I am A WOMAN BLACK AFRICAN AND ALSO AMERICAN WITH MY FAMILY ROOTS DEEPLY

[WhiskeyGrinder]

29. Don't do this.

There were a lot of poor hard-scrabble white folks in 1776 and throughout our history that were despised and kept down in dreadful low-paying jobs. Incapable of doing more that a few years of school, if that. Working 12, 18 hr days to buy a crust of bread. Working in coal mines and other physically dangerous jobs. Living in squallor.

Life was certainly difficult for a lot of people. But chattel slavery -- the actual buying and selling of people, enslaved for life, and bearing their children into slavery -- is different. Yes, slavery has existed all over the world. But only one nation has built itself -- constitutionally, economically, socially and culturally -- on the chattel enslavement of Black people, and it's still reckoning with the legacy today.

The institutions invented to keep Black people in line are certainly used against poor people of all races. But that makes the issue a both/and with race and class, not an elimination of race as an axis of oppression. It's an opportunity to broaden solidarity, not narrow it.