For quite some time, the writing of Atlantic history has been limited by imperial borders, with historians looking at French, Spanish, and English Atlantic systems. One of the most serious attempts to construct a different kind of Atlantic was Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic, first published in 1993. While Gilroy's analysis was focused on the Anglophone and British world, his work had wider merits. The first was that his discourse was anchored in the present. Gilroy wanted to build a discourse on the experience of black people within an Atlantic system following the observation that so much (if not all) of academic discourse on the modern world was Eurocentric. His book was an attempt to offer a counter-reading of history. Second, he built his case by concentrating on the experiences, cultures, and histories of the black people taken from Africa and their descendants—dealing with the paradox that they were less studied than other groups crossing the Atlantic, even though they took on the most important role in shaping the Atlantic world as it has developed on three continents since the sixteenth century. It is only following the work of scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Zora Neale Hurston, and several others that followed them, that the black historical experience within Atlantic history is getting the place it deserves. These early scholars made their academic contributions in a time of very open segregation and racism in society, and part of their work was motivated by the need to confirm the right to a black identity, and the history that came with that. In that sense, their work is still highly relevant today.

The pioneering work done by African American scholars in the last century has borne fruit.Footnote ¹ Not only do we better understand the scope and meaning of the forced displacement of generations of Africans and the creation of slave societies in the Americas, but we have also developed a more diverse methodological approach to study the black historical experience. Scholars, activists, and artists have brought the point home that black lives have mattered in the shaping of history and need to be analysed accordingly.

Analysing how black people tried to grasp some form of control over their own lives is at the heart of the three books under review. Jessica Marie Johnson, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, Sophie White, professor at the University of Notre Dame, and Stella Dadzie, a British educationalist, writer, and activist, all offer important insights in the ways in which Africans and people of African descent chose to deal with issues of freedom, self-determination, enslavement, and resistance in the early modern Atlantic. Slavery, of course, was the single most defining feature of the lives of black people in the Atlantic space. Even those who were free could not run far from its looming presence; as Johnson rightfully remarks, “for slaveowners, freedom for people of African descent would never be free” (Johnson, 154). But all three books go much further than recounting how black people lived with slavery. Johnson's narrative offers a “story of freedom and all of its ambiguities,” which “began in intimate acts steeped in power, shaped by the particular oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent, as well as the self-conscious choices they made to secure control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures” (Johnson, 4). This sense of agency is equally central in Stella Dadzie's book, which shows how “enslaved women made a distinctly female contribution to the advancement of the struggle for freedom” (Dadzie, 13). Sophie White has set out to show “how enslaved individuals harnessed colonial spaces and sometimes even commandeered them,” allowing us to understand “not only how profoundly the forced intimacy of slavery affected these individuals but also how they fought to establish boundaries” (White, 25–6).

The historical contexts in which these issues are analysed differ but overlap. Two of the books, Johnson's and White's, focus on French New Orleans and draw partially from the same source material—testimonies and other legal records of the Superior Council of Louisiana. Dadzie's narrative of resistance is situated in the British Atlantic. While all of the books deal extensively with gender, how it was constructed and how it affected the possibilities of choice, two of them, Dadzie's and Johnson's, opted to focus their narrative exclusively on women. These different approaches are reflected in the how the books have been structured. Jessica Marie Johnson chose to fully situate New Orleans and its black inhabitants in a wider Atlantic space. She begins her story in West Africa and uses “an overlapping structure that mirrors the overlapping diasporas they [the women studied in the book] existed in and created” (Johnson, 13). In the first two chapters, the lives of several free African women in Saint-Louis and Gorée, both in Senegambia, are analysed. Johnson discusses how these women helped to build a society in which encounters between different Atlantic groups were crucial. In the process, several of them constructed social capital, economic wealth, and status. A good example is the seignora Catti, an African widow of a Portuguese trader, a landowner and commercial agent in her own regard, and “a gracious host,” particularly to “foreigners unfamiliar with Wolof customs” (Johnson, 16). Chapter 3 deals with the Middle Passage and the process of commodification. While Marie Baude, wife of a Frenchman, made the passage to New Orleans as a free black woman, she was still subjected to the white gaze that could mistake her for a slave, and subject her to violence, at any instant. When she arrived on America's shore, who she was, changed. Baude, in many ways, was still lucky, though, and she remained an exception. Chapters 4 and 5 are about the subjection of black female bodies to enslavement—it deals with the use of women, the possession and forced labour extracted from them—and their responses to it. Chapter 5 in particular offers a strong narrative of the ways women challenged this system or power by introducing the methodological tool of “black femme freedom”; for Johnson, this refers to the claim to self-ownership, to survival, and to solidarity between black women. It is a very useful concept to look at the black female historical experience both in the early modern period as well as today, as it points to an autonomously constructed way out of hell: “a life-sustaining definition of blackness emerged out of black women's survival, the survival of their children, the creation of self-sustaining communities across African origins, racial nomenclatures, and the precarity of bondage” (Johnson, 173). The final chapter crosses boundaries of empire once again, by analysing the impact brought about by the change of colonial rule, when New Orleans became Spanish. New roads to freedom became available, and the women discussed in this book made use of them.

