Interpretive park rangers often receive applause when they conduct programs. While working as a US national park ranger, I was given ovations by crowds of nearly a thousand in cruise ship auditoriums and by groups as small as a handful of people who attended a rainy campground program.
The applause comes at the end of the program or guided hike, and, while it may be enthusiastic, it often feels transactional. You perform for them, and they applaud, like they’re giving you back a little performance of their own.
It may sound vain to say that I got used to the applause, that I would nod and smile and say “thank you” and then move on with my day like nothing exciting had happened. Like I hadn’t just been applauded by strangers for doing my job. But this is how it often happens, when you’re an interpretive park ranger.
But I want you to think about all the work you’ve done for which you haven’t been applauded. I want you to imagine what it would feel like to receive applause for the things you’ve done well at a job or in school or in your home.
If you finished the dishes before bed and suddenly received a round of applause. You sent the challenging email or made the tough phone call, and there was a cacophony of hands making all the noise they could to let you know that they were grateful or proud.
So many people never receive applause for the work they do, and yet so much of that work is appreciated. It’s just that we don’t live in a culture that encourages applauding for a job well done, unless the person is giving some kind of performance.
Actors, musicians, athletes–all are giving something of themselves to entertain us, and we reward them by cheering and slapping our hands together. When someone wins an award, graduates from school, or gets married, people will clap for them. But for the everyday things, the moments when we maybe most need outside support and encouragement, we are rarely given our praise.
And then there are the people whose work is invaluable, but whose praise never comes.
I recently visited African Burial Ground National Monument in New York City. An early African-American cemetery holding an estimated 15,000 remains, the site was rediscovered in the 1990s and became a unit of the US National Park Service in 2006.
As I toured the park’s museum and watched its film, I was struck by a recurring theme. Children.
Dead infants and children accounted for nearly half of the over 400 remains that were exhumed and later reinterred at the site. While there was a high mortality rate for all infants and children at the time, according to the museum’s displays the rate was even higher for enslaved children. Their tiny bodies showed signs of disease, malnutrition, and labor. As soon as an enslaved child was able to grasp a broom, they were expected to work. And many of them were worked to death.
I made it through the museum with minimal tears until I saw the “sample coffin,” a beautiful, hand-crafted example of the boxes in which these remains were reinterred. This one was a coffin for an infant or small child, so tiny, and I realized then that this would have been the size of many of these coffins.
For those who don’t know, New York City was once home to enslaved Africans. Their labor built the streets and early buildings of the city, fed its people, cared for its children, unloaded its docks, and was foundational to the city’s early development.
New York would not be one of the greatest cities in the world without the labor of enslaved Africans. Yet for hundreds of years, the city forgot the cemetery existed. In fact, Manhattan didn’t just forget the enslaved; it built a department store over their bodies.
The story of the African Burial Ground is not singular. It is the story of the United States. The labor of countless unsung people has built this country, shepherded its growth, and maintains it still.
The people, many of whom were enslaved, who first broke ground on our roads, buildings, and cities, are often not the people for whom those things are named. Our nation puts the names of wealthy donors on its places, not the names of the people who gave countless hours of their lives to create them.
If you have ever received applause for your work, then you are one of a privileged few. Maybe the hardest labors of all–farming, construction, and other physically taxing work–are often done by the people who are the most vilified and least appreciated in our society. And yet these are the very labors most directly tied to our survival.
I’m not sure that applause is an appropriate reaction when faced with the horrors of historical slavery or its modern forms (like the detention centers, the for-profit labor camps we label “prisons,” the categorization of humans as “illegal” so that we do not have to pay them living wages for all they do for us). How do you honor the labor of people who didn’t give it willingly?
What I do know is that while alone in the outdoor monument dedicated to those buried at the African Burial Ground, I felt like I owed them something.
Everyone who walks those city streets owes them something. Everyone who lives in America owes the countless forgotten humans our nation worked to death something.
Maybe that something is to fight for the people still being crushed today. Maybe that something is to disrupt and end these patterns that lead to tiny coffins on display.