The History I Thought I Knew

Hey guys, welcome back to Ascended Warrior, and welcome to Season 5.

I’m opening this season with possibly one of the hardest subjects I could choose to talk about.

Slavery.

This is going to be a two-part conversation. Today we’re going to talk about slavery, and next week we’re going deeper into the systems and stories around race that grew from it.

This is uncomfortable territory.

For many people, especially many white people, there can be an instinct to say:

It’s over.

It ended.

Why are we still talking about it?

I’m not saying that to accuse anyone.

I understand the discomfort because I’m part of this conversation too.

I’ve always been a student of history. Certain periods have fascinated me for most of my life: Tudor England, the Holocaust and the stories of concentration-camp survivors, and slavery—particularly what happened to people after slavery and how those experiences shaped the cultures that followed.

I tell you that because even after years of reading and studying this subject, I recently had an experience that showed me how little I still understood.

What I Didn’t Know About Hampton

I was in Hampton, Virginia.

I live in Northern Virginia, and I like taking trips around the region to visit historical and spiritual places. I’ve driven through Hampton many times while working in the Virginia Beach area.

I already had a story about Hampton.

It’s a bad area.

Higher crime.

Be careful.

Don’t stay there if you don’t have to.

That was essentially the extent of my understanding.

I wasn’t going there specifically to study slavery. I went to visit Fort Monroe.

When I arrived, a woman working there asked whether I had come to see the fort or whether I had come to see Hampton.

And I remember thinking:

Why would I come here to see Hampton?

That question alone should tell you how little I understood.

I told her I was there for the fort but asked what she thought I should know about Hampton.

She gave me several pamphlets and started talking about the history of the city.

Her passion was Hampton itself.

And that conversation opened a door I hadn’t expected.

The Word That Stopped Me

During the Civil War, enslaved people began escaping to Fort Monroe, which was under Union control.

But there was a legal problem.

Under the existing legal system, enslaved people were considered property. Even when they escaped, laws had historically required that they be returned.

So Union officials faced a question:

How could they legally refuse to return them?

The solution was to classify escaped enslaved people as contraband of war.

Contraband.

Even saying that word bothers me.

We use contraband to describe illegal property.

Weapons.

Drugs.

Goods you’re not supposed to possess.

But these were human beings.

People escaping slavery.

Survivors.

Families.

And the legal mechanism used to protect them still relied on language that treated them as property.

That contradiction stayed with me.

These people eventually gathered in what became known as the Great Contraband Camp around Hampton.

The conditions were difficult. Hampton itself had been largely burned during the war.

But the people who escaped there built something.

Communities.

Schools.

Churches.

Hospitals.

They built lives in a place where many of them had arrived owning almost nothing and having been denied even basic education.

And parts of the community they created still exist today.

Standing in History Without Knowing It

Learning that was humbling.

Honestly, it was embarrassing.

I had driven past this area.

I had lived in Virginia.

I had studied slavery.

And I didn’t know.

I had been taught a much cleaner story of the Civil War.

The South wanted slavery.

The North opposed slavery.

The North won.

The enslaved were freed.

Of course, intellectually I knew the history was more complicated than that.

But I had never confronted the complexity physically in the same way.

Calling escaped human beings contraband shattered some of the neatness of that story for me.

So I started digging.

I walked the areas connected to the former camp.

I looked at the churches.

The schools.

The roads.

I stood at intersections where thousands of people had tried to construct lives after generations of being told they were property.

At one point I was standing somewhere with no giant marker telling me what had happened there.

No dramatic monument.

Just a road.

A community.

People going about their day.

And all I could think was:

How did I not know this?

Then I Realized I Did Have a Story About Hampton

I started beating myself up.

I’ve studied this.

Why didn’t I know?

Why wasn’t I taught?

How had something this significant been sitting almost in my backyard without me understanding it?

Then I stopped for a moment.

And I realized something much more uncomfortable.

I did know something about Hampton.

I knew it was a bad area.

That’s the story I had inherited.

No one sat me down and said anything explicitly racial.

No one said:

Don’t go there because it’s a historically Black community.

They didn’t have to.

I knew the conclusion.

I didn’t know the history.

I knew poverty.

I didn’t know what people had built there.

I knew the current reputation.

I didn’t know the story that created the community.

And once I learned the history, something remarkable happened.

The exact same streets looked different.

The buildings had not changed.

The roads had not changed.

The people had not changed.

I had changed.

What We Aren’t Taught Matters

That experience made me wonder whether one of the most powerful ways we inherit a system isn’t through what we’re explicitly taught.