Stella Dadzie's book is built on a similar structure, as it also follows a path of development over time and space without being strictly chronological. A first chapter deals with the trade in Africans, and the female experience. Like Johnson, Dadzie begins her narrative on West African soil. She tackles the horrors of the Middle Passage in the second chapter, and, following the work of Sowande’ Mustakeem in her Slavery at Sea, Dadzie discusses the role gender played in the experiences on board the slave ships.Footnote ² A third chapter is about the labour enslaved women were forced to do, and Dadzie successfully dispels several stereotypes on the gender division of labour. Chapter 4 deals with punishment, the role played in it by gender, and the influence thereof on the intensity of resistance: “The possibility that gender may have rendered women's suffering more acute has important implications. For if a person's motivations to resist bears any relationship to the weight of their oppression, it could be argued that, collectively, enslaved women had an even greater incentive than men to undermine the system” (Dadzie, 111). Chapter 5 maps the different ways in which women resisted. Chapter 6 deals with reproduction, discussing not only the context and importance of reproduction for female slaves in terms of what it meant for their owners, but also as means of resistance and escape, from sleeping with white men to guarantee a better future for offspring to infanticide and self-sabotage in terms of fertility, a long-standing issue amongst historians. Dadzie focuses on the nineteenth century, and with good reason—discussions on fertility become more prominent in the colonial source material, following the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807. A final chapter discusses the role played by women in transferring culture from one generation to the next, successfully arguing that the transfer—and constant adaptation—of culture is an important form of resistance and goes beyond it. She uses a quote from the historian Edward Kamau Braithwaite to suggest that “each transported African carried within them ‘the potential of reconstruction’” (Dadzie, 169).

The structure of both Johnson and Dadzie's books allows for a very important consideration—that Atlantic history needs to include Africa on its own terms. All too often, Atlantic history as well as the history of slavery has been limited to the interaction between the Americas and Europe, hardly discussing Africa. As a recent volume on African women in the Atlantic world argues, “African populations tend to play only a peripheral role in studies on the Atlantic world, although a few historians have demonstrated the active role of Africans in the creation and maintenance of that world.”Footnote ³ As a consequence, “Africa” and “Africans” are used too often as broad categories that never take on a full meaning. Occasionally, such generalisations are present in the books under review. A few times, White resorts to explanations that are not fully pursued, for instance when she argues that the role taken by some African men as enforcers was inspired by colonial law, but “as much, if not more, to West African judicial norms and practices” (White, 135)—what these norms and practices were exactly, in what way they were West African, and how they were preserved over time in New Orleans remains unclear. A similar remark about “cultural understandings originating in West Africa” can be found on page 206. On page 148, Stella Dadzie writes that “women played a vital role as healers and mystics in most African societies.” While none of these remarks are wrong per se, they do point out the occasional reliance on generalised and atemporal conceptions of all things African—undifferentiated through time and space, but convenient threads that are used to explain the fabric of Atlantic societies outside of the African continent. Overall, though, all three authors mostly stay clear of these generalisations, and Johnson's book in particular fits within a relatively young tradition that asserts that, to fully comprehend black experiences in the Americas, a scholar also must investigate the African context in Africa, something Johnson does in her first two chapters, and Dadzie in her first.

