April 3, 2026

The Present Moment 

Something historic took place last week.

On Wednesday, March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a landmark resolution (UN Resolution 80/L.48) declaring the Transatlantic Slave Trade the “gravest crime against humanity.” Spearheaded by John Dramani Mahama, president of Ghana, the resolution passed with 123 votes in favor, 3 against, and 52 abstentions.  According to an article from The Guardian:

“The United Nations has voted to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the ‘gravest crime against humanity’ and called for reparations as ‘a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs’. The landmark resolution passed on Wednesday was backed by the African Union (AU) and the Caribbean Community (Caricom). It had been proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, who said: ‘Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of millions who suffered the indignity of slavery.’

Voting in favour were 123 states, while Argentina, Israel and the US voted against. There were 52 abstentions, including the UK and members of the EU.”

*** 

I spent time earlier this week reading the resolution itself. One section in particular did not easily settle into the background of the page:

“(T)he inception of racialized chattel enslavement was historically unprecedented in its legal and structural design, being the first global regime to codify human beings and their descendants as inheritable, alienable and perpetual property, to convert human reproduction into a mechanism of capital accumulation, and to institutionalize racial hierarchy as a governing principle of international political and economic order...”

The resolution, in no uncertain terms, reaffirms a reality that is often minimized: the scale of the Transatlantic Slave Trade fundamentally altered the trajectory of the modern world. It was not a peripheral chapter in history, but a force that reshaped economies, legal systems, geographies, and human lives across generations, and justified brutality and dehumanization. As the document further states:

“(T)he inception of the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement as world-breaking and world-redefining, which ushered in the racial capitalist system, transforming the fates of all peoples across the world through new racialized regimes of labour and property…”

What struck me was not simply the recognition itself, but the weight of naming it in a global forum that has, for decades, attempted to reckon with the persistence of racial discrimination in its many forms. To describe something as “world-breaking” is to move beyond polite framing. It is to acknowledge that certain historical processes were not contained in the past, but continue to echo through present-day structures, relationships, and lived experiences.

Once I finished reading the resolution, I began to feel a familiar tension between acknowledgment and understanding—between what is stated and what must still be metabolized. Because naming alone (or staying silent) does not resolve the conditions created. It does not undo inherited consequences, nor does it automatically translate into a shared comprehension of what it means to live within the aftermath of such a system.  

So the present moment, for me, is not just about the resolution itself. It is about what it asks of us: to consider how we understand history—not as something behind us, but as something that continues to inform the ground beneath our feet, the frameworks we move through, and the assumptions that quietly shape how we interpret one another and the world.

The Unspoken Truth 

Acknowledgment, even when it is precise and far-reaching, does not automatically translate into a shared understanding of consequence. There is often a gap between what is named in formal language and what is collectively recognized in practice. That gap matters.

Because within that space, certain histories become easier to reference than others. Some are repeatedly centered, taught, and memorialized in ways that reinforce their significance, while others—equally documented, equally devastating in scope—are treated as peripheral, or discussed without fully engaging the systems that produced and sustained them. The result is not just a difference in emphasis, but a difference in how harm is weighted, remembered, and ultimately understood.

This is where an unspoken tension emerges: the ways in which global narratives of suffering and atrocity are organized into hierarchies, whether intentionally or not. These hierarchies shape what is emphasized, what is condensed, and what is left without sustained engagement. They influence how empathy is distributed, how urgency is assigned, and how historical responsibility is interpreted across contexts.

To say this plainly: acknowledgment does not always equal equivalence in attention, interpretation, or response.

And for those of us whose histories are tied to the aftermath of the systems described in that resolution, this gap is not theoretical. It is lived. It shows up in the ways our experiences are framed, in the assumptions that accompany our presence in certain spaces, and in the expectations placed on us to interpret, absorb, or translate histories that have already been documented in exhaustive detail, yet remain unevenly integrated into collective understanding.

I'm not here to assign blame but to promote the idea that it's important to recognize the frameworks we inherit—educational, institutional, cultural—because they do not always carry forward the full weight of what has already been documented. As a result, what is named in one context may not be fully carried in another, and that divergence shapes how people relate to both history and one another in the present.

