It’s no secret that this is not the way things are now. Instead, the vast majority of data about enslaved people is owned and controlled by for-profit corporations, many of which charge users a fee to access information about their families. Meanwhile, scholarly projects (like this one) don’t usually charge users for access to data about enslaved people, but few engage Descendants as equal partners in those projects.

Assembling narratives of enslaved people’s lives is a painstaking process requiring a great deal of patience and—more often than not—a fair amount of luck. This is not because enslaved people’s stories have simply grown faint with time, but because of how they were recorded in the first place—when they were recorded at all, that is. Enslavers—a group that violently denied enslaved people access to literacy—took up pen and paper as weapons of commodification. In letters, law books, business records, bills of sale, estate inventories and printed advertisements, enslavers represented the enslaved not as human beings but as property.

Yet this is our archive. We must feel for its pulse. Scrawled in the lines of ledgers. Tallied in plantation journals. Numbered on ship manifests. Here are millions of ancestors. Here are generations of loved ones. Here—in an archive of death—is life.

With only one record in hand—one unit of data—enslaved people are memorially frozen in time, having neither past nor future, and without the context of kin and community.

Because enslaved people were legally prohibited from learning to read and write, the vast majority of records with information about enslaved people were created by enslavers. As a result, databases—including Oceans of Kinfolk and Louisiana Kindred—produced from historical records often describe enslaved people the same way enslavers did: as commodities, not kin. “Data” of this kind demands contextualization. In addition to the variable descriptions embedded in both websites, please consider the information on the following pages: About Oceans of Kinfolk, Oceans of Kinfolk: Historical Perspective, About Louisiana Kindred, Louisiana Kindred: Historical Perspective.

In June of 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that race can no longer be a factor influencing admissions to institutions of higher learning. While this decision specifically addressed affirmative action, it will have significant implications for all types of remedial programs, including reparations.

Why?

While race-conscious admission programs were originally intended to address past historical injustices—specifically the systematic exclusion of African Americans and other non-white individuals from institutions of higher learning—the Supreme Court rejected this justification in a 1978 case called Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. In fact, in Bakke, the Court ruled that historical injustices were not only insufficient justification for race-conscious admissions but that they were “irrelevant” to the issue entirely, since in the Court’s view, reserving a number of admissions for students of a particular race (a practice known as a “racial quota system”) would be "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality." (The injustice of this statement, of course, is that there has never been a time in which the histories of racial injustice in the United States have been “irrelevant” to the make-up of its institutions.)

In effect, even though the Supreme Court ruled in Bakke that colleges and universities could use “affirmative action” to increase the number of non-white students at their institutions, the Court justified this decision by finding that the government had a “compelling interest” in ensuring diversity in institutions of higher learning. This is the finding reversed by the Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision. According to today’s Court, diversity is not a compelling interest on which race-conscious admissions can stand. Bakke was a wolf in sheep’s clothing and now it has revealed itself.

Bakke put race-conscious programs on the shakiest of grounds, and now that ground has collapsed.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision will cause a staggering drop in the number of non-white students at elite institutions of higher learning, reversing decades of hard-won progress. But the path forward is clear: We must demand justice for the sweeping history of racial injustice in this country.

Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the “diversity interest,” this is, in fact, our only option; from now on, race-conscious initiatives—including any type of program administering reparations—must be “narrowly tailored” to address and remedy the current effects of specific past racial injustices.

And what are slavery’s archives—and their data—if not catalogues of specific historical injustices?

Now is the time to say what we know to be true.

An accounting is due in this country. Justice is owed.