Maybe it’s through what’s left out.

We talk about economic conditions.

Crime.

Education.

Opportunity.

Poverty.

But when we remove the history that produced those conditions, what story are we actually teaching about the people who live there?

If I tell you:

This is a poor Black neighborhood.

Your brain may immediately create a story.

But what if I tell you something else?

What if I tell you that thousands of people escaped slavery and gathered in that area?

That they built communities?

That they built churches?

That people who had been legally denied education gathered together to learn to read and write?

That educators emerged from that community and went out to teach others?

Does that change what you see?

Does that change what the neighborhood means?

That’s the foundation of this entire season.

Slavery Ended. But Slavery Wasn’t Only Ownership.

Slavery ended.

That is true.

But slavery was never only one person owning another person.

It wasn’t contained inside a plantation.

There was an entire world built around it.

Laws.

Economies.

Governments.

Shipping.

Trade.

Religion.

Education.

Ideas about race.

Entire institutions were created to sustain slavery, profit from it, protect it or justify it.

So when slavery ended, what happened to everything that had grown around it?

That’s the question I’m interested in.

Not:

Did slavery end?

Of course it did.

The question is:

What happened to the world slavery built?

This Is About Inheritance, Not Blame

I want to be really clear about something because this conversation can immediately trigger defensiveness.

This isn’t about blaming people living today for slavery.

I didn’t create slavery.

You didn’t create slavery.

We were born into a world that already existed.

But that’s exactly why I use the word inheritance.

We inherit things we did not create.

Sometimes we inherit beautiful things.

Sometimes we inherit problems.

Sometimes we inherit stories without realizing they are stories.

The question is not whether we’re guilty of creating them.

The question is what we do once we can see them.

Slavery Was Not Only an American System

Another thing I want to remove from this conversation is the idea that slavery belongs exclusively to American history.

Human beings have enslaved one another across civilizations for a very long time.

It’s one of the darkest recurring parts of human history.

But the transatlantic slave trade developed into an enormous international network.

People were transported from West and Central Africa across the Atlantic.

The network connected Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil and other parts of South America, North America and Europe.

Millions of human beings were forced into that system.

And most enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic did not come to what became the United States.

That matters because many of us still imagine slavery primarily as something that happened on a cotton plantation in the American South.

That’s a very narrow frame.

The plantation was one part of an international economic structure.

Follow the Sugar

Imagine an enslaved person cutting sugarcane in Jamaica.

If we stop the story there, we might say:

Jamaica had slavery.

That’s true.

But follow the sugar.

The cane has to be processed.

The sugar and molasses have to be shipped.

Ships have to be built.

Sailors have to be hired.

Ports need workers.

Merchants sell the products.

Refineries process them.

Buyers purchase them.

Banks finance trade.

Governments regulate and protect commercial interests.

Suddenly the economic life produced by one enslaved person’s labor reaches thousands of miles away.

The plantation is one node.

The network surrounding it is the larger story.

There Weren’t Only Slaveholders and Innocent Bystanders

This is where the story becomes uncomfortable for a lot of us.

We want participation to be binary.

Slaveholder.

Or innocent.

We may even research our family histories looking for reassurance.

Did my ancestors own slaves?

If they did, we may feel guilt.

If they didn’t, we may feel relieved.

But an economy this large doesn’t work through one type of participant.

A person could live thousands of miles from a plantation and still work inside industries connected to products created through enslaved labor.

That doesn’t mean every person participating in that economy was morally identical to a slaveholder.

That’s not the point.

The point is understanding scale.

Slavery was woven into a much larger economic and political structure.

Every Network Needs Rules

Once you begin looking at slavery as a network, another layer appears.

Economics alone couldn’t sustain it.

The system required laws.

Governments had to recognize ownership of human beings.

They needed rules about escape.

Property.

Inheritance.

Labor.

Movement.

The system also required justification.

People needed a story explaining why ownership of another human being was acceptable.

Why that person’s children could also be owned.

Why education could be denied.

Why families could be separated.

Why certain people could be subjected to treatment that would have been considered unacceptable for others.

That is where race becomes central.

Stories Make Systems Feel Normal

Human beings are incredibly good at creating stories that allow us to live with our behavior.

Governments considered themselves civilized.

Religious communities considered themselves moral.

Educated people considered themselves enlightened.

And yet slavery continued.

So stories developed.

Ideas about civilization.

Intelligence.

Religion.

African identity.

White identity.

These stories became language.

And language teaches us how to see.

Savage.

Primitive.

Uncivilized.

Versus:

Educated.

Respectable.

Civilized.

Law-abiding.