Sophie White's book differs substantially in structure from the others. Her approach relies on micro-history, and she draws as much out of the source material as she can, structuring her book in a thematic manner. She relies on testimonies of black individuals brought before the Superior Council in French New Orleans. Their oral testimonies were written down by clerks. White, when quoting them, offers her translation but also includes the original French. Each chapter focuses on one case, and the purpose is not so much to discuss agency in terms of resistance, but in terms of intimacy, self-awareness, and connection to others. Her book is an amplifier for the voices of the enslaved. The groundwork is meticulously laid out in the first chapter, which discusses all the ins and outs of legal procedure and deals with the context of distortion—such as the fact that oral testimony was recorded in writing by a third party, and the fact that, although no separate slave court existed in Louisiana, enslaved persons were judged on a different basis, holding only limited rights. Furthermore, she rightly points out that “the very concept of slaves perpetrating criminal acts is a deeply problematic one” (White, 8).

All authors are aware of the limitations any approach brings to historical research, which is limited by the existence and nature of source material, which was connected to the racist confines of colonial society: “For most enslaved men and women, it would prove untenable to resist the violence that was directed at them, let alone to openly discuss this violence in court” (White, 89–90). Both White and Johnson point out, however, that a silent voice was not always a silenced voice. Silence was used by women of African descent in their encounters with colonial officials and imperial authorities (Johnson, 69), creating a situation in which, when read against the grain, words and silences work together (White, 225).

All of this affects our ability to listen and hear, but the amount of information White manages to draw from the sources never ceases to amaze. Subsequent chapters deal with cases. In chapter 2, the voice of Louison speaks about being subjected to the random violence of a drunk white soldier. Chapter 3 lets us listen to Marie-Jeanne, accused of infanticide, and Lisette, a slave who self-identified as Ottawa, or who was traded to the French by the Ottawa, and who claimed to have witnessed the event. Chapter 4 narrates how Francisque, a runaway slave, upset the intimate order of the little leisure time his enslaved fellow men Démocrite and Hector had, and chapter 5 lets us in on an impossible love story between a woman named Kenet and a man named Jean-Baptiste, who managed to run away and spend time together, but ended up caught and tried.

The different approach of the books is also reflected in how they tell individual stories. White analyses individual testimony to give insight into “the affective worlds that slaves created for themselves” (White, 25). We get as close to knowing them as possible. Johnson also draws on individual biographies, but in her narrative, they populate a bigger world, a world that exists outside of them as well. For White, the intimate experiences of black individuals are the world, and through careful analysis, we can look inside it. For Johnson, the intimate experiences of individuals shape and are shaped by that world. In Dadzie's narrative, the relationship between world and person is constantly contested—the world is kicked in the belly by the experiences of women who chose to fight. So we learn about Cubah, a female slave who became one of the driving forces behind Tacky's Rebellion in Jamaica in 1760, and who became known as the Queen of Kingston. In narrating the actions of several known heroines, Stella Dadzie recognises the trouble with names—particularly female ones: “The anonymous Cubahs and Nanny Griggs who played similar roles in other slave rebellions are rarely acknowledged” (Dadzie, 127).

Indeed, telling the stories of exceptional women does not mean forgetting—or judging—women whose life trajectories were different. The history of dealing with slavery also needs to be the history of those trying to grasp control over life in a different way. It is of crucial importance to make sense of the mixture of desperation and hope that led to acts of suicide and infanticide. Desperation caused by the incredible cruelties put upon black bodies by slavery, and the hope to be able to reckon with slavery. The authors are clear that all these life-and-death choices of trying to purchase or obtain manumission, of running away, of fighting, are equally valid. The point is not at all about judging. The point is about understanding collective possibilities of choosing and individual agency in doing so, against the most invasive reality that existed—that of slavery. Dadzie, White, and Johnson all do a tremendous job in guiding their readers through the realm of different options, the meaning and consequences of them, and the importance of understanding choice in terms of intimacy, freedom, longing, resistance, and connections to loved ones. As Sophie White writes, “the precise form taken by their resistance was mapped onto their particular worldview” (White, 90). The authors leave no doubt that suffering was both personal and collective, intimate as well as public.

