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Michael B. Jordan thanked his ancestors when he accepted his Oscar for Best Lead Actor. Here's why that matters.
About 10.7 million enslaved Africans survived the perilous journey across the Atlantic. Once upon new shores in the U.S. and across the Americas, they sang, danced, praised, cooked, and conjured cultures that fused ancestral knowledge and traditions with their horrific new reality, which included forced labor. You’re reading this today because of their will to survive, adapt, and innovate.
Colonial powers used white Christian imperialism to justify slavery, and, at the same time, deliberately demonized African spirituality and traditions. History shows that our ancestors were communal, spiritual, and knowledgeable people who had excelled at agriculture, science, and many technologies for centuries.
As depicted in “Sinners,” their knowledge and spiritual practices afforded them protection, survival, and liberation. Frederick Douglass carried a mojo bag containing High John the Conqueror root and beat back a notoriously violent enslaver. Harriet Tubman used the sky and her vivid dreams to guide hundreds to freedom.
Jordan's words are a beautiful reminder that we’ve been gifted ancestral toolkits full of wisdom and traditions, and when we lean on them, we can win. Ancestral knowledge helped us get this far, and it'll help us create a liberated Black future too.