Racial Equity, Allyship, and Inclusion in 2024
In This Issue: Editor in Chief Clay Rivers on the fight for racial equity in 2024; Swahili’s history in Africa, and chocolate’s bittersweet U.S. history.
2024 marks Our Human Family, Inc.’s sixth year of publishing articles to advocate for racial equity, allyship, and inclusion. It’s hard to believe we’re still at it. It’s exhausting, not at all glamorous, and the pay is . . . well, that’s a story for another day.
So why do we do it? Wait — I can’t speak for our managing editor, Sherry Kappel, or our contributing writers. I’m sure they all have reasons for addressing America’s original sin, reasons that they haven’t shared with me. The better question for me is why I still publish a weekly newsletter about racial equity, allyship, and inclusion when there’s so much racism in the world.
That’s an easy question to answer, and it has two parts. First, I’ve seen up close and in the most personal ways what racism can do.
I know of the death and destruction racism has wrought across the South (the lynching of Emmett Till) and near my hometown (Ocoee Massacre). I’ve learned that the residual effects of decades-old events can poison the present, sabotage the future, and snuff out the promises of the Constitution for Black people.
These will always be the results unless those travesties are acknowledged and righted (Oak Tree Union Colored Cemetery of Taylorville [Groveland, Florida]). Note: These aren’t isolated incidents. American history is littered with attempts to rid the country of Black people.
Read the full article in Our Human Family.
NEW THIS WEEK
How Swahili Became Africa’s Most Spoken Language
Once just an obscure island dialect of an African Bantu tongue, Swahili has evolved into Africa’s most internationally recognised language. It is peer to the few languages of the world that boast over 200 million users.
Over the two millennia of Swahili’s growth and adaptation, the moulders of this story — immigrants from inland Africa, traders from Asia, Arab and European occupiers, European and Indian settlers, colonial rulers, and individuals from various postcolonial nations — have used Swahili and adapted it to their own purposes. They have taken it wherever they have gone to the west.
Africa’s Swahili-speaking zone now extends across a full third of the continent from south to north and touches on the opposite coast, encompassing the heart of Africa.
Read the full article at Our Human Family.
Oppression in the Kitchen, Delight in the Dining Room
The holidays are here, and among the many treats of the season are chocolate and hot cocoa. While these traditions provide a hefty dose of sugar, there’s a bittersweet side to chocolate’s history, too.
Stratford Hall Plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia, is a plantation museum where, as a historian, I work as the director of programming and education. The museum ushers in the holiday season with a chocolate program, highlighting Colonial chocolate-making and its historical ties to American enslavement.
This sober look into our nation’s past helps illuminate those whose labor and contributions have been long ignored, and examines the darker attributes of this favorite sweet. There is no better place to set in context the history of chocolate and enslavement than at a plantation where cocoa was processed and served by enslaved laborers.
Read the full article at Our Human Family.
Final Thoughts
