Reparaions

In December 2022, I took some time off to discern the next steps in my career and found myself at the Door of No Return on Goree Island in Dakar, Senegal. This island was one of the many places in West Africa where enslaved Africans were held in barracoons before being shipped to the Americas. With ancestry from seven West African countries, a few of my Senegalese ancestors likely walked through these doors. As I stood at the doorway staring out to the vast blue-green ocean, my heart was heavy as I pondered the tragedy of millions of Africans being kidnapped, torn from families and homelands, and packed on ships to spend the rest of their lives enslaved. But oddly enough, I also felt triumphant.