The institution of slavery from its inception required a particular kind of person – one compatible with life of deference to the dictates of another. The ideal slave had to be absolutely dependent. A slave mother who had to ensure the survival of her children had to teach them to meet the world as she knew it. She must groom them to be subordinate or surely seal their death.

RECOVERY means we shake free from the idea that our lives are only protected by persisting in a deep consciousness of personal ineptitude. For in doing so we determine that we will not merely trade iron chains for psychological ones.

Cultural anthropologists have searched intensively and have found no contemporary evidence for the persistence of African patterns of culture in Black America. The experience of slavery was remarkably efficient in effacing the African and producing the African American. All that is uniquely Negro found its origin on the shores of the land black slaves inhabited and is the document of black history.

So descendants of African slaves are specimens of human experience with a pedigree of prevail to showcase. Battered, scarred yet unhindered, we live. A reframe of the story of the legacy of black lives must then shift from the narrow focus of oppression to a broader narrative of triumph.