Rua do Poço dos Negros
There is a street in Lisboa called “Rua do Poço dos Negros.” Roughly translated it means “Negro Pit Street,” or more honestly — that street where we dug the giant mass grave where we threw all the bodies of stolen people once we’d exhausted the life from them.
It’s not to far from the Casa dos Escravos de Lisboa (Lisbon Slave House) and one imagines that you'd want your mass grave convenient enough that it wasn’t a slog to carry all those dead bodies, but also far enough away that the scent of death wasn’t constant.
The Lisbon Slave House and the Negro Pit were both built by my people. My people were in shipping, which is also the name of my new talk. The goal of the talk is to get people to deal with the shame of their past in order to move forward to a better future. We can keep making excuses. We can keep attempting to rewrite the past. Or we can acknowledge it, make reparations for it, and work together to build a better future. But we can’t keep whitewashing it.
Be a better ancestor than the ones you got.
I’m doing to talk again tomorrow (Monday, March 14, 8pm EDT, 5pm PDT). This time my special guest will be Eduardo Ortiz, who did a ton of good immigration work for US Digital Services under the Obama administration. I hope you can make it. I miss your face. You can sign up here.