Today, I was watching Season 18, Episode 3 of Criminal Minds: Evolution. In that episode, Special Agent Jennifer “JJ” Jareau loses her husband. There’s a moment where she’s with her mother, overcome by grief, and her mother wraps her in her arms to comfort her. That simple embrace—full of love, safety, and humanity—stopped me in my tracks.
It was a beautiful reminder of what family should look like.
But as I watched them, something unexpected happened. My mind drifted to the legacy of slavery, and I was struck by how violently Black people were stripped of those very moments. Stripped of our families, our feelings, our humanness. Reduced to property.
Watching that scene, I couldn’t help but think: No one can ever pay enough for what was taken. And it is a miracle that Black people can even sit and speak with white people today, given the unspeakable past.
I thought about the women who gave birth only to have their babies ripped away—sold, discarded, or raised by strangers who saw them as commodities. I thought about how those same women were forced to raise other people’s children, often those of the very masters who raped them. Their own children, if they survived, were never held as beloved. They were born into a system that didn’t even see them as human.
Can you imagine? Giving birth and knowing your baby doesn’t belong to you. That the love you feel, the dreams you have for your child, the pain of childbirth, the hope—none of it matters. Because to them, you were just a vessel. A machine. A tool. Your grief, your exhaustion, your soul—none of it counted.
And yet, you loved. Deeply. Fiercely. You dared to love in a world where your love meant nothing to the people in power. That is a miracle in itself.
And that… that is just one tiny fragment of what slavery was. Not even close to the full horror.
In the book Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, there’s a line that pierced me: “My mother had many children, but she had no family.”
That is the kind of generational rupture slavery created. The more I reflect on it, the harder it is to understand how anyone could justify inflicting such terror, such psychological and physical violence, on another human being. People didn’t just participate—they woke up daily and found new ways to sustain and justify this cruelty. They passed it down like an inheritance.
And yet, when we were taught about slavery in school, it was brushed over in two pages. Two pages. We were told that yes, it happened—but then came abolition, and the “heroes” who ended it were celebrated. End of story. We even made jokes as kids—saying things like, “Why didn’t your ancestors get on the boat?”—as if slavery was just some unfortunate inconvenience, not the brutal dehumanization of generations.
Looking back now, I’m appalled at how lightly we treated it. That’s how effective the system was at erasing its true history.
Now, when people argue against reparations, I hear things like, “Why should I pay for what my great-great-grandparents did?” What they miss is that their entire bloodline benefited from that system. Wealth was built. Privileges passed on. Entire nations grew rich from the backs of people who were never paid, never acknowledged, never healed.
Truthfully, even money isn’t enough. Real reparations would need to be paid in flesh and bone—because maybe if someone spent just three months enslaved, they’d begin to grasp the depth of that trauma. Maybe then, they’d be more willing to pay something, anything, for what was done.
But until then, the least we can ask is that the truth be told—and never forgotten.
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over here