"Who are your people?"

Imani Perry, a Professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University and an advising scholar for CBBG, reviews the book Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery by Heather Andrea Williams (The University of North Carolina Press, 2012):

"Consistent with the unevenness of historical information about the poor and the marginal, the book presents more vignettes than long-form stories. Yet it has a propulsive narrative flow, and with each successive chapter the suppleness of Williams’s prose grows. She observes that among the enslaved there were distinct ways of coping with the constant threat of loss, and of living with the grief of permanent separation. Simultaneously, some whites embraced the fiction that black people lacked the capacity to feel deeply, which allowed them to dissociate from the horror of human trafficking. Others simply pretended not to hear the wails."

You can read the full article here: "Human Bonds" (The New York Times, June 29, 2012)

Stay tuned for a CBBG workshop about African American genealogy research coming soon...