Dealing with the perceived discord between individual choice and collective experience is one of the most difficult tasks for scholars analysing agency in a context of oppression and violence.Footnote ⁴ All three books excel in the way they do so, by successfully balancing on the fine line between collective subjection and individual freedom. There was no collective escape from slavery, but only a number of individual “success” stories. If these books show anything, it is that every time a small crack appeared in the fabric of slavery, someone managed to jump in it, trying to survive, perhaps hoping to make the crack bigger. But the stories told by Johnson, Dadzie, and White do not stop there. Heroic reactions to violence were an integral and essential part of the black historical experience, but as Johnson rightfully remarks, “telling a history of black women and intimacy during slavery means more than confronting violence” (Johnson, 12).

By their titles, all books refer to an essential component of the study of black historical experience during slavery—that it was a bodily experience; “a kick in the belly,” “wicked flesh”—the Atlantic world was a world in which struggles for freedom were fought over and with the body. Unavoidably, the historian must accept that the archives were not able to preserve traces of bodily action: “court records omitted these sounds of suffering, just as they were devoid of deponents’ gestures, looks, mannerisms, facial expressions, accents and intonation during their testimonies” (White, 47). All three authors are equally convincing in their assertions that black bodies, particularly female ones, were crucial in the construction of agency, self-determination, and resistance. If white people felt that the black body was the main battleground for power, black people took up that challenge, and raised the stakes—by using these bodies to run, dance, fight, kill, love, and live.

Dealing with the body means dealing with gender, its construction and perception still not sufficiently well understood.Footnote ⁵ In her introduction, Stella Dadzie explains that, when researching the history of slavery, she kept wondering “what happened to the women” (Dadzie, 6). A great deal of important academic work has been done to enhance our understanding of the agency exercised by enslaved Africans in their own emancipation, but the precise role of gender remains obscure. To make matters worse, the agency that is often attributed to women does not escape stereotypes. Often, it seems a black woman who wanted to be free had two options. She could become a wild but compliant mistress, who seduced her master in the hopes of improving her life, and perhaps that of her offspring, through sex—a stereotype that simply avoids the question of rape but leaves space for a colonial “discourse of anxieties” (Johnson, 49) that labelled black women as dangerous because of the sense of autonomy they kept, even when their bodies were submitted to sex. On the other hand, there was the idea of the archetypical mother figure, fiercely capable of overcoming all odds to protect her children. Her autonomy was in her capacity to endure anything white masters or black husbands put on her. Both stereotypes come with strong moulds for black female bodies—either lustful, promiscuous, and exotically dangerous, or stout, robust, determined, and unbeatably strong physically.

Both roles imply a small degree of female autonomy, but it was an autonomy that was granted by men. There was free choice, as long as that choice kept women subjected to men. And yes, some women made exactly those choices, but re fusing to understand why they did so, or narrowing the black female experience down to those two choices, is harmful to our understanding of past and present. Dadzie writes that, in historical narrative, “enslaved women were somehow caught up by default in confrontations from which only men could emerge as heroes” (Dadzie, 8). It is a very acute observation to make, particularly as all three authors provide examples that the reality was different, for instance by pointing out that thanks to a greater mobility on board the slave ships and in the plantations, women were able to get involved in rebellion and escape on their own terms.

Jessica Marie Johnson offers important insights into the construction and deconstruction of black gender. Her analysis supports C. Riley Snorton's notion of gender as a “racial arrangement” (Johnson, 83). Johnson argues that “Africans’ understanding of themselves as women or girls, men, or boys, held little value to slave traders” (Johnson, 81). Indeed, they were reduced to assemblies of body parts, “to be negotiated and subdued” (Johnson, 81). The Middle Passage was crucial in this process. Womanhood and girlhood were dismantled, humans became ungendered, to be reconstructed again within the racial arrangement of gender. Racially constructed as “Africans,” the gender of enslaved black women and girls mattered in relationship to white considerations of financial worth, the amount of labour that could be extracted, sex, and, particularly in the nineteenth century, of the enslaved offspring that could be created.Footnote ⁶ This is also why White's stories of intimacy and love, Johnson's biographies of free women, and Dadzie's insights into female rebellion are of such importance—they offer a discourse on gender that is not exclusively constructed on white male terms. It also keeps reminding us of the humanity of every single individual that was enslaved or born in slavery.

