African Americans, as a people, are like the enslaved Africans who never knew exactly when they were born. Some people were so young when kidnapped in West Africa, so young when sold down the river into Mississippi, that they never learned their birthday. So some folks chose a birthday, like African Americans choose a birthday—August 20, 1619—based on the first documented recognition of our arrival in Virginia. A different John, John Rolfe, married Pocahontas in 1614, and then produced African America’s birth certificate five years later, on this day.

Today feels more like the anniversary of the day I was diagnosed with metastatic cancer than a birthday. I live in fear of a reoccurrence like I live in fear that metastatic racism will never go away, that the African American will die off before racism does. It is a hopelessness that has always existed here, even among white people watching the war of worlds between Angela and John. As Thomas Jefferson put forth at the founding of the United States, “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the white; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”

It is an original hopelessness I battle each day, as I suspect Angela did during those early days of African American history. It is a battle against hopelessness that makes me not feel like celebrating today, although I should be celebrating. I feel lucky to be alive as an African American. The totalizing effect of John has been no life, has been shortened life. Black death matters to racist America. Black life matters to African America.

Read: Slavery made America

In recapping African American history, someone like Angela is indispensable. She is not the famed slave-revolt leader, the daring runaway, the author of an antislavery screed, the maker of an enduring cultural product, the anointed black leader, the Phillis, Sojourner, Mary, Malcolm, or Maya. There is history in regular African Americans behind the scenes surviving the regularity of racist policies, ideas, abuse, and violence for 400 years. Angela is the woman of today who works in a low-wage health-care gig, moving from crisis to crisis and joy to joy, all the while raising her hopes for a better day, or not. She is still surviving John, brewing our hope.

In recapping America’s racist history, someone like John is indispensable. He is not the unforgettably brutal or mediagenic slave-ship captain, master, Confederate, lynch mob, Klansman, cop, mass shooter, or Andrew, Pitchfork, Bull, George, or Donald. There is history in regular policy makers behind the scenes regularly instituting racist policies that yield racist inequities or injustices, or regularly refusing to institute policies that prevent inequities and injustices. John is the Mitch of today refusing to use his power as Senate majority leader to stop voter suppression, gerrymandering, and Russian hackers; to curtail white-supremacist domestic terrorism; to close the growing racial wealth gap; or to end mass incarceration and deportation. John is still harming Angela, brewing our hopelessness.