Clint Smith’s book How the Word Is Passed bids readers to reckon with the history of slavery across America, but after I read it, I concluded that it does so much more.  In an era in which white American conservatives are championing campaigns to suppress black American history and stymie contemporary black American progress, it is a gut-check reminder that Black Americans’ struggle for life, liberty and happiness is far from over.  If anything, it’s only the beginning.

Smith trope’s is important to remembering the treacherous road we Americans have traversed just to get to a place where we can even consider the importance of treating each other with decency and respect, regardless of skin color.  While it is true that white Americans subjugated black Americans during the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era, and the governmental leaders of these bygone eras tried to make amends for this original sin through the passage of legislation, the fact still remains that too many contemporary white Americans believe that enough has been done to correct their white American ancestors’ original sin. 

What Clint Smith makes clear in How the Word Is Passed is that today’s unenlightened segment of the white American majority is committed to perpetrating campaigns designed to suppress inconvenient truths about the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the passage of post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws.  This historical suppression is in line with the conservative Republican Party’s voter suppression in states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures.  And they’re using the removal of Confederate statues in places like Richmond and Charlottesville to condition white Americans to rally around whiteness by falsely telling them that the removal of these statues is an affront to what their white American ancestors have built, these United States of America. 

But if they would start taking this line of thinking a few steps further, and understand what Clint Smith is getting at when he explains to us how the word is passed, they would recognize that the true change-makers and entrepreneurs were the enslaved Blacks whose uncompensated labor laid the foundation for what this nation is becoming, a more perfect union.  In other words, the United States of America was built on the backs of enslaved black Americans.  And the only way to truly perfect this union is to acknowledge their white American ancestors’ crimes against other human beings (black Africans), offer contemporary black Americans an apology for their white American ancestors’ crimes against other human beings (black Africans), and compensate the descendants of enslaved black Africans for the next 400 years through reparations.  More importantly, though, contemporary white Americans must believe wholeheartedly that all men, humans really, “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Know this, the word that my black African ancestors passed to members of the contemporary Black American Diaspora is that we should use our righteous words and deeds to light the way to the kind of enlightenment that allows all of us to become a reconciled nation of equals.