Seeking a home free from violence, oppression, and fear has been the struggle of millions of people …
Over Our Heads by Tasha Dougé from Home/Land at the Lewis Latimer House Museum, 2020
The United States’s militant border control policies were founded using tactics bounty hunters and law enforcement used to hunt and capture enslaved people running to freedom. These tactics traveled through time as a means of oppression.
Children have been used as pawns by colonizer-settlers (police, the army, and independent bounty hunters who were not constrained by the law) seizing their land and their children. From slavery to Trump, children have been leveraged by the government as a means to control the parents and grandparents. The artist in this category has a personal connection to this topic.
In the early aughts I was a high school English teacher. Though I do not remember which book, story, or poem we were reading, I do recall students asking why more enslaved people did not rebel. Back then I did not know the answer: Black liberation has been battling oppressive forces since the dawn of African slavery. Different parts of the country experienced revolts, some huge, like John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, the Slave Revolt in New York in 1712. Enslaved people in the South ran away into swamp lands, where, in some instances, they set up communities, or they escaped into Mexico. In the North, people escaped to Canada. When Frederick Douglass escaped, the Underground Railroad was just being recognized by the world outside of enslaved “fugitives”. Since slavery was ended in 1865, Black Liberation has persisted, through the activism and scholarship of Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Septima Poinsette Clark, Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the list is eternal. Until there is Black Liberation, there will always be people fighting for it.
Do you remember when San Francisco 49ers QB Colin Kapernick took a knee to protest violence against Black bodies and then the NFL pushed him out of the franchise? This is an example of American Hypocrisy. The policies of this country do not protect its BIPOC citizens. A country founded on genocide and slavery that continues to silence this truth of its history cannot be just. It is not the dream for most, it is sheer will, fight, and determination for folks who did not grow up with the benefits of having a system on your side. Meritocracy is a myth. The American Dream for many is a nightmare.
