In My Lifetime...

Hello friends,

We were talking in the SHHARE community recently about the disconnect between those who are seeing what was history play out again and those who have little understanding of that history and don't fully realise what they're seeing.

Then I thought about my own life.

When I was a tiny person, I met my great-grandmother, then over 100 years old. That put her birth date just after then end of Apprenticeship in the Caribbean, and it meant that her parents were born enslaved. Just think about that for a minute - I know someone who knew someone who was enslaved and that was in my own family. I'm not the only one, and it means that history that we like to pretend is ancient history is really only a few generations removed.

When my grandparents were born, near the start of the 20th century, it was just a generation and a half, two at most from those enslaved ancestors. Opportunities for people racialised as Black were still very limited, though in their lifetime some social mobility happened, in part because there were more educational opportunities.