Stop Using Slavery to Explain 2026 — It Dishonors the People Who Survived It

Slavery was an abomination. I will say it plainly and without qualification because what follows requires that there be no ambiguity about where I stand. The transatlantic slave trade was among the greatest moral catastrophes in human history. The chattel slavery system that operated in America for two hundred and forty-six years was a machine for the extraction of human labor through torture, rape, family destruction, and murder. The enslaved people who endured it — who survived the Middle Passage, the auction block, the lash, the breeding farms, the systematic erasure of their languages, their names, their religions, and their humanity — were among the most resilient human beings who have ever lived. What was done to them was monstrous. That is not a debatable proposition. It is a historical fact, documented in slave narratives, in plantation records, in the Congressional testimony of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and in the physical scars that were photographed and preserved so that no future generation could pretend it did not happen.

And it is precisely because slavery was that monstrous — precisely because the people who survived it were that strong — that I am asking, with all the love and all the respect I possess for my ancestors, for Black America to stop using their suffering as an explanation for our choices in 2026. Because to use the horror of what they endured as a reason why a grown man will not raise his children, why a teenager will not open a book, why a community tolerates levels of internal violence that would have been unthinkable to the generation that survived Reconstruction, is not to honor the enslaved. It is to diminish them. It is to say that the people who survived the unsurvivable were so thoroughly broken that their descendants, seven generations later, living in freedom, with legal equality, with educational access, with technological resources that would have seemed miraculous to Frederick Douglass, are still incapable of the basic human functions that every other traumatized people on Earth has managed to recover.

That is not an argument for the power of slavery’s legacy. That is an insult to the people who outlasted it.

The Timeline That Nobody Examines

Slavery ended in 1865 — 161 years ago. Jim Crow, the system of legal segregation that followed, was dismantled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — 61 years ago. These are facts. They are not opinions. And they establish a timeline that the slavery-as-explanation narrative cannot survive.

If slavery and Jim Crow are the primary explanations for Black social dysfunction in 2026, then the metrics of that dysfunction should have been worst during slavery and Jim Crow and should have been improving steadily since 1965, as the direct effects of these systems receded with each passing generation. The data shows the opposite.

In 1960 — five years before the Civil Rights Act, during the last years of legal Jim Crow — the Black marriage rate was 61 percent. By 2020, it had fallen to 30 percent. In 1960, approximately 22 percent of Black children were born to unmarried mothers. By 2023, that number had risen to approximately 70 percent. In 1960, the Black poverty rate was approximately 55 percent. By 1990, it had fallen to approximately 32 percent, and by 2019 it had reached a historic low of 18.8 percent — before the pandemic reversed some of that progress. The poverty trajectory was improving, and improving dramatically, in the decades immediately following the end of Jim Crow. But the family structure trajectory was collapsing during the same period.

This is the data that the slavery explanation cannot account for. If slavery broke the Black family, why were Black families more intact in 1960 — ninety-five years after slavery, in the midst of legal segregation — than they are in 2026, sixty-one years after the end of Jim Crow? If the legacy of slavery is the primary determinant of Black outcomes, those outcomes should be improving as the legacy fades. Instead, by the most critical measures of family structure and community stability, the outcomes have deteriorated dramatically during the very period when the legal barriers were removed.

Something happened after 1965 that was more damaging to Black family structure than slavery and Jim Crow combined. That is not a comfortable sentence to write. But the data demands it.

What the Other Survivors Did

I am now going to make comparisons that will be called offensive by people who find data offensive when it contradicts their preferred narrative. But the comparisons are not only legitimate — they are essential. Because the claim that historical trauma makes present dysfunction inevitable is a claim that can be tested by examining what other traumatized peoples have done in the aftermath of their suffering.

Jewish people after the Holocaust. Between 1941 and 1945, six million Jewish men, women, and children were systematically murdered by the Nazi regime. Survivors emerged from concentration camps having lost their families, their communities, their possessions, their countries, and in many cases their will to live. The atrocity was eighty-one years ago. In the decades since, Jewish communities worldwide have rebuilt with a ferocity of purpose that is documented in every available metric. Israeli GDP per capita is approximately $55,000 — higher than Britain, France, or Japan. Jewish Americans, who constitute approximately 2 percent of the U.S. population, earn a median household income of approximately $97,500 — the highest of any religious group in America. They are disproportionately represented in medicine, law, academia, science, and business.

Japanese Americans after internment. In 1942, the United States government forcibly relocated approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans — the majority of them U.S. citizens — to internment camps, where they were held for up to four years. They lost their homes, their businesses, their savings, and their constitutional rights. The internment ended eighty-one years ago. By the 1970s — within a single generation — Japanese Americans had the highest median household income of any racial or ethnic group in the United States. Today they maintain educational attainment rates and income levels that consistently exceed the national average.

