I prepared myself for grief.
I had read enough. Studied enough. Sat with the history long enough to know that grief was the reasonable thing to feel — when you are standing on the roof of one of the largest slave dungeons in West Africa, looking out over the Atlantic Ocean.
But grief is not what came.
What came felt less like sorrow... and more like recognition. Like finally meeting someone you have always known.
What I found at Cape Coast was not a story of what was taken from us. It was a story of what we carried anyway.
I Went There as a Scholar. I Left as Something Else.
The United States government funded me — through a Fulbright Hays Scholarship — to go to Ghana and study the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Not the sanitized version. The archival, documented, necessary version.
I sat in records most people never see. I walked grounds most people never walk. I stood inside the Door of No Return and let myself feel what that meant.
And somewhere in all of it — in the archives, in the conversations, in the quiet — something shifted in me.
I stopped seeing the people who were taken as victims of a story.
I started seeing them as the main characters of one.
The kingdoms of West Africa were not primitive. They were sophisticated. Organized. Culturally rich. Spiritually complex. Historians like John Thornton and Michael Gomez have spent their careers documenting exactly how sophisticated. And still — so much of that scholarship never reaches the classrooms where Black students are sitting right now, trying to figure out who they are.
What the Archives Actually Show
The people who survived the Middle Passage did not arrive as blank slates.
They arrived carrying language. Agricultural knowledge. Spiritual frameworks. Ways of organizing community that were the result of generations of accumulated wisdom.
Enslavers tried to strip it all away.
They could not.
What survived — what was preserved, hidden, adapted, and rebuilt — is in us right now. It is in the music. In the way we care for one another. In the particular genius that Black American culture has shown, across four centuries, for making something extraordinary out of conditions designed to produce nothing.
I need you to sit with that. Because it is the foundation of everything I do with students.
Your student is not walking into that PWI to prove they belong. They are walking in as the inheritor of people who rebuilt entire worlds from nothing. That is not a metaphor. That is history.
Why I Bring Ghana Into My Work
When I work with students preparing for a predominantly white institution, one of the first things I ask them to do sounds simple — but it is not.
I ask them to research who their people actually were. Not what was done to them. Who they were.
What ethnic groups are documented in the regions where their ancestors were enslaved? What were those cultures known for? What survived the crossing and can still be traced in Black American traditions today?
I ask because I have watched what happens when students arrive without that foundation. I have watched the slow erosion. The way an institution — through what it teaches, what it ignores, who it centers — can quietly convince a student that their history is a deficit instead of a legacy.
Students who know who their people actually were are harder to diminish. They have something to stand in that is bigger than any institution's approval.
That is what Ghana gave me. Not just as a scholar.
As a person.
Spend one hour looking into the African cultural lineage that produced your family. Not the tragedy — the brilliance. The kingdoms. The systems of governance. The spiritual traditions that came across the water and did not die. Talk to your student about what you find. Let them know who they are descended from before any institution has a chance to tell them a smaller version.
Before They Leave for College
Spend one hour — just one — looking into the African cultural lineage that produced your family.
Not the tragedy, though the tragedy is real and deserves to be known. The brilliance. The kingdoms. The systems of governance. The spiritual traditions that came across the water — and did not die.
Talk to your student about what you find. Let them see that their story did not begin in 1619. Let them know who they are descended from before any institution has a chance to tell them a smaller version.
This is not extra.
This is the work.
Help has arrived.
