Opinion | The Real Stakes of the American Story

So I grew up on the ocean. The Atlantic Ocean was the beach. It was a place to go. And then I went to Africa for the first time. Misconnect: I was supposed to give a speech in Abuja in Nigeria, and I got there too late. And so they sent somebody to meet me at the airport in Lagos who was supposed to take care of me. And this young lawyer met me at the airport and he was very nice. And the first thing he said was, “I have to show you Lagos.” It was like 11 o’clock at night. And he took me all around the city and we would literally go into neighborhoods and he would start shouting: “Hey, everybody, come out and meet this Black American lawyer.” And he took me all around the city. And I finally said, “Man, I got to get a little rest. Can we just go home and get a little — I got to get up early.” He said, “OK, one more place.” And he took me to the beach. It was dark. You could see the moon shining across the ocean. And this guy had been so gregarious and so talkative — all of a sudden got so quiet. And I was standing there and I looked over at him and he was crying. He had a tear running down his face, and then he looked at me and he said, “I brought you here because I wanted to tell you I’m sorry. This is where we lost you.” And for the first time in my life, I realized I was standing on the other side of this ocean that separated me from everything that’s important about me. My identity, my culture, my history was all taken from me by the Atlantic Ocean. If I take a DNA test, I show up in 24 different countries. And it hit me hard. First time. And it changed my relationship to the Atlantic Ocean. When I got back here, I realized that that body of water needed to be understood more honestly. We’ve spent millions of dollars looking for trinkets from the Titanic in the Atlantic, and we haven’t spent hardly anything to reckon with the two million bodies that are buried in the bottom of that ocean. And so a story can help us understand things about who we are, our relationship to the things around us that are important. I still love the beach. I still see it as a place of beauty, but I also see this need to help others understand the harm that was caused by moving millions of people off of their land, their place, their space. It’s really unprecedented in human history.