Please will you stop misrepresenting what I'm saying. Conversations where I'm constantly repeating myself because the person I'm talking to is reacting to what they're afraid I'm saying instead of what I am saying are exhausting.

For the final time, I'm not saying that there's "no point" in honouring tradition. Any tradition. Buddhism, maypole dancing, facial scarification, go for it. Live your best life. I'm not sure that learning about tradition honours slaves, and I suspect that you personally aren't going to dig up anything that historians haven't already found and preserved, but again, there's no problem with anybody doing this.

However, you framed your interest in pre-slavery traditions specifically as something that was "taken away from you." You talked about "living by those traditions." You took issue with a line in my article that says that "race" (as in, the idea that we are divided as human beings by the colour of our skin) is a lie that we should abandon.

This then, is no longer simply about curiosity or learning. It's reaching back to a specific part of history, and claiming the pain of it as your own. And doing so on the basis of some supposed innate connection to that pain. You suggested, counterintuitively, that this might be a means of "abandoning the lie of race."

There is a difference between studying something and defining yourself by it. Your framing heavily suggests the latter. That's my only issue. And yes, I would say exactly the same thing about Jewish people who devoted themselves to the Holocaust as opposed to historians who try to preserve the facts of what happened. In fact, I've had some interesting conversations on that very topic.