A Tale Of Two Histories | Jazzed About Stuff

I always sat in the middle of the most classrooms off to the side whenever I picked my seat in college courses. I remember sitting in that same formation in my World Literature class. There weren’t a lot of people there, but I remember there was one other Black person who happened to be in the class and who sat next to me.

We shared the looks in our direction when we got to the brief bit of history that Black Americans get when we show up as slaves in a piece of canonized literature. I thought that would be the end of Black history for that particular class, as it usually is, but I was surprised when we somehow ended up on the topic of everyone knowing their history except Black people.

The rest of the class had never heard of that before. The other people in the class asked the only two Black people in the room the question, “why doesn’t anyone know anything about Black history?”

“Well, most Black people don’t know their own history beyond a few generations because when they were taken from Africa during the TransAtlantic Slave Trade, they were mixed up and dispersed to places all up and down North and South America,” I responded. “Their names were beaten out of them and were replaced with the names of their slave masters. I’m only searching for the history of my oppressor when I search online for my last name.”