Chinese Americans after the Exclusion Act. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — the first law in American history to bar an entire ethnic group from immigration — was accompanied by decades of violent anti-Chinese pogroms, forced relocations, property confiscations, and systematic legal discrimination that lasted until the Act’s repeal in 1943. Chinese Americans were prohibited from testifying in court against white people, prohibited from owning land in many states, and subjected to violence that included the mass expulsion of Chinese communities from cities across the American West. Today, Chinese Americans have a median household income of approximately $85,000, a bachelor’s degree attainment rate of 57 percent, and a poverty rate below the national average.

I can hear the objections forming. “Slavery was different.” Yes, it was different. It was longer and in many respects more brutal than any of these comparisons. “The Holocaust was more recent.” Correct. And that should mean its effects on the current generation are stronger, not weaker, than the effects of an atrocity that ended a century earlier. “These groups had different starting conditions.” Also correct. Jewish survivors of the Holocaust walked out of death camps with nothing — no possessions, no homes, no communities, no families. Japanese Americans walked out of internment camps having lost everything they had built. The starting conditions were devastation. The outcomes were recovery. The variable was not the depth of the trauma. The variable was the response to it.

The Universal Solvent

The slavery explanation has become what a chemist would call a universal solvent — a substance that dissolves everything it touches. Apply it to any disparity, any dysfunction, any failure, and it dissolves the need for further analysis. Why is the Black poverty rate higher than the white poverty rate? Slavery. Why is the Black incarceration rate higher? Slavery. Why is the Black marriage rate lower? Slavery. Why is the Black educational achievement gap persistent? Slavery. Why are Black-on-Black homicide rates seven to eight times the white-on-white rate? Slavery.

The word functions as a full stop. It terminates inquiry. It forecloses analysis. It converts every question into a statement of historical grievance that cannot be interrogated because the historical grievance is real. And this is the mechanism by which the slavery explanation does its greatest damage: not by being false, but by being incomplete and unchallengeable at the same time. Slavery was real. Its effects were real. Its legacy is real. And it does not explain 2026.

It does not explain why a man born in 1995, who has never been enslaved, who has never been denied the vote, who has never been subject to a literacy test or a poll tax or a whites-only sign, who has more legal protections than any Black person in the history of the world, refuses to raise his children. It does not explain why a teenager in 2026, with access to a free public education, a public library, and the entire accumulated knowledge of human civilization available on a device in his pocket, will not open a book. It does not explain why a community that survived slavery, survived the Klan, survived Jim Crow, and survived the fire hoses of Birmingham now tolerates levels of fratricidal violence that would have horrified the generation that marched at Selma.

To use slavery as the explanation for these choices is not to respect the ancestors. It is to betray them. Because the ancestors did not survive what they survived so that their great-great-great-grandchildren could cite their chains as a reason for inaction. They survived so that their descendants would be free. And freedom means, among other things, that your choices belong to you — that you can no longer attribute them to a system that ended before your grandfather was born.

The Data After Jim Crow

Let me return to the numbers, because numbers do not care about anyone’s politics, including mine.

In the twenty years between 1940 and 1960, the Black poverty rate dropped from approximately 87 percent to approximately 55 percent. This was the largest reduction in poverty for any demographic group over a twenty-year period in American history, and it occurred before the Civil Rights Act, before the Great Society programs, and before the War on Poverty. It occurred because Black Americans were migrating from the rural South to the urban North and West, entering industrial employment, forming two-parent families, building institutions, and exercising the economic agency that the Great Migration made possible.

Between 1960 and 1980, the Black poverty rate continued to decline, falling from 55 percent to approximately 32 percent. But the rate of decline slowed after the introduction of the Great Society programs, not before. The most rapid improvement in Black economic outcomes occurred when Black Americans were relying primarily on their own labor, their own families, and their own institutions. The improvement continued after 1965 but at a reduced rate, and the family structure that had supported the improvement began to disintegrate simultaneously.

The Black incarceration rate tells a similar story. In 1960, the rate of incarceration for Black Americans was elevated compared to whites, but the gap was dramatically smaller than it would become. Between 1970 and 2000, the Black incarceration rate increased by over 400 percent, driven by the War on Drugs, mandatory minimum sentencing, and the crack cocaine epidemic. But it was also driven by a dramatic increase in violent crime within Black communities — a crime wave that coincided not with slavery (which had ended a century earlier) or Jim Crow (which was being dismantled) but with the collapse of family structure, the expansion of welfare dependency, and the emergence of a cultural orientation that glorified precisely the behaviors that lead to incarceration.

To attribute the crime wave of 1970–2000 to slavery requires a theory of causation in which slavery’s effects were somehow dormant for a hundred years, allowed a century of gradual Black progress, and then suddenly activated with devastating force at the precise moment when legal barriers were being removed and government assistance was being expanded. This theory is not credible. It is not supported by any mechanism that social science recognizes. What is supported by the data is that the post-1965 deterioration of Black social outcomes was caused by post-1965 factors — factors that can be identified, examined, and addressed, but only if we are willing to look at them instead of reflexively pointing at a plantation that closed 161 years ago.

What the Survivors Would Say

I want to engage in an act of historical imagination that I believe is not only legitimate but morally necessary. I want to ask what the actual survivors of slavery would say if they could see how their suffering is being used.

