This piece is power and soul. Pain, and the strength that can be born of surviving it. Generations worth of it with likely generations more to come. Because they DO keep running. Harder than ever, over the past several years.

I've never really felt much urge to visit the southern U.S.--the heat alone would be a KEEP OUT, never mind whole flavors of racism and danger that NYC-er me wouldn't want to deal with on a limited time-vacation. But I'd definitely make an exception for a plantation, and to remember my father's family. I'd also like to visit a plantation property in Trinidad/Tobago and Barbados, to remember my maternal family. I think there's a helluva lot of good and fortification in and conviction gained from the idea of Sankofa. The necessary concept of "go back and get it." The United States' cultural majority hasn't yet learned that and is fighting against ever having to learn it. Nothing good, at least not long-term good, ever comes from forgetting or white-washing one's own history.

I think EVERYONE in the U.S. would benefit from visiting sites of genocide upon minorities, whether those be some bucolic concentration camps built on stolen land and worked by stolen people; the railroad lines which STILL provide massive financial infrastructure for the U.S. nearly two hundred years later, or the many massacre sites of the indigenous tribes and the mass graves of indigenous children to be found at orphanages and residential schools throughout North America.

With a nation so remorselessly rotten and hypocritical, from foundations to chimney tops, the decline of the last old "superpower" is hardly surprising. The superpowers coming up are sure following the same race-capitalist playbook to the sky, even as late-stage race-capitalism destroys chunks of the world before our very eyes.

THIS PIECE ... got me thinking and thinking. Nodding and sighing. Absolutely superb writing, as always <3