An observation: There is less nuance in digital popular discourse about Black America lately. I wonder if it's because of the reverse Great Migration to the Sun Belt, social media, early 20th century Migrants passing on, or a combination of factors.

A fair number of new ideas would have been unfamiliar to those of us who came of age a few decades ago:
--the idea that we have no culture;
--the idea that only certain parts of the Black US retained any culture;
--the idea that we're perennially "lost."

Collectively, we could find ways to push back against all three erroneous ideas without being frustratingly xenophobic or entertaining harmful reparative fantasies about being the "real ____."

One thing I liked about the 1619 Project is that it honored our ancestors' choices.

I've been watching Beyond the Return vids at night on YouTube. I love the idea of reconnecting with my deep ancestors on the other side of this Pandora.

However, I'll always maintain it can't be at the expense of our more recent ancestors. If we don't honor them, who will?

In one video I watched, someone recounted meeting an Uber driver who, when asked where he was from, he said "LA." They asked, what about your parents? "LA." Grandparents? "LA."

This was cast as sad. "He doesn't know where he's from."

But he told you. He's from LA!

It's so strange that because we cannot tell you where our ancestors from the mid-18th century were from, we're considered "lost."

But we know where our great-grandparents are from. We can call 180-200 years' worth of names on both sides. Many of us know their stories.

"Lost."

I understand where this comes from.

But I also understand that this is a way that descendants of slavery become dehumanized in discourse and practice over time.

Enslaved peoples, refugees, the conquered, the dispossessed become dehumanized in the imagination this way.

I understand the inclination to turn away from the shame and humiliation of enslavement and Jim Crow. To skip over the traumatic past. To reach further back.

There's value in recovery projects. But post-pandemic, I need to return to the South as much as I need to get to Ghana.

And that's OK.
And that's not taking anything away from those who want to wash their hands of the West. (I *do* understand.)
And that's not critiquing repatriation / return. (I may decide to join you in the future.)
But my foremothers' bones are here.
That means something.

I can call 200 years of my forebears' names.
That means something.
That's not nothing.
(And what they must have endured to get us here.)

Just thinking aloud. I'll admit that I balked at the implication that it's a tragedy that the brother and his parents and grandparents were born and raised in LA.

The TAST is one of the greatest tragedies in human history.

But that brother's life? His life is a TRIUMPH.

The sheer tenacity, the adaptability, the times of thriving, everything that brother's stolen ancestors had to endure on this stolen land so he was behind the wheel of that Uber...

... only then to be subtly judged by a stranger as being a lost human from nowhere and nothing.

I'll close with this: I agreed with one commenter who pointed out that our survival isn't because Black Americans are somehow magical or superhuman, but because the various societies our ancestors were stolen from were themselves complex and adaptable.

So who's "lost," really?