My colleagues who actually study slavery for a living may shake their heads at this, but a janitor in Ann Arbor pointed out to me that some of our kids never had a chance - "from slavery to sharecropping to the ghetto"...

...and told me to temper my "I am working class!" grind-and-bootstraps attitude I had back then with the fact that my family on both sides had been landowners.

"That's why your family is like it is. It's not just you."

That was the beginning of me unlearning grit ideologies.

The story on Dad's side was that they were "swindled out of their land because so-and-so was foolish" in MS, and in FL, we lost it when everyone migrated North & didn't "hold on" to what Grandma's dad built...

But of course, as a scholar, I now know the truth is complicated.

The land that my family owned in Florida is now held by developers. Old Black Florida's still there if you look for it, but a lot of it has been lost.

My people are ambivalent about your retiree & vacation paradise. But...

We have those stories! And I think maybe that matters.

During the pandemic, me and my mom and sisters were on Zoom and in Google Earth, looking at the new development that replaced my great-grandparents' home that we had until Auntie Katie died... the dissonance!

...I was like, those bastards didn't keep the fruit trees? SMH.

We owned that property until the 1990s.

The losses Black America has experienced have been totalizing.