Has anyone gotten a chance to watch Katrina Browne’s documentary “Traces of the Trade” on PBS? I just caught it last night.
The film unfurls a nine-year story about the contemporary offspring of a wealthy slave-trading/slave-owning family (from 19th-century Rhode Island) that supposedly trafficked in more slaves than any other family in American history.
The descendants of those family members traveled from the United States to Cuba and Ghana (earlier this decade), revisiting important nodes of the trans-Atlantic circulations that organized “the peculiar institution.”
The documentary is also an attempt to examine what it might look like for whites to talk honestly with one another about racial history’s implications for contemporary American lives and life chances — as a precursor to more-sustained multi-racial conversations in the United States and abroad.
One poignant portion of the film revolves around those familial participants groping around for a language they might productively use to confide in one another (and in one of the film’s African-American producers) about their deepest fears and frustrations around issues of race. And this is one of the places where, as they say, the rubber hits the road. What kinds of dialogues are we usually having about race? Are they empowering or debilitating, sincere or hollow, real or canned? The film offers some answers.
It quickly moves on to a discussion of reparations and a decidedly religious (religiously-inflected) final sequence. The entire thing is worth watching and commenting upon. And it helps to demonstrate why many of the dialogues we have about race and racism in America are not robust enough, especially when the only forms of honest sharing vis-à-vis questions of race tend to happen under the feeble auspices of anonymous Internet comments or in exclusively private machinations/complaints aired only amongst friends.
What might it look like for us to really talk honestly about America’s racial history? Does anybody even want to do that?