It is tempting to believe that the horrors of slavery were made possible by a Western philosophy that aimed at dehumanising black individuals. But that would be an easy way out—slavery as the product of a mistake in thinking. Considered that way, the dehumanisation of black people in the past is not just seen as a way for white slave owners and colonial officials to live with themselves, it becomes a blindfold for the present. It suggests that we need to do nothing to come to terms with the horrors of the past.Footnote ⁷ By retroactively stating that black people were dehumanised by white people in the past, the suggestion is made that, after the end of slavery, all that needed to happen was for white people to consider black people as fellow humans, a recognition that would render the past inaccessible to us, while draining once more all black agency from the history of modernity. These books show that this is a shortcut that cannot be taken, even though the longer route is more difficult to follow. Johnson, referring to the work of Walter Johnson, makes the strong point that reality was worse; slavers needed their slaves to be human, so they could terrorise them, control them through fear, making the “atrocities they visited upon them” matter (Johnson, 83). White's analysis of the French legal context for black slaves to be tried at court further fuels the idea that they were indeed considered human, but of a whole different race—to whom very different legal rules applied. It is not a coincidence that over time, the French code noir, the law that regulated all aspects of slavery in the colonies and that was first published in 1685, had evolved, by 1723 and 1724, to distinguish between “black” and “white” people, rather than “slave” and “free.” She added that “it would not take long for race to also be inscribed on the bodies of free blacks within the court system” (White, 31).

Assuming the enslaved were treated the way they were because their oppressors could not think of them as human is not the only trap that is easily fallen into. It is equally dangerous to strip the black historical experience of time, and studies that focus too much on the institution of slavery have sometimes suffered from a lack of temporality, as if slavery appeared, to disappear centuries later—reducing the whole period in between to a time of stasis—an idea perpetuated by considering slaves as dehumanised victims without agency. By doing what is possible with the material that is available, historians have not always managed to bring time into the narrative, as if the experience of an enslaved woman somewhere in the early seventeenth century was the same as that of another woman two hundred and fifty years later. Part of the difficulty in introducing time lies with the nature of slavery, which, by stealing life, steals time. It is easy enough to imagine the lives of enslaved Africans playing out in a context of timelessness. Time requires hope, time requires change, and for many, nothing changed, and there was little hope. Hell was eternal. Furthermore, time also relates to expectation, to a conception of tomorrow. And colonial violence brutally, and often successfully, managed to destroy that as well, through its arbitrariness: “again and again, local court officials picked and chose how to apply the code noir, whom to prosecute, and for what crime” (White, 129).

It is the historian's task to understand time better—by understanding how the enslaved dealt with the theft of it, how they tried to get it back, and how that influenced the unravelling of history over a longer duration—without falling in the classical pitfall that the present only means progress compared to the past. One of the lines of research with the most potential to break ideas of stasis disrupted by sudden progress is research on memory and trauma. Thinking about intergenerational trauma caused by slavery and racial subjugation has become a terrain of study not only for scientists, but also activists, artists, and novelists.Footnote ⁸ And rightfully so. All the books under review help to make the study of intergenerational trauma possible—by their focus on individual stories very concretely situated in time and space, by looking at social and kinship connections, and by exploring the intimate worlds the enslaved built for themselves and their loved ones.

Dadzie, Johnson, and White all succeed magnificently in bringing time into their analysis, although their approaches differ. Johnson discusses temporal evolution within the societies she analyses, the West African comptoirs “still in the making” (Johnson, 52) and American places like New Orleans, evolving from societies with slaves to slave societies. She also brings back several of her protagonists in different stages of their lives, and places them within different, changing historical contexts. Marie Baude, the free black woman who was interrogated about the murder by her husband of a mulâtre sailor in Saint-Louis, comes back on board a ship that sails across the Atlantic and she disappears from the archives in New Orleans, a different woman in a different society. In the 1720s, a black man named Louis Congo agreed to become the colony's official executioner, for which he received his freedom, a tract of land, and his wife, Suzanne. She, on the other hand, did not receive her freedom in this deal. Both reappear at several points in the archives, and in the book, living in time, but also fighting for their freedom. Johnson also uses the concept of black femme freedom to break the stasis of suffering by creating an idea of the future, and as such, it is of crucial importance for her discourse: “Black femme freedom resided in enslaved and free African women and girls’ capacity to belong to themselves and each other. It demanded a promiscuous accounting of blackness not as bondage and subjection, but as future possibility” (Johnson, 10).

