Black DNA for Mental Health
Knowing your family history is everything, y’all — for realz!
My mental health, my outlook, my frigging everything has taken a 180° turn towards the sky is the mo’ fugging limit, since I started searchin’ ancestry records. No lie. That shit is better than any sex, drugs, music, experience I’ve had in my life. I didn’t even know how shaky my self-image was until the gaps of my world started to fill in with knowing who came before me. I bet a lot of shit Black people go through is because they don’t know who the fuck they are.
New call for reparations, starting immediately! The US government should start a program to make it effortless for anyone with links to enslaved Africans, to access any o’ the available data—free of charge. The US need to compile that shit and there need to be offices set up to walk people through looking they shit up. That shit need to include bills of sale, names of traders and any documents recording exchanges of Africans from one place to another.
The US government also need to pay for DNA testing that should be confidential. I should be the only person who knows who I am related to and no one but me (and who I decide to tell) ought to be able to connect me to the DNA sample. I should get a random frigging ID number that links me to the sample, and nobody need to be tracking me cause they got my DNA.
It’s gonna take a lot of people to be the admins in these new programs. Black people need to get free training in DNA analysis, historical research, anthropology and genealogy. These things need to be made part of the school curriculum along with anti-racism, and some accurate fucking history that starts in Africa (not Greece). No child need to grow up wondering where they came from. Everybody got a right to know they history and the culture of they ancestors as common frigging knowledge, like every mo’ fo’ knows who the fuck George Washington is (or so they think).
I’m serious y’all. It frustrating AF hitting a wall at 1880 for all my Black family members because their “owners” didn’t bother to include they name on census rolls. When Black folks finally sit down and file our class action law suit against the United States, lets be sure to add this to the list of damages.