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery, taught himself to read, became the most powerful orator of the nineteenth century, advised a president, and wrote three autobiographies that remain among the most important documents in American literature. Harriet Tubman escaped slavery, returned to the South nineteen times to lead others to freedom, served as a spy and scout for the Union Army, and founded a home for the elderly in Auburn, New York. Booker T. Washington was born into slavery, educated himself, founded the Tuskegee Institute, and built a network of Black schools and businesses across the South.

These were people who had actually been enslaved. They had the scars on their backs and the chains around their wrists. And every single one of them — without exception — responded to slavery not by citing it as a reason for limitation but by transcending it with a ferocity that makes the modern excuse-making not just inadequate but obscene. Douglass did not say, “I was enslaved, therefore I cannot read.” He taught himself to read by candlelight and used literacy as a weapon against the very system that had tried to deny it to him. Tubman did not say, “I was enslaved, therefore I cannot act.” She walked back into the jaws of the system that had enslaved her, again and again, and pulled others out of it with her bare hands.

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” — James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village” (1953)

The innocence that Baldwin describes is the innocence of the slavery explanation — the state of moral slumber in which the invocation of a historical atrocity exempts an entire community from the scrutiny that every other community applies to itself. It is the innocence that says a man in 2026 cannot be expected to raise his children because a man in 1826 was not allowed to. It is the innocence that says a teenager cannot be expected to study because a teenager in 1850 was not allowed to read. It is an innocence that, as Baldwin warns, has long since died — and its continued maintenance is producing not virtue but monstrosity.

The Moral Hazard of Eternal Victimhood

There is a concept in insurance called moral hazard: the phenomenon in which protection from consequences increases the behavior that produces those consequences. When a driver has comprehensive insurance, he drives less carefully. When a bank is guaranteed a bailout, it takes larger risks. And when a community is provided with a universal explanation for every failure — an explanation that locates causation entirely outside the individual and entirely in the past — the incentive to address present behavior is diminished.

The slavery explanation is a moral hazard. It does not describe reality. It constructs a reality in which personal agency is irrelevant and collective grievance is the only lens through which outcomes can be understood. It tells a twenty-year-old Black man that his life is determined by events that occurred before his great-great-grandfather was born, and that his individual choices — to study or not, to parent or not, to work or not, to respect the law or not — are negligible variables in an equation dominated by historical forces beyond his control. And it tells him this in the name of compassion, which makes the lie more corrosive than if it were delivered as an insult, because an insult can be rejected while “compassion” is absorbed.

Every other group that has experienced historical trauma has, at some point, made a collective decision to stop using that trauma as an explanation for present behavior and to start using it as fuel for future achievement. Jewish communities did not stop remembering the Holocaust. They built memorials, documented testimonies, created museums, and inscribed “Never Again” into the foundation of their collective identity. But they did not use the Holocaust as a reason why a Jewish teenager in Brooklyn should not study for her exams. They used it as a reason why she must.

The Japanese American community did not forget internment. They fought for and received an official apology and reparations from the United States government in 1988. But they did not use internment as an explanation for Japanese American poverty or Japanese American crime or Japanese American family dissolution — because those phenomena did not materialize, because the community chose recovery over grievance, achievement over explanation, and the future over the past.

What Must Be Said

Slavery happened. Its effects are real. Its legacy persists in wealth gaps, in institutional patterns, in the geographic distribution of poverty, and in the psychological inheritance of a people who were told for centuries that they were property rather than persons. All of this is true. I have no interest in minimizing it, and I do not minimize it.

But slavery ended 161 years ago. Jim Crow ended 61 years ago. And the metrics that most powerfully predict life outcomes in the Black community — family structure, educational engagement, community safety, and the cultural narratives that shape behavior — have deteriorated most dramatically during the period of greatest legal freedom and greatest government assistance. This is a fact. It is not a comfortable fact. It is not a fact that fits neatly into any political narrative. But it is a fact, and the refusal to face it is a refusal to face the actual causes of present suffering in favor of a historical explanation that, however true in its own context, cannot account for the specific trajectory of Black America after 1965.

What must be said, because it is true, is this: the ancestors survived the Middle Passage. They survived the auction block. They survived the lash. They survived having their children sold away from them, their marriages unrecognized, their humanity denied by law and custom and violence. They survived all of this and they still built families, still educated their children in secret, still formed churches and mutual aid societies, still purchased their freedom when it could be purchased, and still ran toward liberty when it could not. They did all of this with nothing — no legal protection, no government assistance, no civil rights laws, no affirmative action, no diversity programs.

And we, their descendants — who have all of those things, who live in a country that has, however imperfectly, bent its laws toward our inclusion, who have access to educational resources and economic opportunities that Douglass and Tubman and Washington could not have imagined — we use their suffering as an excuse for not trying?

That is not history. That is desecration. It is the use of sacred suffering for profane purposes. It is the conversion of the ancestors’ triumph into a justification for their descendants’ surrender. And it must stop — not because slavery was insignificant, but because the people who survived it were too significant to be reduced to an alibi for the choices we are free to make and refuse to make in 2026.

They survived so we could be free. The least we can do with that freedom is use it.