This is the tension that sits beneath the surface: the difference between knowing something has been acknowledged, and living within conditions that acknowledgment has yet to fully transform.

The Architecture of Breaking (Historical Lineage) 

The systems referenced in last week's historic resolution did not emerge in isolation. They were constructed over time through a series of legal, religious, and economic frameworks that, together, formalized the transformation of African people into property and sustained that designation across generations. I have been thinking of this collection of written frameworks as an archive documenting the authorization of violence.

Within this lineage are religious decrees such as Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455), which provided moral and theological justification for the subjugation and perpetual enslavement of African peoples. These were not merely symbolic statements; they helped establish a framework in which conquest and enslavement could be interpreted as sanctioned acts.

This logic was further operationalized through commercial systems such as the Portuguese peça de Índias, which reduced human life to quantifiable units for trade, assigning fractional value to individuals based on age, gender, and perceived labor capacity. In parallel, the Spanish Asiento de Negros formalized a state-controlled monopoly over the trafficking of enslaved Africans, embedding human commodification within governmental and economic policy.

Legal systems across colonial territories reinforced these classifications. The charter of the Dutch West India Company extended Roman-Dutch law to categorize Africans as movable property. The Barbados Slave Code of 1661 codified enslaved Africans as chattel under English law, stripping them of legal personhood. Similarly, France’s Code Noir of 1685 defined enslaved individuals as meubles, or movable goods, while regulating their lives through a legal framework that denied autonomy and rights.

In the English colonies of North America, including the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States, statutes such as the principle of partus sequitur ventrem established that a child’s status followed that of the mother, ensuring that enslavement would be passed down. This doctrine secured the generational continuity of enslavement, embedding it within the reproductive lineage of enslaved women.  Sit with that for a moment.

Taken as a whole, these examples illustrate an interlocking system—one that combined theology, commerce, and law to normalize and sustain the reduction of human beings to property. Over time, these frameworks became embedded within the governing structures of multiple societies, shaping economic development, social hierarchy, and legal precedent across regions.

What emerges is not only a record of exploitation, but an architecture—deliberate, iterative, and reinforced across institutions—that required alignment between belief systems, state power, and market forces in order to persist. Taken together, these documents form an archive of codified dehumanization.

Place Matters — Germantown 

Within this broader historical continuum, certain locations carry their own significance as sites where these systems were both sustained and, at times, questioned. Germantown, in particular, holds an early and often overlooked moment of recorded dissent within the colonies.

In 1688, a group of European settlers in Germantown authored what is now recognized as one of the first organized protests against slavery in North America, commonly referred to as the Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery. While limited in reach and not immediately transformative in its impact, the petition represents an early instance in which individuals within the dominant population publicly—and in writing—challenged the moral and ethical foundations of enslavement. Taken alongside UN Resolution 80/L.48, it also gestures toward a counter-archive—one that documents not only the persistence of these systems, but the early presence of resistance and dissent.

This matters not because it resolved the conditions it addressed, but because it demonstrates that resistance existed alongside a systematic expansion of efforts to dehumanize Black people. Even in their early stages, these structures were being observed, questioned, and, in some cases, named as inconsistent with the stated values of those who participated in them.

For me, Germantown is not only a historical reference point—it is a place where this history intersects with my own practice. Since 2011, I have worked in and around this area, engaging communities, documenting spaces, and paying attention to the ways history continues to surface in the present landscape. The physical environment carries traces of layered histories—some visible, others embedded in patterns of development, displacement, and memory.

Working in this place has meant moving through a space where the past is not distant or abstract, but embedded in the fabric of the neighborhood itself. It is present in the architecture, in the shifts in population, in the narratives that are preserved or omitted, and in the ongoing negotiations around belonging and identity.

To spend time here, repeatedly, over years, is to become attuned to those patterns—not as isolated events, but as continuities that shape how space is experienced and understood. Germantown, in this sense, becomes more than a location. It becomes a point of contact between historical record and contemporary life, where questions of memory, recognition, and responsibility remain active rather than settled.

