What Exactly Are We Preserving?

I went to Montreal to work.

I didn’t go there looking for a lesson about race, history, colonialism, or power. I was working as a travel nanny, doing what I had done for years: entering someone else's home, caring for their children, managing the details of their lives, and trying to do my job well.

But while I was there, I kept finding myself asking a question I couldn't quite put down:

What exactly are we preserving?

I had originally been thinking about Quebec and its determination to preserve French language and culture. There is nothing inherently strange about wanting to preserve a culture. Languages disappear. Traditions disappear. Communities change. People have every right to care about the things that make a place distinct.

But preservation made me start wondering about something bigger.

When people talk about preserving a culture, a country, a way of life, or "traditional values," what exactly is being preserved?

The language?

The food?

The architecture?

The stories?

Or sometimes, whether we realize it or not, the distribution of power that came with all of it?

Montreal gave me plenty of smaller reminders that I was moving through the world as a Black American woman.

I remember asking a security guard for help finding a location. He was Black, or possibly of African descent. He understood what I was asking in English. He simply refused to help me. I remember thinking, Okay. So this is happening here, too.

There was another moment in a mall when a white woman and I were walking toward each other. Instead of either of us adjusting our path, she kept walking directly toward me as though I would eventually move. I stopped. She kept coming. I looked at her. She pushed into me again.

I remember thinking, You're a fucking weirdo.

And I kept moving.

There were also men who approached me sexually, became aggressive when I declined, and called me the usual "Black bitch" when I wouldn't entertain them.

None of these encounters, individually, tells me everything about Montreal. I don't know what was happening inside each person's head. I don't need to pretend that I do.

What I know is what happened,

And what I know even more clearly is that I expected some of it.

That's the part that bothers me now.

As a Black woman who has traveled extensively, I have learned that disrespect is sometimes something I am expected to navigate rather than something the world is expected to prevent.

You learn to read a room.

You learn when to ignore something.

You learn when to speak up.

You learn when speaking up will make things worse.

You learn that sometimes the safest response is to keep moving.

And eventually, something deeply fucked up happens:

you begin to expect disrespect without accepting that it should be normal.

I was also dealing with something much larger than random encounters in public.

I was trying to survive my employment.

I was living and working inside someone else's private world, where the boundaries between home and workplace were blurred and where my access to basic things; housing, transportation, money, information, security- could become dependent on the people who employed me.

That experience forced me to think about power differently.

A private home is still a workplace when someone is being paid to work there.

Caregiving is still labor when it happens behind a beautiful front door.

And the person providing that labor doesn’t stop being an employee simply because the work involves love, intimacy, children, or someone's private family life.

I began to see something I had spent years participating in without having the language for it:

The people who keep other people's lives functioning are often expected to absorb the uncertainty created by the people who have the power.

And for Black women, this has a history.

Black women have been essential to American domestic and caregiving infrastructure for centuries. Under slavery, Black women's labor was extracted in the fields, in kitchens, in nurseries, in childbirth, and throughout the domestic life of white households. Their reproductive capacity itself became part of an economic system in which a child's status followed the mother.

After emancipation, Black women did not suddenly become free from domestic exploitation. Many continued working as domestic servants, washerwomen, cooks, laundresses, and caregivers.

The work changed.

The underlying question of whose labor would sustain whose household did not disappear.

And this is where I arrived at a phrase I had been searching for without knowing it:

Ancestral inheritance.

We inherit more than genes.

We inherit stories.

We inherit property and poverty.

We inherit institutions.

We inherit cultural assumptions.

We inherit survival strategies.

We inherit family narratives about what happened to the people before us.

We inherit the consequences of decisions we never made.

And sometimes, we inherit advantages that we mistake for simply being the natural order of things.

This doesn’t mean that someone's great-grandchild is personally guilty for what their great-grandparents did.

Guilt is not the point.

Inheritance is.

If someone inherits a house, nobody tells them, "You didn't build that house, so you don't actually own it." 

We understand inheritance when it’s material.

We understand that wealth can pass from one generation to another. Property can pass from one generation to another. Businesses, social networks, education, names, connections, and opportunities can pass from one generation to another.

So why do we become so uncomfortable when we talk about inherited social position?

Why is it so difficult to acknowledge that history can leave some people with consequences and other people with advantages?

The problem isn’t that every white person consciously wakes up thinking about maintaining racial hierarchy.

History doesn't require that kind of coordination.

A system can absolutely reproduce itself without everyone inside it agreeing that they are participating in it.

The system doesn't need everyone to conspire.

It needs enough people to accept that this is simply how things are.

And perhaps that’s why the language of "going back" appears so often in political and cultural conversations.

“mAke aMerIcA gReAt aGaiN”

Return to traditional values.

Protect our way of life.

Take our country back.

Back to what!?

What exactly are we trying to restore?

Because there was never a single America experienced in the same way by everyone.

There was an America in which some people owned land and some people were legally defined as property.

An America in which Black women could be forced to labor while simultaneously being denied the authority to determine what happened to their own bodies and families.

An America in which Black neighborhoods could be deliberately denied investment.

An America in which racial exclusion could be embedded into housing, employment, education, and wealth accumulation without requiring every individual participant to announce themselves as racist.

And then there was an America in which the people who survived all of that were told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

That’s the absurdity of pretending everyone began at the same starting line.

There’s a scene in Family Guy that has stayed with me for years. Cleveland introduces a civil-rights board game called ‘Two Decades of Dignity’. Peter asks whether anyone ever wins.

Cleveland's answer is essentially: you don't win; you just do a little better each time.

And it’s funny because it is horrible.

For generations, Black Americans have been asked to measure progress against conditions we did not create, while being told that the playing field is level.

We are expected to celebrate every inch of progress while simultaneously being told that the distance we traveled is irrelevant.

And Black women have often been expected to do something even more complicated: build, nurture, educate, organize, work, care for children, sustain families, and survive institutions that were never designed with our full humanity in mind.

Then we are told to be grateful that things are better.

Better than what?

Better is not the same thing as repaired.

And acknowledging inheritance is not the same thing as demanding that anyone feel personal shame for being born.

I don't need someone today to feel guilty because someone who came before them did something terrible.

I need them to understand that they may have inherited something from that history.

And once you understand that you inherited something, you have a choice.

You can pretend you didn't.

You can defend it.

You can romanticize the world that produced it.

Or you can ask what responsibility comes with receiving something you did not create.

That question applies to all of us.

Black people inherit things too.

We inherit resilience, yes, but I am increasingly suspicious of the way we romanticize resilience when what we are really describing is adaptation to conditions that should not have existed in the first place.

We inherit caution.

We inherit stories about how to survive.

We inherit knowledge about when to speak and when to keep moving.

We inherit the expectation that we may have to work twice as hard and still be questioned.

And sometimes, we inherit the terrible belief that disrespect is simply something people like us have to endure.

I don't want to inherit that part anymore.

And maybe that is what my experience in Montreal ultimately gave me.

Not an answer about Quebec.

Not an answer about white people.

Not even an answer about racism.

A better question.

What have all of us inherited, and what are we doing with it?

Because none of us arrived here empty-handed.

Some of us inherited consequences.

Some inherited advantages.

Some inherited both.

We inherited countries, cultures, languages, stories, wealth, trauma, institutions, expectations, and ideas about who belongs where.

We inherited systems that were built before we were born.

We didn’t choose what was handed to us.

But we do get to choose whether we pretend we received nothing.

And maybe that is the real question behind every demand to preserve the past:

What exactly are we preserving?

And, perhaps more importantly:

Who gets to decide what is worth preserving, and who has to pay for it?