On July 1, 1799 My Great Grandmother Trasie arrived on America’s shore from the country known today as Cameroon to be sold at the Charleston Slave Market at the age of 17 years old for $300 US Dollars. She was originally purchased by a White Woman Burnadette Martin, the wife of Louis Martin of Charleston South Carolina. The language on the bill of sale reads “Trasie of the Congo Nation…. to have and to hold the said negro…. unto the said Bernadette Martin for her sole … use & benefit her executors, administrators and asigns to her and their own proper use and behoof forever… for her sole … use and her heirs.” In December of the same year Trasie was subsequently sold to John Martin a planter from Fairfield County South Carolina and his relative Robert Martin a slave owner would become my Great Grandfather. This is American History.
As beloved as Barack Obama was as the “First Black President,” he is born of a white mother who may have in 1799 had the ability to purchase a young woman like my Great Grandma Trasie for her sole use as a slave just like Burnadette Martin. He is also the son of a Kenyan born father. And again in a historic context had this been the case in 1799 where a free African had fathered him to a white woman according to South Carolina slave law Barack Obama would have been deemed a mulatto subject to the regressive Slave Code of 1740, born free because he would have followed the condition of his mother, an immigrant white woman. The language however of the 1740 law tried to place all subsequently born mulatto’s and Indians into servitude unless a petition was made for their freedom. This too is America’s history. As a Descendant of Trasie under South Carolina law my ancestors were born into slavery, yet under that same law as a son to Ann Dunham, Barack Obama would have been born into freedom.
According to the Guardian Barack Obama said “The biggest mistake of his presidency was the lack of planning for the aftermath of Muammar Gaddafi’s ouster in Libya that left the country spiraling into chaos and coming under threat from violent extremists. Today Libya has a thriving slave market where a man can be sold for $400 dollars, one hundred more dollars than the sale of my Great Grandmother in 1779.
Monica Mark wrote an in depth article for BuzzFeedNews “Inside The Country Where You Can Buy A Black Man for $400.” According to her article the slave video that surfaced in 2014 was “the tip of the iceberg of a forced labor market estimated to be worth $150 billion worldwide. Images resurfaced of black Africans being detained by militias in cages in Tripoli zoo. There were videos of Libyan coast guards whipping terrified black women and children at sea.”
Barack Obama is not an American Descendant of Slavery. His decision to go to war with Libya and forcibly remove Muammar Gaddafi from his presidency has caused an uptick in the abuse of slavery in that country. Alternately on the topic of slavery in the United States with Ta’Nehisi Coates where he essentially said one can make a theoretical argument for reparations, but as a practical matter “how do Latinos feel if there’s a big investment just in the African American community, and they’re looking around and saying, ‘We’re poor as well. What kind of help are we getting?’ Or Asian Americans who say, ‘Look, I’m a first-generation immigrant, and clearly I didn’t have anything to do with what was taking place.'” This quote inexcusably let immigrants off the hook for being fully American. Being American means understanding the history of the country, knowing the multi-generational ramifications of unjust laws and being willing to not just fight for your equality, but for the equality of American Descendants of Slavery that have been made a permanent bottom class due to racist Federal and State Legislation, and any other American on the bottom. As the President of the United States, Barack Obama does not get the right to make a category of people subject to severe injustice the reason to be unimaginative in creating modern social justice. That is politically lazy and morally corrupt.
This position has emerged as the go-to commentary in recent HR40 Hearings for conservatives leadership like Mitch McConnell and Representative Mike Johnson. Contrary to popular believe Barack Obama was not a form of reparations to American Descendants of Slavery because he is in no shape or form from that community, nor does he share legacy in that space. So if Obama’s biggest mistake is the aftermath of Gaddafi’s removal from power, then surely his second mistake was the diminished value he placed upon Black American Descendants of US Chattel Slavery in his Coates interview.
I am appealing to President Obama to retract the statements from the Coates article as his words set a precedent for conservative leaders in particular to devalue the lives and experiences of Black American Descendants of US Chattel Slaves aka Freedmen, people labelled by government as colored, negro, black African Americans, people that were the subject of discrimination policy in all facets of life from ancestors being purchased as a commodity to children being born into chattel slavery, to Jim Crow laws, convict leasing, sanctioned terrorism after US Marshalls vacated the South after 1877 Compromise that included property and land theft, medical abuses, FHA loan discrimination/ housing devaluations, lack of military advancement, discriminatory farm and business loans, predatory housing loans, environmental discrimination, mass incarceration, war on drugs, voting discrimination and so on. To survive and be told by your nation that despite your being a numeric minority in American, never fully able to participate in the democratic Republic because you do not have the numbers, with no political structure in place for your needs and votes to count because you are a numeric minority with no weighted voting or proportional voting where you can actually legislate on equal footing with the numeric majority. This is not democratic and this inequity disallows true freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Now that the face of the dominant culture is changing, based on laws that numerically dominant white Americans legislated that allowed European Immigrants priority over American Descendants of Slavery and that same numerically dominant white America voted to add diversity to immigration after the 1978 SCOTUS decision on the Bakke case, America as a country and certainly as a government does not get to absolve itself of anti-negro legislation nor do European or ethnically diverse immigrants, all while asking American Descendants of Slavery to stand behind yet another generation to the newest most diverse immigrants in the name of equality it has never truly been afforded Mr. President, and certainly not because you said so.
It begs the question does American intend to put any and everyone before the Black American Descendants of US Chattel Slavery, an ethnicity born out of the establishment of the United States, so that as a people we remain a permanent underclass for the sake of their freedom? It will take 228 years according to the Institute for Policy Studies to close the wealth gap between American Descendants of Slavery and white Americans. Government created this imbalance and Reparations done properly is the cure.
Unapologetically,
Friday Jones