Ancestral Memory

Films like SANKOFA may evoke trauma responses in viewers.  There is a justifiable and important reason for this response.

Discussing the legacy of SANKOFA, Haile Gerima described the descendants of the formerly enslaved as carrying “scars and psychological issues.” Indeed, those scars and psychological issues that Gerima referred to are known as transgenerational and intergenerational trauma. Based on literary explorations of trauma, memory and testimony, literary scholars and others have argued that the trauma of slavery still lives with contemporary Black people, that the trauma of slavery is “ghosted” in the bodies and collective consciousness of each generation of Africans in America.  Moreover, this collective trauma is handed down physically and physiologically. This is called epigenetics in the biological sciences and ancestral memory in the social sciences.

Systems

After 246 years of chattel slavery, the U.S. Civil War and subsequent Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved Africans. However, the white southern ruling class was embittered by having both lost the war and being forced to coexist with the very people they had enslaved.  Therefore, systems of oppression similar to those of Apartheid South Africa were created by southern state governments.  These systems of oppression became known as the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. Black people were disenfranchised by oppressive laws and policies and relegated to poverty and second-class citizenship. While Jim Crow and other discriminatory and segregationist laws were repealed during the Civil Rights Era, many of these policies and laws still permeate American society today, having systemic, systematic and disparate impacts on Black Americans. Hence, the traumatic experiences of descendants of enslaved Africans in America stand apart and continue to haunt Black Americans well into the 21st century.

Today, Black people are still navigating and negotiating the trauma that enslavement and its legacies left with them. With every act of physical violence against Black bodies, with every act of psychological violence against those Black bodies, descendants are forced to relive the traumas of slavery, racial prejudice and violence over and over again.

Reconciliation

Slavery leaves no hands clean. If Black people are carrying the trauma of enslavement in their DNA, what has slavery done to those who are not the descendants of enslaved Africans? Even slaveholders in the country’s founding era recognized that the practice of slaveholding had a detrimental effect on them.

Films like SANKOFA are imperative for viewers of all races.

SANKOFA is just as relevant now as when the film was originally released. 

Video courtesy of SANKOFA

Films like SANKOFA may evoke trauma responses in viewers.  There is a justifiable and important reason for this response.

Discussing the legacy of SANKOFA, Haile Gerima described the descendants of the formerly enslaved as carrying “scars and psychological issues.” Indeed, those scars and psychological issues that Gerima referred to are known as transgenerational and intergenerational trauma. Based on literary explorations of trauma, memory and testimony, literary scholars and others have argued that the trauma of slavery still lives with contemporary Black people, that the trauma of slavery is “ghosted” in the bodies and collective consciousness of each generation of Africans in America.  Moreover, this collective trauma is handed down physically and physiologically. This is called epigenetics in the biological sciences and ancestral memory in the social sciences.

Systems

After 246 years of chattel slavery, the U.S. Civil War and subsequent Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved Africans. However, the white southern ruling class was embittered by having both lost the war and being forced to coexist with the very people they had enslaved.  Therefore, systems of oppression similar to those of Apartheid South Africa were created by southern state governments.  These systems of oppression became known as the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. Black people were disenfranchised by oppressive laws and policies and relegated to poverty and second-class citizenship. While Jim Crow and other discriminatory and segregationist laws were repealed during the Civil Rights Era, many of these policies and laws still permeate American society today, having systemic, systematic and disparate impacts on Black Americans. Hence, the traumatic experiences of descendants of enslaved Africans in America stand apart and continue to haunt Black Americans well into the 21st century.

Today, Black people are still navigating and negotiating the trauma that enslavement and its legacies left with them. With every act of physical violence against Black bodies, with every act of psychological violence against those Black bodies, descendants are forced to relive the traumas of slavery, racial prejudice and violence over and over again.

Reconciliation

Slavery leaves no hands clean. If Black people are carrying the trauma of enslavement in their DNA, what has slavery done to those who are not the descendants of enslaved Africans? Even slaveholders in the country’s founding era recognized that the practice of slaveholding had a detrimental effect on them.

Films like SANKOFA are imperative for viewers of all races.

SANKOFA is just as relevant now as when the film was originally released.