Standback Family: James Baldwin, one of America’s greatest thinkers said, “You were born where you where born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever.”

It has been said that the family lived near enough to the coastline to see the ships coming into the ports carrying human chattel as their cargo. Looking back, can you imagine what the family thought about the sight they saw from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

A sight that might have taken them a moment to catch their breathe as they withdrew to stand back. What were they feeling as they watched black bodies step onto the ports along the coastline?

By 1700, Virginia had established a clear distinction between white and black residents; how their labor would be valued, and how their lives would be controlled.

Did they know the suffering, the memory the mayhem and violence slavery had embraced across the country in the forging of “citizenship, the notion of liberty and a people’s fundamental rights” — would wreck havoc for centuries to come?

Our very presence here reminds this great nation of what it is not. Slavery continues to color our journey. It always has.

It always will — until, instead of standing back and looking the other way, we move forward and face some uncomfortable and unflinching truths and its damning prose we tell ourselves about our nation’s forging and legacies.

Maybe a good place to start is to let go of the false idea that slavery wasn’t so bad and is something we should all just "get over it.”

… Maybe, we can take another step by not asking African Americans to turn the other cheek, to contain our joy, to accept that we are supposed to go only as far as we are allowed.

James Baldwin wisely noted, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”