Resources for learning and teaching the fullness of Black history all year round.
- “The Spirit of Our Work: Black Women Teachers (Re)Member”
- “We Be Lovin’ Black Children: Learning to be Literate About the African Diaspora”
- “Teaching Black History to White People”
- “Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools”
- “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South”
- “Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil”
Aniefuna means “my land is not lost.” It looks hard to say, but really, it sounds just like it looks. My wife and I chose this last name before starting our family. It’s a West African name, originating within the Igbo ethnicity, which is one of many ethnicities on the African continent and now across the African diaspora (1).
I started learning about the diaspora through books and archives when I attended a historically Black university (HBCU) for graduate school. I learned truths about European imperialism and the humanness before slavery — how colonists from all over Europe stuck their flagpoles into African soils, controlling nations and influencing heritage for centuries. I learned how the absence of so many Igbo and Yoruba people felt for some growing up in West Africa under European reign. Humanizing pre-colonial history catapulted a spiritual reckoning and unlocked a familiar wholeness for me. My desire to know exploded.
From studying African and Black American history, I developed what Joyce E. King calls “diaspora literacy” to contend with the reflection of white supremacy in my paternal lineage and its connection to world history. Although Black Americans reinvented and established a unique culture, we’re eternally connected to the sub-Sahara. My wife and I chose Aniefuna because in studying Black history, we learned that our land was never lost. As I write this, the swatch of emotions is reignited — the darkness and lightness of discovering the reflection of white supremacy in my blood and how it connects to the privilege of my racial ambiguity. Creating generations of Aniefunas was our way to try to reconcile our values with the traumas of our family history.
I share this story not to encourage people to adopt African names, but because learners and educators should not have to attend graduate school to learn truths about pre-colonial Africa and American history. Amid bans on teaching Black history and calculated attempts at falsifying history, we all need a recalibration in the importance of telling full stories about America’s past and present. Oral history has preserved Black history, and sharing these stories across generations will preserve truths and offer a blueprint for the future.
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