My name Colston is my inheritance... a legacy of slavery in Virginia

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Last week, I watched the video of protesters toppling the statue of notorious slaver Edward Colston.

After promptly tossing the statue into Bristol harbour , a black woman with a megaphone climbed atop the plinth and spoke to nearby listeners like a general.

I could not help but feel I was watching an important page turning in history.

However, I could not shake the aching plurality of this moment because I am Black American peeking through the window of my smartphone at a moment of acute political resistance and I am the descendant of the slave trade.

My full name is Lee Edward Colston II.

Edward Colston’s statue has forced me to take a closer look at not just my name but my own individual legacy— my ‘American Inheritance’ if you will.

Like many Americans, it is not an inheritance I asked for but it’s what I have and with it comes a hefty tax.

Part of the inheritance I share with other Black Americans is a complex relationship to my last name.

Protesters throw statue of Edward Colston into Bristol harbour

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The reality is because of the legacy of slavery, it’s difficult for me to pinpoint whether or not I am a direct descendant of Edward Colston.

Slavers kept few birth records for the other people they enslaved, only bills of purchase and sale.

What I do know is Edward Colston facilitated the transport of human cargo to two main ports: the Caribbean and the American state of Virginia, the latter is where my family is from.

Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it’s not. The not knowing haunts me.

My last name is one of the many indelible legacies of slavery still shaping my life today.

It’s the reason Malcolm Little remade himself into Malcolm X. He understood a hard truth many Black Americans are uncomfortable acknowledging.

While black folk have done with our last names what we have done with everything we have inherited in this country— transforming mess into magic, lynch ropes into legacy and epithets into elegies, in the quietness of our hearts Black Americans know this raw truth: the only reason we have last names is because barcodes weren’t invented yet.

These monuments: Edward Colston, Leopold II, Christopher Columbus, have always represented ways to preserve the enduring legacies of white men.

But now, we have a unique opportunity to examine how Covid-19 is forcing the world to see these monuments for what they actually are; scabs.

Capitalism has kept the majority of Americans trapped in a cycle of survival—overworked, scrambling to make ends meet and steeped in perpetual exhaustion.

This pandemic has fractured that. It’s taken everyone off the hamster wheel of capitalism long enough for us to peel away our scabs and inspect the wounds of our individual American and British inheritances.

It’s given us the time to see ourselves, “undoctored”, exactly as we are and offered us a decision: are we going to clean this wound and heal it or will we wait for our next scab.

If white men are the Founding Fathers of the United States, black people are the Mother they assaulted.

America is a baby born of violence and in many ways. England was the midwife. So it comes as no surprise to see the children and descendants of colonisers toppling the images of their forefathers after a pandemic has given them the time to sit in the discomfort of that truth.

Toppling this statue is reflective of a larger transformation happening in our global body politic.

We are ripping away the scabs but the real question is: are we willing to clean the wound?

Are we willing to not slap a plaster on it but instead continue to flush it daily and let the sun, air and time offer it the room to heal.

I believe the intersection of this pandemic and this political uprising is not asking us “who we are”.

We know that already even if we’ve been unwilling to acknowledge it.

This crisis is asking us “who do we want to be?”

Lee Edward Colston II is an actor, playwright, teacher and author

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