Once people have been sorted into those categories, the system becomes easier to tolerate.

That’s why the word contraband bothered me so much.

The Union could use that classification as a legal mechanism to avoid returning escaped people to slavery.

But the language still carried the architecture of property.

It demonstrates how complicated social change can be.

A society may begin changing a law before it has changed the language and assumptions that produced the law.

How Could Religion Coexist With Slavery?

This is a question I’ve struggled with for years.

How did communities deeply invested in Christianity reconcile themselves with owning other human beings?

Many early communities in what became the United States were deeply religious.

Some had fled persecution.

Some were attempting to build societies they believed would reflect their understanding of God.

And yet slavery existed within those societies.

Different religious communities interpreted religious doctrine in dramatically different ways.

Some used Christianity to defend slavery.

Others used the same broader faith tradition to condemn it.

That’s important because it reminds us that people do not simply read a religious text and automatically produce one inevitable social system.

Interpretation happens inside culture.

People bring their interests, assumptions and existing worldview with them.

Religion can challenge a society.

It can also be molded around what a society already wants to believe.

The Story Had to Reproduce Itself

For hereditary racial slavery to continue generation after generation, the story surrounding it also had to survive.

The next generation needed to inherit an explanation for why another human being could be inherited.

Their children needed the same explanation.

And eventually the explanation stopped feeling like an argument.

It became normal.

This is simply who these people are.

This is simply their place.

This is how the world works.

That is what makes cultural inheritance so powerful.

Once something becomes normal enough, nobody has to explain where it came from anymore.

It simply becomes reality.

The Machine Was Enormous

The more I studied this after Hampton, the more I kept imagining a network diagram.

One of those images where hundreds of points are connected by lines.

At one point you have the enslaved person and the slaveholder.

But around them are banks.

Merchants.

Ports.

Governments.

Religious institutions.

Schools.

Laws.

Labor markets.

Ideas about race.

The slaveholder and the enslaved person are one part of a much larger machine.

So imagine removing that one relationship.

Legal ownership disappears.

That’s enormous.

But what happens to the other nodes?

Do they disappear automatically?

Do the people inside them forget everything they believed yesterday?

Do the economic relationships vanish?

Does the geography reset?

Does the education system immediately become equal?

Does society instantly change its definition of who is valuable?

Of course not.

And that is where the story after slavery begins.

What Does Freedom Actually Require?

Once I started looking at slavery as a network instead of a single institution, emancipation began to look different to me too.

Ending slavery was monumental.

It changed the law.

A human being could no longer legally own another human being.

But if slavery had created an entire network around that relationship, removing legal ownership didn’t automatically dismantle everything else.

The people remained.

The land remained.

The businesses remained.

The governments remained.

The churches remained.

The schools remained.

The economic relationships remained.

And perhaps most importantly, the beliefs remained.

So imagine the moment after emancipation.

You have a population of people who had spent generations being told they were property.

They had been denied education.

Denied control over their labor.

Denied control over their movement.

Denied the ability to build wealth in the same way as the people around them.

Then the law changes.

You’re free.

But what does that actually mean?

Where do you live?

Where do you work?

What do you own?

Can you read?

Can you understand a contract?

Can you negotiate your wages?

Can you buy land?

Can you vote?

Can you travel?

Can you protect yourself under the law?

Legal freedom is extraordinary.

But practical freedom requires more than the removal of a chain.

The Law Changed Before the Culture Did

One of the most important things to understand about systems is that laws can change much faster than human beings.

You can sign a piece of legislation tomorrow.

You cannot sign a piece of legislation that instantly removes generations of belief.

People who believed Black Americans were inferior the day before emancipation did not necessarily wake up the next morning thinking:

I was completely wrong. We’re all equal now.

Those ideas had been embedded into the culture.

They had been reinforced through religion, economics, education, law and family.

They had been passed from one generation to the next.

So after slavery ended, new laws and practices emerged that restricted the lives of newly freed Black Americans.

Black Codes limited movement, employment and other aspects of freedom.

Labor systems developed that could keep people economically dependent.

And this is where I think our understanding of history can become too simple.

We learn:

Slavery ended.

Then we jump ahead.

But what happened in that space matters.

Because a system doesn’t need to remain identical in order to preserve some of the relationships that existed inside it.

Imagine Being Told You Are Free

I kept trying to imagine what that moment actually felt like for the people living through it.

Imagine that yesterday you were legally property.

Today, you’re told you’re free.

Now what?

You need food.

You need housing.

You need work.

Maybe you’re trying to find family members who were sold away years earlier.

