Roots of Freedom

THE NATION'S FIRST blockbuster television miniseries, Roots, shocked the nation when it started airing on Jan. 23, 1977. Based on Alex Haley’s research on his own family’s story and adapted for television from Haley’s novel, Roots offered the world its first cinematic depiction of Africa and Africans unfiltered through the conduit of Hollywood’s racialized imagination. White Tarzan and Jane were nowhere to be found in Juffure, Gambia. Kunta Kinte was the leading man. Fanta was his ingénue—black ... and beautiful.

For eight nights the Kinte family unfolded from generation to generation, focused on individual family members’ struggles against generations of evil white slave masters.

But the 2016 “reimagined” version of Roots places the snatched descendants of Omoro and Binta Kinte squarely within the unyielding machine of the international slave trade—an economic system that, fundamentally, sought the well-being of European nations at the expense of the rest of the world.

In 380 B.C.E., Plato articulated a grand idea in his treatise The Republic. There is this thing called “race,” he posited. Race is determined by the kind of metal a person is made of, he said: silver, gold, iron, or copper. A person’s race determines how that person serves society.

The transatlantic slave trade took Plato’s notion and expanded the “republic” to encompass the world. Guided by Western philosophers’ notions of human hierarchy, Western popes and monarchs declared the right of Europeans to enslave “uncivilized” peoples for the benefit of the crown. It didn’t take long for Plato’s copper and gold to morph into Virginia judicial law that delineated between slaves and servants based on skin color. Colonial “races” became white, black, and red.

The Western market extracted millions of people—each one of them created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26)—from African nations throughout western and central Africa and a half million from southeast Africa. Some researchers estimate that more than 12 million “images of God” were ensnared in the Atlantic trade alone between the 16th and 19th century. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 1.5 million images of God were erased by the Middle Passage on ships bound for the Americas. Another 10.5 million were hauled to the Americas (450,000 of them to the U.S.). The vast majority were sold and enslaved in South America and the Caribbean islands—almost 5 million in Brazil alone. Six million more were sold in Asia, and 8 million within Africa.

In one of the most poignant moments in the reimagined four-part series, Kunta Kinte is chained to the back of a wagon, rolling through the Virginia countryside. In his first moments in the colonies, he looks over the hillsides peppered with people of African descent and wonders aloud: “So many of them. ... Why don’t they run?” My jaw dropped. “They can’t,” I thought. “They are living inside of the machine.”

FIFTEEN GENERATIONS after Kunta Kinte—after the Civil War and reconstruction and Jim Crow and Birmingham and Selma and “black is beautiful” and mass incarceration and #BlackLivesMatter—15 generations later, I had a conversation that dropped my jaw again.

I recently met a woman named Charo Mina-Rojas at the Carter Center Forum on Women, Religion, Violence, and Power. Mina-Rojas is a Colombian of African descent. She said people of African descent must reclaim our ethnic heritage and cast off racial categorizations. I advocate the same in my book The Very Good Gospel. I call those considered black and white to forsake racial categories and return to ethnic identity, which is not a human-made construct. Ethnicity is true—created by God.

What would Kunta Kinte think today? I believe he would be proud of the current descendants of Africa and the Middle Passage. We are finally breaking free from the last rusty vestiges of the global slave trade—the slavery of the mind.