African Americans have lived through over 400 years of enslavement, lynchings, Jim Crow, redlining, gentrification, and cultural appropriation. Meanwhile, so much of our history has been destroyed, erased, and ignored by the white supremacist systems that dictate so much of American culture. But as Black people today fight to tell our truths—in the streets, the workplace, and now on Netflix—we are continuing our ancestors' unfinished work of liberation. By preserving and celebrating their legacies of resilience and spirit of resistance, we are building a world where they can finally find rest and freedom through us. “This is the first time in my life that I’ve ever been able to convene with them,” Satterfield says, overcome with tears as he pays homage to the enslaved at Benin’s Gate of No Return. “Finally, they get to come home.”

“It was strange to come home to a place I had never been,” Stephen Satterfield says in the opening episode of High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America. “Fragments of a lost memory were everywhere.”

Satterfield, the food writer turned documentary-host, is speaking quite literally, as he walks along the red clay roads of Benin where many Africans took their last steps as people before being shipped across the Atlantic as cargo. The sentiment he expresses is one that many across the Black diaspora will find intimately familiar: homecoming.

At historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), homecoming is a weeklong marathon of marching band battles, step shows, and school spirit. But the tradition is about more than college pride. To experience a sense of homecoming as a Black person is to be in community and communion with your people. It is a deeply spiritual feeling of belonging and joy felt when the rich complexities of Blackness and Black culture are centered and celebrated in a space—something most of us don’t encounter in our everyday lives. It’s an idea so crucial to Black culture that it’s inspired acclaimed novels, megawatt Coachella performances, and now one of the most powerful food documentaries ever made.

A new Netflix series untangles the culinary and cultural links between the two continents that Black Americans call home.

'High on the Hog' Is About More Than Food—It’s About Homecoming