Maybe you’ve never been allowed to attend school.

Maybe you don’t know how to read.

Maybe you’ve never been allowed to enter into a contract on equal terms.

Maybe you have no land.

No savings.

No inherited property.

No family wealth.

And the people around you who once supported slavery still own much of the land, still control businesses and still hold political and social power.

That’s a very different picture of freedom than simply:

You’re free now. Go build a life.

Freedom isn’t only the absence of ownership.

Freedom requires the ability to participate.

Education Changes Who Gets to Interpret the World

This is one of the reasons the education piece of the Hampton story affected me so much.

At Emancipation Oak, I learned about Mary Peake.

She taught formerly enslaved people to read and write.

And when I first learned that, I thought about education the way most of us probably do.

School.

Books.

Learning.

But then I started thinking about what literacy actually means when you’ve been denied it.

If you can’t read, someone else has to tell you what’s in the contract.

Someone else has to tell you what the law says.

Someone else has to tell you what the newspaper says.

Someone else has to interpret the world for you.

So learning to read isn’t simply learning words.

It’s access to power.

You can read the contract yourself.

You can read the law yourself.

You can write a letter.

You can communicate across distance.

You can learn without waiting for someone else to decide what you’re allowed to know.

You can begin interpreting your own world.

And that made me see the pursuit of education among formerly enslaved people differently.

Education wasn’t some side benefit of freedom.

Education was part of becoming free.

The Emancipation Oak

Standing at the Emancipation Oak in Hampton was one of those moments when history stopped feeling like something in a textbook.

This enormous tree became associated with the education of formerly enslaved people and with the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in the area.

And I kept thinking about what it represented.

People who had been legally denied access to education gathering to learn.

Children and adults.

People beginning to build something that slavery had intentionally withheld from them.

That changes the story of Hampton.

If all I know is that Hampton has areas of poverty or crime today, then I am looking at an outcome.

But when I put the history back, I see something else.

I see a community built in part by people emerging from slavery who were trying to create institutions almost immediately.

Schools.

Churches.

Community.

Education.

And suddenly the question becomes:

What happened between that extraordinary beginning and the conditions we see in some communities today?

That’s a much more interesting question than simply labeling the neighborhood.

When We Remove History, We Create Stories About People

This is where the experience became personal for me.

Because I realized that when I didn’t know the history, my mind still had an explanation.

Human beings don’t like blank spaces.

We fill them.

If we see poverty without understanding how it developed, we create a story about poor people.

If we see crime without understanding the history of a neighborhood, we create a story about the people living there.

If one group has more wealth than another, we may create a story about work ethic.

If one community has higher educational outcomes, we may create a story about how much different families value education.

Sometimes those stories contain pieces of truth.

But without history, we have no idea how much of the equation we’re missing.

That’s what bothered me about my own assumptions about Hampton.

I had an answer.

I didn’t have the equation.

What Happens When the Starting Lines Are Different?

Let’s think about land.

Land is one of the most basic ways families have historically built wealth.

You purchase property.

The property increases in value.

You pass it to your children.

They inherit an asset.

Maybe they sell it.

Maybe they borrow against it.

Maybe they build on it.

Whatever they do, they aren’t beginning at zero.

Now imagine two families.

One has been able to own property for generations.

The other spent generations legally prevented from owning itself.

Then one day the law changes and we say:

Okay. You’re equal now.

Equal under a law does not automatically mean equal starting positions.

That’s not a moral judgment about either family.

It’s mathematics.

One family has accumulated something.

The other has not had the same opportunity to accumulate it.

And because wealth can move through generations, the effects can move through generations too.

Systems Become Geography

Then I started thinking about geography.

Because systems don’t only exist in laws.

Eventually, they become physical.

They become neighborhoods.

Roads.

Schools.

Transportation.

Housing.

Businesses.

Where people are able to live influences what schools their children attend.

It influences what jobs are nearby.

It influences transportation.

It influences property values.

It influences where businesses invest.

It influences where highways are built.

It influences where undesirable industries are placed.

So if you want to understand inequality, sometimes you don’t need to begin with someone’s beliefs.

Look at a map.

Where do people live?

Where are the jobs?

Where are the schools?

Where is the transportation?

Where is the investment?

Where are the environmental burdens?

The architecture of an old system can remain visible long after the original laws have changed.

South Africa Made the Pattern Easier to See

One of the comparisons that helped me understand this more clearly was South Africa.

South Africa and the United States obviously have different histories.

I’m not saying the systems were identical.

But South Africa gives us a very visible example of how racial policy can become geography.

The 1913 Natives Land Act restricted Black land ownership across most of South Africa.

