All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

The language used to describe anti-Black racism and slavery in the United States has evolved, reflecting shifts in social attitudes, academic discourse, and advances in civil rights. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, terms like “peculiar institution” were euphemistically used to refer to slavery, downplaying its brutality and framing it as a regional quirk of the South rather than a fundamental human rights violation. Similarly, discussions of anti-Black racism were often couched in language that either ignored or minimized the systemic nature of racial oppression, focusing instead on individual acts of prejudice.

The language around anti-Black racism shifted with the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Terms like “civil rights” and “segregation” became more prominent, highlighting the systemic nature of racial inequality. The rise of Black Power and subsequent movements in the late 20th and early 21st centuries introduced more direct and forceful language, including terms like “white supremacy,” “systemic racism,” and “institutionalized racism,” emphasizing the pervasive and structural aspects of racial injustice.

Today, discussions around anti-Black racism and slavery are increasingly framed with terms like “racial violence,” “anti-Blackness,” and “historical trauma,” reflecting a deeper understanding of the ongoing impact of slavery and racism on Black communities in the US. Such terms highlight the personal experience of racism and slavery from an emotional, psychological, and physiological standpoint. The goal of such terminology is to recognize the embodied experience of slavery rather than thinking about it in abstract academic terms.

Miles indicates in her introduction that she occasionally and purposefully uses terms like “owner” and “slave,” which are often rejected in early 21st-century scholarship in favor of terms like “enslaver” and “enslaved person,” to address the brutality and gravity these social statuses implied in the 18th and 19th centuries. This also aids in clarifying specific roles and events in her discussion of history.

This guide favors the terms “enslaver” and “enslaved person” but occasionally mirrors Miles’s language as necessary to retain that same clarification.