History does not lie down to sleep. It walks, with open eyes, among us.
On the clock of men, the crime of slavery was erased a long time ago. The whips were put away, the slave quarters transformed into silent museums, and the slave ships are now merely shipwrecks in the distant memory of books. The law was signed, the ink dried.

Therefore, it is true: no white person alive today is responsible for slavery. The weight of the steel is not on the shoulders of those born under the sun of recent freedom. No one, this morning, can be accused of what their ancestors did.

But time is not a blank sheet of paper.
The wealth of some was woven with the threads of others’ suffering. The cathedrals, the grand houses, the railways, the fortunes, were built upon foundations of pain and unpaid sweat. It is a silent inheritance, but a heavy one.

Thus, as the present moves forward, a hidden law of history continues to operate: all white people alive today reap the benefits of it. Like a house one inherited, with its comfortable rooms and wide windows, built with the stolen wages of those who cleaned it for generations. The house was not asked for, yet they live in it, protected by its walls, warmed by its fire.

And in the same coin, in the same square, but on opposite sides of the mirror, memory becomes flesh upon the skin. Because the whip, even invisible, left deep scars. In the cotton fields, in the slave quarters, on the bodies of the grandparents, something broke. Something passed down from generation to generation, silently, at dinners, in whispered conversations, in exchanged glances.

That is why all Black people alive today bear scars from it. They are not open wounds, but birthmarks, invisible furrows upon the soul. Scars that manifest in fear, in distrust, in doors that close, in opportunities that never opened, in the need to prove, every single day, that they are human.

The past is not the past. It is a river that continues to flow into our sea. And all of us, whether we like it or not, swim in it. Some, in the calm waters of the shore; others, fighting against the current. Freedom is the right to swim, but history is the current that pushes us. And the question that remains, at the end of the day, is: who remembers where the water came from?

© Beatriz Esmer