The Labor Day holiday is the perfect opportunity to acknowledge the history of African enslavement in America, its repercussions, and Black labor in the U.S., says Dr. Marcus Anthony Hunter, a sociology and African American Studies professor at UCLA.
The idea for Labor Day originated in the late 1800s, and the first parade came from union leaders who were mostly white men. Ironically, though, most labor unions had denied protections and dignity to the descendants of enslaved people, the original laborers who built much of America’s early wealth. Hunter notes that the many immigrants who came to the United States and were able to charge for their labor were able to do so as a byproduct of slavery, because African slavery had ended.
Although we tend to view Labor Day as a holiday and part of the long weekend before school starts, we should also consider it as an opportunity to commemorate Black labor. Hunter, the author of “Radical Reparations: Healing the Soul of a Nation” and other works, emphasizes the need to look at the various ways we can provide our own reparations for African slavery. One way is simply by remembering and acknowledging the quality and depths of Black labor.
Acts of social repair, which would mean celebrating, marking, or acknowledging the physical locations where Black people have labored in the United States and the products that have resulted from their work, will encourage people to see today’s environment as something Black workers played a large part in creating.
“The story of America is land dispossession and involuntary enslavement, so how do we start talking about those and acknowledging those together, and also demonstrating that that, in and of itself, is a form of repair; to literally make public acknowledgment in spaces or places where enslaved labor built it, designed it, created it –– alongside the acknowledgment that the land upon which America is built is unceded territory from Native and Indigenous people,” Hunter told the AmNews.
Many people make attempts to tell the history of the land they are on. They may do so by opening up a meeting with a verbal acknowledgment of the Indigenous people who originally inhabited the lands they are on or by including a notice about it in their email signature. Those living in Harlem would raise awareness by pointing out that the famed Black neighborhood sits on the ancestral homeland of the Lenape and other Indigenous groups.
We could also extend this idea, Hunter said: “Using Labor Day as an example where you’re supposed to intentionally, explicitly acknowledge labor as important, think about what if they were paired together in these public discussions. When people welcome a space, they are welcoming people in. [What if] you have a land acknowledgment –– and you have a labor acknowledgment? That, I think, [would] help remind people about how integral the enterprise of slavery is to our common experience today.”
Hunter admits that Black labor, from slavery through today, has been used to create wealth in the United States is basically a non-monetary form of reparations, but he sees it as a way to help people make connections, so they start seeing the links and value between the past and the present.
“For example, with a place like D.C., you do a land acknowledgment that says the Anacostan people, the original caretakers — this is their unceded land, but we know D.C. also was designed and built by African people, by enslaved Africans, and by descendants of enslaved Africans. It makes me wonder a lot about the tension you might feel as a Black person, feeling gaslit, like you’re hearing this land acknowledgment all the time. But what about acknowledging your people and their contributions?
“Labor Day seems like one of those opportunities to really coalesce those two ideas together, the land and the labor, and acknowledge that much of what we think of as America was built by unpaid, involuntary labor.”