Jennie Williams Jennie Williams

Open Letter to the Slave Voyages Project

To the members of the Slave Voyages Operational Committee, Steering Committee, and all other relevant parties:

This time of year a full decade ago, I was waiting tables in Washington, D.C., but between shifts, I would often find a secluded table in the restaurant, pull out my laptop, and work on the thirteen applications I would soon submit to various doctoral programs in history. Thirteen was a lot, I knew, but because I didn’t yet have a master’s degree, I was worried I wouldn’t get in anywhere unless I cast a very wide net. And I very much wanted to get in somewhere (maybe anywhere), you see, because I had made up my mind that I was going to study the history of race and slavery in the United States. Crafting those applications, I could not offer a clear statement about what it was, exactly, that I intended to research, but I do recall having precise clarity about my motivations for applying: as a white woman descended, at least in part, from enslavers, I felt an ethical and moral responsibility to contribute to work reckoning with the history of racial injustice in the United States. It was one thing to inherit such a bloody legacy, I figured, but quite another to willfully look away from it.

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