will highlight three scholars of slavery studies and Black women’s histories who agreed to an interview with“The pile-up of traumatic moments and violated bodies and devastated lives [has] led to a sense of Black victimhood and an overwhelming picture of passivity and of abuse, which makes it challenging to look toward the future and feel that we can stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and be proud,” said Tiya Miles.
When I have conducted interviews with them, I have had people tell me, “No, my ancestor wasn’t enslaved,” and I’ve had to make difficult decisions on how to handle that. Because I have the documents, and I have the records that show how their ancestors were talking about their experience, and yet there was so much denial. “No, no. That’s not our past. Maybe it was some other people’s past, but our people were actually free.
In taking that approach, Annette Gordon-Reed perhaps didn’t give some people who were and are very angry about Jefferson’s role in that relationship the kind of portrayal that they wanted or the kind of interpretation they wanted, but I think she was being a responsible historian.That, of course, presents its own challenge: trying to look at history without interpreting it from your own present-day context., and I have to say I have had my own days seething at Thomas Jefferson.