“Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.”

Hartman contends that slavery is not just an event that occurred for a period of time that is easily demarcated and then ended. Rather, slavery brought about a reality of economic and social inequality between white and Black Americans that continues to cause pain, harm, and misery in the Black community.

“The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger. Torn from kin and community, exiled from one’s country, dishonored and violated, the slave defines the position of the outsider.”

Hartman emphasizes the existential condition of the slave as someone taken from a home and a family and transported to a foreign world. What did it feel like? What did it mean to the slave? Slaves were told to forget their mother, to let go of Africa, and to erase all connection to their family. Having no history and nothing to long for, their enslavers could manipulate them more easily. This treatment also made them into outsiders wherever they lived.

“I had not come to marvel at the wonders of African civilization or to be made proud by the royal court of Asante, or to admire the great states that harvested captives and sold them as slaves. I was not wistful for aristocratic origins. Instead, I would see commoners, the unwilling and coerced migrants who created a new culture in the hostile world of the Americas and who fashioned themselves again, making possibility out of dispossession.”

Prior efforts by African Americans to find their roots in Africa mistakenly assumed that the aristocratic Asante culture could be claimed as their own. Hartman dispels this illusion. The aristocratic warriors were enslavers; they did not get sent to the Americas. Many Africans still look to these warriors as heroes, but Hartman thinks it is more important to emphasize the fate of the victims, what she calls the “commoners” who were enslaved.