Once again, Dr. Daniel Black dropped a gem that forced me to sit still long enough to let it rearrange my thinking. This is the same man who said, “The Creator created man, man created God,” a line that became my walking stick while writing Circumventing Your Religion to Find My God(s). He has a way of taking ideas that feel settled and turning them just enough so you can see the seams. History, he reminds us, is recorded by the supposed victor. Erasure is not accidental; it is required. Power demands it.
But this time he went further. He asked us to stop teaching someone else’s behavior as our history.
“If I rape a person and that other person teaches what I did to them, for the rest of their lives they are forever in bondage… they have taken the behavior, this trauma, and owned it as their own.”
I had to sit with that. I replayed it slowly. I let it wash over me and settle somewhere deeper than intellect. Because if what he is saying is true, and I believe it is, then we have been misnaming history for generations. We have been calling white behavior “Black history.” We have been cataloging brutality as if it were our biography.
Slavery is not Black history.
Slavery is white people’s history.
The cotton field is white history. The slave ship is white history. The auction block is white history. The branding iron, the rape, the forced breeding, the laws that codified human beings as property—all of that is white history. That is the record of what they did.
Black history is what we did in response.
Dr. Black gave language to something I had been circling for years without quite naming it. When he said Black history is creating four-part harmony in the middle of a cotton field, I felt the shift. When he said Black history is inventing systems of communication in the suffocating darkness of a slave ship, where dozens of nations were thrown together without a common tongue and still found a way to hum, to chant, to signal, to survive, I knew I was listening to a master teacher. That clarity belongs to him.
Black history, as he framed it, is not the violence inflicted upon us. It is the genius we carried with us. It is the cultural memory that refused to dissolve. It is the capacity to order sound into harmony, to shape silence into meaning, to make community out of fragmentation.
And here is what humbled me.
It wasn’t coincidence; it was ancestral alignment, the kind that happens when you’ve been guided to the right voice at the right time.
When I started the Before the Chains series, I thought I was simply writing historical fiction. I did not yet have Dr. Black’s language guiding me. I had not yet heard him articulate the difference between their behavior and our being. But something inside me would not allow our story to begin in captivity.
So I went back.
Back before the ship. Back before the auction block. Back before cotton became the dominant image attached to our name. I wanted Afi at the well. I wanted governance, spirituality, arguments, humor, rhythm, and daily life. I wanted a world in which our humanity was assumed and unchallenged.
At the time, I did not call that anything profound.
Now I understand it as alignment.
The ancestors have a way of guiding you even when you do not recognize the guidance. They do not always announce themselves with thunder. Sometimes they simply refuse to let you write from a place of diminishment. They tug you toward wholeness before you have the academic framework to justify it.
Before the Chains was not an act of resistance. It was an act of remembering.
And remembering is different.
Resistance still assumes the presence of an oppressor. Remembering centers us. It restores the timeline. It reorders the narrative so that we are not a reaction but a people with continuity. A people with cosmology. A people with architecture of thought and spirit long before a European ship ever touched a shore.
Our music is not great because someone tried to silence us. Our spirituality is not profound because someone tried to erase it. Our communal instinct is not admirable because someone tried to fracture it. Those qualities were already there. They predate the violence.
What happened in the fields revealed what was already present. What happened in the hull of a ship did not invent our ingenuity. It exposed it.
Dr. Black helped me see that we have been mislabeling chapters. We have been teaching trauma as identity. We have been allowing the crime to define the people harmed by it.
The ancestors nudged me toward a correction before I fully understood it. They would not let me begin the story in chains. They insisted on wells, on villages, on names spoken in full voice.
And that is where our history actually lives.
Not in what was done to us.
But in who we were, who we are, and who we have always been.
The trauma is not our authorship.
Our creativity is.
Once I saw it that way, I started applying it everywhere.
Take the BAFTA awards. White history is a white man with Tourette’s shouting “nigger” while two accomplished Black actors stand on stage. White history is the BBC choosing to air it unedited. White history is the way that man’s disability immediately becomes a shield, the way the conversation shifts from the impact to the explanation. White history is the lukewarm apology that follows, calibrated and cautious.
White history will be the institutional blindness that keeps a film like Sinners from being recognized as Best Picture.
Black history is the dignity and poise shown by Mr. Delroy Lindo and Mr. Michael B. Jordan. Black history is the composure that refuses to match ignorance with spectacle. Black history is excellence that does not bend because someone else decides to flinch.
Black history is Sinners being one of the greatest films of all time. Notice I did not say one of the greatest Black films. I said one of the greatest films. Period.