Several of the people discussed by Jessica Johnson—including Louis Congo—also appear in Sophie White's story, side by side with her main protagonists. White's sense of time is shorter, but no less important. She combines changing legislation surrounding the adjudication of enslaved men and women with a micro-historical look at testimonies from trials, in which time runs at a different pace, but is very clearly present. This intimate time, and how it can be conserved, is masterfully laid bare using illustrations. At some point in her 1752 testimony against the violent attack by a drunk French soldier, Louison mentions how she was wearing a corset—White is not only able to make sense of Louison's decision to provide a detailed description of it, but she also included an illustration of such a corset made around the same time. Dadzie's use of time is again different—she uses time with a clear point on the horizon in mind—the present, in which slavery has ended, but institutional racism and forms of ignorance about history persist. Her story skilfully navigates through a longer time frame to follow routes to abolition that have been constructed by black women. She is also explicit about the ways in which different generations influence one another; when she discusses the role of women in passing down culture, for instance, she rightly remarks that culture, as it developed in America, was “reinforced by new arrivals from Africa” (Dadzie, 157).

What all three authors do well is to discuss their topics fully taking time into account, meaning that, despite the persistent nature of the relentless violence their protagonists were subjected to, they were able to respond to it. The reforging of gender and race in slavery, for instance, was not without reaction; “African women, children, and men laid the foundation for new kinds of kinships, reformulations of intimacy, and polymorphous gendered reimaginings” (Johnson, 119). Sophie White convincingly shows the persistent ability of the enslaved to steal time that was not given to them. The last case she looks at is that of Kenet and Jean-Baptiste, two slaves who fell in love and lived together for a short period until they were arrested in 1767. It was Kenet who received the most severe punishment, beaten with sticks and branded with a fleur-de-lis on her right shoulder, after which she was forced to resume her labour as enslaved woman. White uses this example to conclude that “the stakes for enslaved women and men were that much higher than for whites” (White, 215); after punishment, if they survived, they were forced back into the condition of slavery.

The world discussed by Stella Dadzie, Sophie White, and Jessica Marie Johnson was a grim one. Perhaps it seems self-evident, but the phrase “for women and girls pushed into la traversée, forging kinship ties and protecting the most intimate parts of their lives became perilous, desperate, and, for many, ended only in death” (Johnson, 79) is perhaps the most essential in Johnson's book. It is explicit about the fact that, in their lifetimes and those of their direct ancestors and descendants, there was no successful endgame, there was no paradise of freedom waiting. For a long time, these women did not even get a place in history. In a way, they were forced into timelessness, both in life and death. It all “ended only in death.” Johnson's discourse, like that of her two colleagues, is spot on in tone. But all three books make it clear that many tried to resist, not just by becoming a famous heroine, worthy of remembrance, but by continuing to be human. The intimacy, love, and connection to others that being human entailed were perhaps the only victories possible for the countless individuals made to suffer the abuse of slavery. Some even managed to take little snippets of time back. For a period of eight months, the lovers Kenet and Jean-Baptiste managed to fully claim their humanity, living together in a cabin, where Kenet “did nothing” and slept with Jean-Baptiste “in their bed” (White, 215).Footnote ⁹

These books show that history does not just belong to the past. The intimacy of the enslaved, with which Dadzie, Johnson, and White make their readers familiar, is an intimacy that must be embraced more profoundly today. There are important and direct continuities between the lives of Kenet, Jean-Baptiste, Marie Baude, Louis Congo, Francisque, and countless others and our society today. Part of this continuity can be found in the intergenerational trauma of those belonging to the black diaspora. For many, the intimacy discussed in these books is natural, comes as part of identity, but for too many others, it remains an elusive intimacy—discarded then, rejected now. It is still something we need to come to terms with—and it seems that this is the time, now that the unjust racial nature of unpredictable state violence has been laid bare in the United States, and now that streams of migration from sub-Saharan Africa into Europe are providing so many with an anonymous grave in the Mediterranean, just as countless individuals drowned, by choice or by fighting, in the Atlantic during the Middle Passage. All authors leave no doubt that black women took and shaped their own historical agency, and all of them insist that the histories that they analysed continue to shape black experience, and by extension everyone's experience, in our modern world.