My Practice — #RacismIsASickness 

In 2015, I began a project that I did not fully understand at the time, but felt compelled to create. What would eventually become #RacismIsASickness emerged less as a fully formed concept and more as a response—an attempt to name something I was observing, experiencing, and navigating in real time.

At its core, the project treats racism not as an abstraction or an occasional aberration, but as something systemic, persistent, and deeply embedded within the structures that shape everyday life. Framing it as a “sickness” was not meant to reduce its seriousness, but to signal its reach—its capacity to affect individuals, institutions, and broader ways of organizing society. It points to something ongoing, something that requires attention, critical examination, and sustained engagement rather than dismissal or minimization.

Over time, my understanding of the work has evolved alongside my experiences and continued engagement with communities, histories, and spaces like Germantown. What began as an intuitive response has developed into a long-term framework for thinking about how these systems operate and how their effects are experienced across generations.

The work has also required me to sit with questions that are not always straightforward: how to hold complexity without flattening it, how to engage spaces that are not always designed with my full presence in mind, and how to remain attentive to the ways certain narratives are centered while others are sidelined or underexamined.

This project is not positioned as a final or the only answer, for that matter. It is an ongoing inquiry—an attempt to better understand the conditions described in both historical and contemporary contexts, and to create a space where those conditions can be examined with clarity rather than avoided or oversimplified.

In that sense, #RacismIsASickness functions as both response and practice. It is a way of organizing thought, attention, and engagement in relation to a reality that has been documented across centuries, yet continues to require interpretation in the present moment.

The Shift — From Extraction to Discernment 

Over time, my approach to engaging spaces, opportunities, and collaborations has changed. Where I once operated with a “take what is useful and leave the rest” mindset, I began to recognize the limitations of that stance—particularly in contexts where underlying frameworks were not neutral, and where my presence required more than selective participation to be fully supported or meaningfully engaged.

That earlier approach assumed a level of flexibility that, in practice, often required me to absorb or navigate gaps that were not always visible on the surface. It asked me to adapt without asking whether the environment itself had been designed with a full range of participants in mind. In some cases, that meant overlooking misalignments in order to remain present.

The shift came through experience—through repeated encounters that made it clear that discernment is not the same as disengagement. Discernment requires evaluating not only what is offered, but how it is structured, what assumptions it carries, and what it asks of those who participate within it. It involves asking whether a given space can hold the depth, context, and specificity of the perspectives being brought into it.

It's not my practice to reject offers to collaborate or to withhold participation for its own sake. Instead, in an effort to be transparent, I must share that I've evolved my powers of recognizing that not all environments function with the same level of awareness, capacity, or intention when it comes to engaging histories and lived experiences that carry long, documented trajectories.  And then acting accordingly.

As that awareness developed, so did the criteria for how I assess opportunities. The question is no longer simply whether something is beneficial or interesting, but whether the framework itself is aligned in a way that allows for full engagement without requiring the diminishment or translation of essential context.

Discernment, in this sense, becomes a practice of alignment. It is a way of ensuring that where I invest time, energy, and presence is consistent with the principles that guide my work, rather than requiring those principles to be set aside in order to participate.

This shift has not made decisions easier, but it has made them clearer. It has allowed me to recognize when an opportunity supports the integrity of the work, and when it may unintentionally ask for a level of participation that does not fully account for the histories and perspectives that inform that work.

The Decision 

In this context, a recent opportunity presented itself that required consideration through this lens of discernment. Rather than approaching it solely as an isolated offering, I examined how it was structured, what it emphasized, and what it would require of participants in terms of self-reflection, self-awareness, engagement, interpretation, and alignment.  After reviewing the materials and reflecting on the nature of the space, I made the decision to decline participation.

This decision was not rooted in a rejection of the individuals involved or the organizing entity, nor was it an assertion that the intent behind the opportunity was harmful. That was not my framework guiding the assessment. Instead, the decision came from an evaluation of fit—specifically, whether the structure of the opportunity could fully hold the depth of context that informs my work without requiring that context to be minimized, translated, or set aside in order to participate.

