Quote: “Families broken apart and moved roughshod throughout the country obliterated connections to the past and to the dead.”

I picked this quote because as soon as I read it the whole point of the reading suddenly clicked in my head. I began to make the connections between the efforts of slave owners and sellers to dehumanize enslaved people and the lack of presence of ghost stories that involve black people. It made the topic of the reading have more relevance to me. Instead of just being about the fact that there are no black ghosts in Richmond Virginia, the reading was asking why there were black ghosts in Richmond and theorizing that perhaps the reason for that is because it was done intentionally. That it was a result of slave masters separating families and severing ties to strip black people of their identities. This quote helped me as a reader to make sense of what I was reading and understand the point that the author was making.

Reading this made me think of the ways that people connect with their past and about how that closely relates to identity. This is especially important to think of at the moment due to our recent government administration’s actions. The push to erase true black history from the education system. Erasing this history affects the identity of so many Americans. It leads to holes in people’s minds about very important aspects of who they are and where they came from, how that affects them today. Erasing the real story as to paint a prettier picture and ignore what happened does a lot of harm to our future. this in my opinion is very clear from the decisions people make politically. If we as a whole were more educated about our own histories, and understand our history, we learn from it.