Later, apartheid formalized racial separation even more extensively.

The Group Areas Act assigned racial groups to different residential and business areas.

Pass laws controlled the movement of Black South Africans.

Townships developed outside economic centers.

Then apartheid ended.

The laws changed.

But the cities didn’t magically rearrange themselves.

Homes didn’t pick themselves up and move closer to jobs.

Roads didn’t automatically change.

Transportation networks didn’t instantly reorganize.

Generational wealth didn’t redistribute itself overnight.

The legal architecture changed faster than the physical architecture.

And that helped me understand something important.

A law can disappear while the geography created by that law remains.

Removing a Rule Doesn’t Rebuild a City

This is such an important concept because we often think the removal of discriminatory laws should automatically produce equality.

But imagine a city that has been intentionally structured for decades.

One population lives near economic centers.

Another lives farther away.

Investment follows one group.

Infrastructure develops around one group.

Property values grow differently.

Then the discriminatory law is removed.

That’s essential.

But the city is still physically there.

The houses are still there.

The businesses are still there.

The roads are still there.

The accumulated property values are still there.

History has become concrete.

And this isn’t only about race.

This is something I want us to carry through the entire season.

Systems leave physical and psychological architecture behind.

Even after we decide we no longer believe in the system that created it.

What Did the System Teach People to Believe?

There is another layer that is even harder to see.

The physical system may survive.

But so can the story.

If generations of people are taught that one group is less intelligent, less trustworthy, more dangerous, less civilized or less deserving, those beliefs don’t disappear because a law changes.

They can move into language.

Humor.

Hiring decisions.

Housing choices.

School expectations.

Who feels threatening.

Who feels familiar.

Who we imagine belongs in leadership.

Who we expect to see in poverty.

And eventually the original source of the belief can disappear.

We’re left with the conclusion.

That was exactly what happened to me with Hampton.

I didn’t know where the story came from.

I simply knew the story.

Bad area.

And because I didn’t know the history, I had no reason to question it.

The Story Can Outlive the System That Created It

This is one of the most important things I want people to understand from this episode.

A system can teach people a story for hundreds of years.

Then the system changes.

But the story doesn’t necessarily disappear.

It can continue moving through families and communities long after people forget where it originated.

Think about phrases you’ve heard your entire life.

Ideas about certain neighborhoods.

Certain kinds of people.

Who is dangerous.

Who is hardworking.

Who is intelligent.

Who is lazy.

Who belongs.

Who doesn’t.

We absorb thousands of these tiny messages before we’re old enough to question them.

Most of them aren’t delivered as lessons.

They’re simply part of the environment.

And then we grow up believing we independently arrived at our worldview.

Maybe we did.

But maybe some of it was inherited.

This Is Where Consciousness Begins

For me, this is where the spiritual part of this conversation begins.

Because consciousness isn’t about knowing everything.

It’s about becoming willing to see what we didn’t know.

It’s being able to say:

I believed this.

Then I learned something new.

And now I see it differently.

That shouldn’t be threatening.

That’s growth.

Hampton didn’t change when I learned its history.

I changed.

My ability to see changed.

And that’s why I think these conversations matter.

Not because we’re trying to make everyone guilty about the past.

Not because we’re trying to decide which people living today are responsible for something that happened centuries ago.

But because we’re trying to understand the world we’re actually standing in.

You cannot consciously choose what to carry forward if you don’t know what you’re carrying.

Inherited Does Not Mean Chosen

None of us chose the world we were born into.

We didn’t choose its borders.

Its economic systems.

Its religions.

Its racial categories.

Its gender expectations.

Its ideas about success.

Its definitions of morality.

Its neighborhoods.

Its institutions.

We arrived here.

The house was already built.

And then we learned how to live inside it.

That’s what inheritance means to me.

It doesn’t mean guilt.

It doesn’t mean blame.

It means we received something before we were conscious enough to decide whether we wanted it.

And once we become conscious of it, we finally get a choice.

Do I keep this?

Do I change it?

Do I transcend it?

That’s where we’re going this season.

And it’s why slavery is such an important place to begin.

Because slavery gives us an enormous historical system where we can watch this process happen in real time.

We can see the original institution.

We can see the economic network around it.

We can see the beliefs that justified it.

We can see the laws that protected it.

Then we can watch the law change.

And ask:

What happened to everything else?

That question takes us beyond slavery.

It takes us into race.

Education.

Housing.

Work.

Identity.

And ultimately into the much larger question this season is asking:

How much of the world we’re moving through did we consciously choose—and how much did we simply inherit?