because the African American past predates the founding of the United States, and because that pre-Declaration history is overwhelmingly defined by the daily brutalities associated with racialized slavery, it is useful to pose the broader question, "What does it mean to be human?" Asking this question helps us gain insight into English settlers' mindset as they justified creating a system of racialized chattel slavery in colonial Virginia to replace the system of indentured servitude that they brought with them when they initially crossed the Atlantic"--
Read More
What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question.What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. If being "American" means living in a land of freedom and opportunity, what are we to make of those Americans who were enslaved and who have suffered from the limitations of second-class citizenship throughout their lives? African American history illuminates the United States' core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being. This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called "the cause of freedom." It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans' present and past have value and meaning. At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation's obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery, The Cause of Freedom tells a story about our capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in the country's foundingdocument, namely, that all people were created equal.
Read Less