Seeing remnants of slavery every day
“I live in Brooklyn in this neighborhood that's part Caribbean, part Hasidic, and then part gentrified. I live right across from a school that's all White. And I see it's beautiful. It's gorgeous. It's well-attended. It looks like a pristine building. But I go just two blocks away and I walk past a school that looks like a prison. It's gray. There's a cement courtyard for the play area. It has this rusted fence around it. It looks like a gulag. And I see the students are all Black. I watch those kids and wonder what it must be like going there every day walking into a school that looks like a prison. It's just so bleak. And what does it do? It's another form of slavery. You know.”
Delano said he sees “the school-to-prison pipeline” every day. It’s another form of slavery. “You know here in New York I was reading something that said African American and Latino students are eight times as likely, more likely, to have the police called on them for a school infraction than white students. What that starts is a relationship with the police. It starts a relationship with distrust of authority. It starts a relationship. We've set this path, created all these systems where you end up in prison. That's slavery.”
Art tells a Brooklyn slavery story
For Delano, seeing the art exhibit “A Subtlety” aka the “Marvelous Sugar Baby” at the Domino Sugar factory connected the slavery economy with Brooklyn’s wealth. That art show told him a specific story about slavery.
“I saw Kara Walker’s show ‘A Subtlety’ at the Domino Sugar factory. It was a really beautiful, artistic way of showing the legacy of slavery here. This Brooklyn plant that was being torn down to make way room for beautiful condos that probably will be inhabited by you know, the 1 percent. You really had to see it. This big black mammy figure was created from sugar. It was a hot summer. There were these little child-like figures made out of molasses. Those little children represented all the people that worked in the factories. As the summer became hotter the molasses figures melted and the smell permeated this vast factory. As you walked you became sticky while you smelled that smell. And that's what we don't buy. Not giving more humanity to slavery, not talking about the people. We can’t have that distance when you're smelling it. We are stepping in it and when it's sticky when it's uncomfortable that's what this totality of slavery is like. This form of bondage, you smell it, you walk in it and it makes you think. There's just a little resistance. And today we think we're free. But slavery is sticking to our feet.”
Delano is interested to reframe the way the American Revolution is taught by putting more of an emphasis on the beginning of America as starting from the date that enslaved people were bought here.
Growing up with a mother from the South in a majority White town in Massachusetts informed Burrows about the legacy of slavery outside school. His mother frequently recounted her experiences growing up in the South around people who had firsthand experiences of slavery.
“It was a reminder like, oh wait, I’m just a few generations removed from slavery.”
Like many African Americans, Burrows straddled the reality of having a very intimate relationship with the history of slavery while navigating the white-washed version taught to his peers and community.
“I'm still learning a lot about slavery, I've done a lot of reading over the last three years trying to make up for lost time,” Burrows said.
“I have a lot of anger about the fact that I wasn't taught more. I've had shame about my own background, shame about my own features, shame about walking through this world as a Black person, as an African-American man and how that manifests in not owning and doing research and acknowledging my own history.”
Delano Burrows, is a Brooklyn-based writer and visual artist who focuses on People of Color (POC) and cultural identities, is a Bard student.
Hear Delano’s complete interview below: