Since January, hostages held by the terrorist group Hamas have begun to return home to Israel. The images of these innocent people after 15 months of captivity in Hamas’s hands have been shocking, appalling, and beyond anything I’d ever imagined. We’ve seen images of people who look emaciated, having been held underground and tortured for months on end.

President Donald Trump said they looked like Holocaust survivors. I agree, but as a member of the black community, they remind me of something else too: the pictures of black innocents being violently transported on slave ships starved so severely that they ended up looking like no more than skin and bones.