To the editor:

The Phoenix (March 10) quotes Descendant Voices in Action Chairman Isaac Gilliard’s support for the unwanted port marker, “so we [people of color] can talk about ourselves”; but if institutions as lofty as Ivy League schools offer colloquia on black power, the installation of this conversation piece in a small, New England, majority-white town is glaringly unnecessary. It’s also redundant— we have white guilt scabs on two properties already — but advocates want the Bristol Town Council to go one step further and sanctuarize their ethnomasochism on public land.

Bristol Historical Society Executive Director Catherine Zipf denies that the marker is about us white people (although organized white liberals are the biggest contingency pushing for it), and Gilliard reassures us that it’s not about making anybody feel bad. However, as another recent letter points out, not only is the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project an excrescence of UNESCO, but it’s solely concerned with “arrival sites” along our country’s eastern seaboard. In other words, the Port Markers Project has not proposed symmetrical markers for “departure sites” in West Africa, where millions were sold as slaves by black Africans, having been enslaved originally by black Africans.

See the historical society’s own scholarship, now unfurled alongside on Court Street (with some trepidation), for a similar example of narrative selection. She exhaustively inventories the racist receipts of Bristol’s slavers on her timeline but ran out of space before she could include that, out of the 11 million Africans who survived the middle passage, only around 388,000 came to North America. Therefore, she couldn’t dwarf that last figure in comparison with the 1.25 million Europeans enslaved by the Barbary Pirates. (Is wide-reaching UNESCO demanding memorials to white slaves in coastal towns across North Africa?)
Zipf is at least correct when she remarks, “[t]he story we have been telling [about slavery] is grossly incomplete.”

As we’ve come to expect, this eyesore port marker will tout the usual one-sided fable that exclusively spotlights Europeans’ participation in slavery as the villains. I know that one or two of our councilpersons will be thrilled to vote for this woke totem, but the majority of the Town Council should reject it. Alas, I doubt the remaining three have enough vertebrae to withstand sour faces from our lamentable state reps or accusations of racism in the Phoenix (an honor which I can personally recommend); but I nevertheless encourage readers to contact their council members about keeping our town free from ideological litter.

Meanwhile, to those delicate “citizens of the world” who require Bristol to undergo penances of their choice so that they may feel comfortable continuing to live here: let me remind you on behalf of us townies that nobody is keeping you here in chains.

Zachary Cooper
48A Sherman Ave.