"On slavery, 150 years later"

"I find that slavery is more of a conversation killer, than a conversation starter. My family’s history is not on the list of topics I take with me to cocktail parties or social gatherings. Well, at least not my father’s family. It’s perfectly acceptable for me to talk about tracing my mother’s family through Ancestry.com, but the acknowledgment that the same cannot happen for my father’s family is not appropriate for public conversation. Apparently...

Having done all of my schooling at predominately white institutions, I have plenty of stories about the classroom discomfort that comes from talking about racism beyond Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks... In that moment slavery ceased to be a historical artifact, something abstract that I discussed in class. It was real, and a part of me. Being confronted with evidence of my own marginalization was something I wanted, and desperately needed to talk about, but my classmates were having none of it. After sharing my experience reading the inventories, a silence fell over the room. The next time someone spoke, it was about something different."

http://feministing.com/2015/12/07/on-slavery-150-years-later/

Yes. I have never had space to process this. But I have gotten a lot of subtle feedback that my ancestral history is rude and shameful and best forgotten. It's so disconnecting from everything, to be made to feel that your family sprung from nothing 3 or 4 generations ago. To know that no one is particularly interested in you tracing your family back, repairing the ties that have been cut