In her 2006 book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, the critical theorist Saidiya Hartman chronicled and contextualized a trip she took to Ghana as a descendant of African people enslaved in the United States. Hartman framed her oft-thwarted attempts to reconstruct familial and ethnic histories as the lingering effects of a forced cultural amnesia: “Everyone told me a different story about how the slaves began to forget their past. Words like ‘zombie,’ ‘sorcerer,’ ‘witch,’ ‘succubus,’ and ‘vampire’ were whispered to explain it,” she wrote. “In these stories, which circulated throughout West Africa, the particulars varied, but all of them ended the same—the slave loses mother.”

Implicit in the idea of “losing mother” is the tragedy of losing the right to belong, or the ability to trace one’s history and attendant social context. It is a kind of internal displacement. Consider, then, the important comparison Hartman makes later in the text, between the forced migration that enslaved people endured and the conditions that drive Ghanaians on the continent to migrate from their country (most often to the U.S. or Europe):

In Ghana, they joked that if a slave ship bound for America docked on the coast today so many Ghanaians would volunteer for the passage that they would stampede one another trying to get on board. But who would ever envy slaves or view a cargo hold as an opportunity or risk death to arrive in the Americas? … Each year young men and boys risked deadly voyages to escape poverty and joblessness, while girls fled to Abidjan and other cities and were trafficked internationally as prostitutes. It was the dire circumstances of the present that caused Ghanaians to make wisecracks about volunteering for the Middle Passage.

To understand the links between the conditions that shaped blackness in America and those that affect people outside the country, it’s instructive to consider antiblack violence—physical, psychological, social, and economic—as a global phenomenon. If Ghana, like many African and Caribbean nations, still grapples with the lingering effects of European colonial intervention, then even its highest-status citizens are not wholly free. More pointedly, exodus toward the U.S. from black nations is a doubly fraught endeavor: Even well-heeled immigrants are often leaving countries still dealing with the afterlife of colonial violence; on top of that, they must traverse oft-difficult conditions only to arrive in a country shaped by the peculiar institution of transatlantic slavery.

Black people born in the U.S., in turn, cannot always meaningfully lay claim to American citizenship. The birth certificate as a tool of identity verification was long denied to enslaved peoples and their descendants. Proving one’s citizenship without the kind of documentation regularly refused to black people in this country has been a profoundly difficult task. Tracing genealogy, for example, turns up reminders of both institutional violence and legal dead ends. But even black people in America who can point to verified legal documentation must contend with the constant suspicion of their foreignness: Former president Barack Obama, the Hawaii-born son of a Kenyan immigrant, spent much of his tenure plagued by rumors of a falsified origin story.