In making this determination, I considered how my presence would function within that environment, and whether the framework itself was equipped to engage perspectives shaped by long historical trajectories such as those outlined in the preceding sections. The question was not whether the space was valid in a general sense, but whether it was designed with sufficient capacity to meaningfully engage differences in lived experience, historical awareness, and interpretive framing.

Ultimately, the decision reflects a commitment to maintain an alignment between my work and the environments in which I choose to participate. It also reflects an understanding that not every opportunity, even when well-intentioned, is structured in a way that supports full engagement for me.

Declining, in this case, was not a withdrawal from engagement altogether, but a recognition that discernment sometimes requires stepping back in order to remain grounded in the principles that guide the work itself.

The Question 

At the center of this reflection is a question that continues to shape how I move through spaces and evaluate opportunities. It is not a question meant to provoke defensiveness, but one that asks for clarity about capacity, responsibility, and care within a given framework.

How will you hold space people like me, a middle-aged Black woman who is descended from African people who were trafficked in the transatlantic slave trade, came through Virginia and forcibly migrated to places like Missouri and Mississippi, two of the country's harshest states for enslaved Black people?

This question is not only about inclusion in a general sense. It is about whether a space, a practice, or an environment has the structural and conceptual capacity to engage experiences shaped by histories of displacement, erasure, and ongoing inequities—without reducing those experiences to simplified narratives or requiring them to be translated into something more easily absorbed.  I seek spaces that value honesty and curiosity, not pity or defensiveness.

To ask and answer this question helps to determine whether the framework itself has been designed with enough awareness to accommodate difference in a meaningful way. It is about whether there is room to engage complexity without flattening it, and whether the presence of that complexity is understood as integral rather than exceptional.

It also asks for an honest accounting of what is expected from participants. Not every space articulates its assumptions explicitly, yet those assumptions often shape how people are received, how their contributions are interpreted, and what kinds of engagement are possible within that environment.

This question, then, becomes a tool for discernment on both sides. For those creating or facilitating spaces, it invites reflection on structure, intention, and capacity. For those entering them, it offers a way to assess alignment without requiring the compromise of core principles or lived context.

Ultimately, it is a question about holding—about whether what is being gathered, shared, or exchanged can be sustained in a way that respects the full context from which it comes.

Finally, Returning to Center 

I applaud and thank you for hanging in with me to this point.  This essay—an attempt to draw a throughline from the archive of dehumanization to early documented attempts to resist the practice of chattel slavery to this humble project—wasn't easy to write.  

What has become clear over time is that history is not simply something to be studied or referenced, but something that continues to inform how we understand the present and how we choose to engage within it. The systems and structures outlined earlier in this essay did not dissolve on their own; their effects continue to be felt in varying ways across communities, institutions, and everyday interactions.  We are reaching a tipping point where continued denial or diminishment —while benefiting from these systems and structures—will quickly be a thing of the past.  Likewise, sitting on the sidelines and abstaining won't work either.   I want to believe that ultimately, we all want to be on the right side of history, right?

Working within this awareness has required a level of attention that goes beyond surface-level engagement. It requires an ongoing commitment to examining how spaces are built, how they function, and how they account for the range of experiences of people who move through them. It also requires recognizing when alignment is present and when it is not, and allowing that recognition to guide decisions with intention.

My work exists within this context. It is shaped by an understanding of history as something that carries forward, and by a practice that seeks to engage that reality with clarity rather than avoidance. The UN resolution 80/L.48 and projects like #RacismIsASickness are part of an ongoing effort to make sense of these conditions, to name them when necessary, and to remain attentive to how they manifest in both visible and subtle ways.

Choosing where and how to participate is therefore not incidental. It is part of the work itself. Each decision reflects an assessment of whether a given space can hold the perspectives, histories, and experiences that inform what I bring into it.

In that sense, stepping away from certain opportunities is not an end point, but a continuation of that process. It is a way of remaining aligned with the principles that guide the work while continuing to engage in spaces that demonstrate the capacity to meet it with depth and awareness.

This is the posture I return to: one of clarity, discernment, and sustained attention to the relationship between history, space, and participation. From that position, the work continues.