Abstract
This paper is using a critical personal narrative and decolonialization theory to share the story of my family. It is the story of my great-grandfather, who was the child of a slave master and a house servant, and his story of survival, using historical documents. Race and racism have been a part of my family from its origin, because of the cultural and social meanings of Blackness, which are discussed in the article.
Highlights
The first roadblock that I ran into was on the Louisiana vital statistic website; it stated that the State of Louisiana did not issue birth certificates for Black people until after 1900
The African ancestry was purposefully systemically erased from families of African
It was a little amazing how easy it was to trace the White side of my family history, but there was no way to trace the African part
Summary
I started doing research on my mom’s father’s family back in 2000. I was a young. Brenè Brown (2017) argued that, for African Americans to be enslaved for years, the society had to culturally dehumanize them. They had to decide that they were objects, not people. The US Constitution counted slaves as three-fifth of a person on the US Census, even though they had no right to vote It was not until the 13th Amendment that African American men had the right to vote, and until the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, African Americans continued to be disenfranchised in voting Counterstories must be beyond the surface level of information, because interaction between White people and African Americans has always existed, but this problem of dehumanization that has been inserting in the conceptualization of race has skewed concepts of how people think of each other.
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