I could make a martyrly claim to having been the victim of childhood enslavement when I report that I started regularly cooking with my mother at a hot stove when I was five. But the truth is I wanted to cook. Cooking meant being near food.
I think it is the easiest mentality for a human being to be either colonized or to colonize. The structure of either the slave or the master seems to be the simplest and the most relaxing one to slip into. Either you are a slave, and you don't have to think for yourself, or you're a master, and you don't have to work for yourself.
The history of black women in the economy is rooted in the legacy of slavery. Enslaved black women were forced to provide care work, unpaid, for white families.
We have the potential to help people out of poverty, out of disease, out of slavery and out of conflict. Too often, we turn the other way because we think there's nothing we can do.
In a lot of movies, African-Americans are either maids or slaves, but that's not all they were. We need to show that. And we can't keep erasing history.
It is a great mistake, as we have already remarked, to be afraid of Him and to act in His presence like a timid and craven slave trembling with fright before his master.
Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.
From his roots as a slave, the American Negro - sometimes sorrowing, sometimes jubilant but always hopeful - has touched, illuminated, and influenced the most remote preserves of world civilisation. I and my dance theater celebrate this trembling beauty.
I'd gone to Oxford to do graduate studies in the history of the slave trade, but I came across Georgiana's letters, gave up that thesis, and wrote one on her instead. When I learned that Georgiana's great-nephews supported opposite sides in the American Civil War, I knew this would be the perfect sequel.
Southern politicians who have tried to rise above the passionate rhetoric surrounding the Civil War have frequently found themselves dragged back into the mire. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, a Republican, was forced to apologise when his proclamation declaring April Confederate History Month failed to make any reference to slavery.
