Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

When we are dead, and all the things that ever were have turned to dust, we will not be history; we will be things that once were. A few of us, however, will have lived a life so notable that a white man might deem it worthy of bending his opposable thumb to register our existence into posterity. The best we can hope for is to become a part of white history because American history is white history. Except for this one. This history is Black AF.

The true origin story of America is intriguing enough without embellishment, a tale that includes cannibalism, cross-country adventures, and the type of brazen incompetency that almost doomed this experiment in thievery. But of course, to save face and maximize profits, the story was revised until we ended up with the swashbuckling blockbuster that we now know, filled with idealistic, barrel-chested white saviors who immaculately conceived of a brand-new kind of democracy with nothing but a few muskets and an abundance of Caucasity.

With its shoddy leadership in shambles, Jamestown was doomed. As the third winter came upon the settlement, the newcomers were at an all-time low, forced to eat leather belts, their pets, and, eventually—each other. Yes, that’s right: researchers have found evidence that the few remaining Jamestonians survived the period known as the “starving time” by murdering pregnant women and eating their own children.7 The heralded “first Americans” were cannibals.

Meanwhile, back in Virginia, the Chickahominy natives, who weren’t under Wahunsenacah’s confederacy, helped feed the lazy British settlers, who still hadn’t planted enough food to feed themselves. When Wahunsenacah died in April 1618, the natives decided to stop offering government assistance to the settlers. Ending this welfare-to-work program would doom the unskilled English encroachers. They desperately needed help. The only thing that could possibly save the English colony would be an influx of immigrants who knew what they were doing.

But to understand the origins of America’s constitutionally enshrined human trafficking system that legally reduced people to chattel, we must go back to the inception of the transatlantic African trade that formed the foundation of America’s color-based social hierarchy. It started at church. The Church. After a little-known woodworker named Jesus died, Christianity began trending in Europe.

But he still had to figure out how to curry favor with the pastor by putting a little extra in the offering plate. Because Portugal was essentially a new country, they didn’t have a great credit score and their options were limited.

Back then, items that weren’t locally available were highly coveted, especially pelts, precious metals, and spices.* In the event that these seasoned salt-seeking seafarers didn’t return home, most people assumed the fearless travelers must have run into some kind of undefeatable beast, a story bolstered by the fact that every time European sailors tried to explore the West African coast, they never made it farther south than North Africa’s Sahara Desert coast. It had to be monsters. What else but a saber-toothed leviathan could defeat these gallant pathfinders in rickety ships?

Henrique asked one of his African servants captured during the Reconquista how to build these ships and avoid sea beasts. After the servant laughed for about forty-five minutes at his captor’s belief that a gang of oceanic gremlins was out there taking down ships, he informed them that the sea thugs weren’t killing white people; it was the wind! Using this new knowledge, Henrique assembled a few local cartographers to draw new maps. Instead of charting the land and the seas, Henrique’s boys drew charts of the ocean currents and cornered the exploring market by mastering the “trade winds.”

While filling his boat with seal pelts, Gonçalves ran across a naked African and his Berber female servant, the first native Africans Gonçalves had encountered in his twenty years of exploration. So, of course, he kidnapped them.

When Henry heard about the sale, he was no longer interested in the ostrich eggs, the seal pelts, or the spices; he wanted to know more about this people-trading thing. But Henry hadn’t cleared this practice with the church and didn’t know what the pope would think. Sure, they had “enslaved” Moors, Jews, and non-Christians during the Crusades, but that was a military thing—not a pure cash grab. When explaining his rationale to the church, Prince Henry would argue that, technically, he wasn’t an “enslaver” because true Christians would never do that. Instead, he allowed Portuguese “missionaries” to “save” Africans by converting them to Christianity. The argument worked. By 1446, more than thirty Portuguese ships had filed applications with Prince Henry for people-stealing licenses. In 1455, Pope Nicholas V granted Henry a monopoly on the African human market—as long as they baptized their cargo.3 Henry had finally found gold in Africa.

UNIT REVIEW THREE LITTLE QUESTIONS Christopher Columbus did not: Discover America. Consider himself to be an Italian. Know what he was doing. All of the above. Who is responsible for slavery? Henry the Navigator. Nuno Tristão and Antão Gonçalves. White people. Every society had slavery. Plus, the Africans sold slaves, too. Why must you make everything about race? The new discoveries were called the “New World” because: It was new to white people. The people in the “Old World” weren’t good at naming things. The “world” only consists of places white people conquered. It wasn’t.

Just as it may seem obtuse to pigeonhole Greeks, English, Spanish, and Germans into a homogeneous gob of indistinguishable “white people,” it does a disservice to lump the different societies, kingdoms, and people together from a continent three times as big as Europe and just simply refer to them as “slaves.”* The Mandinka people from the West African Mali kingdom were not the same as the Kongo people, although both had civilizations and empires that made Europe’s empires look like ghettos.

Almost one hundred years before 104 white “adventurers” from the Virginia Company of London landed on a Virginia beachhead on May 14, 1607, Africans had already ventured to America, slaughtered natives, and built plantations. In the words of the immortal historian Ray J: “We hit it first.”

Juan Garrido was the first documented African American. Much of what we know about Garrido comes from his probanza, or résumé, which states that while he was from West Africa born and raised, exploring is where he spent most of his days.

When Ponce and his crew arrived at present-day Charlotte Harbor, the Calusa were anxiously waiting to meet their new neighbors. Ponce had barely made it through his speech welcoming the Calusa to Spanish rule when one of the Calusa warriors’ housewarming gifts—an arrow dipped in the sap of one of the most poisonous trees in the known world—pierced his thigh.* Ponce’s whole staff, crew, and record label hightailed it back to Cuba, and the thuggish conquistador who brought slavery, colonialism, genocide, and death to New World natives died from the wound. In the first case of whitesplaining, Spain would blame Ponce de León’s death on the “very savage and belligerous”5 Calusa Indians, who were “not accustomed to a peaceful existence.”

Unfortunately, everyone knows corn tortillas are superior to whole-wheat ones, so Garrido’s flour plantation didn’t make him a wealthy man. That’s when his conquistador homeboy Cortés tempted him with one last heist.

Narváez was convinced—he was going to rob the Apalachee. That’s also when the Carolina gentrifiers made a crucial mistake identifiable to anyone who has ever watched a horror movie or the documentary series about the crime scene investigation team led by Scooby-Doo: they “split up.”

Esteban knew that splitting up is the most ill-advised move in all of history. It would later cause the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the destruction of the Five Heartbeats.* And if you notice, this book does not contain a single chapter about Harriet Tubman telling passengers on the Underground Railroad, “You go this way; I’ll go that way.” A dedicated student of history will learn that splitting up ranks somewhere between “let’s take their land” and “maybe I should put this shoe polish on my face for the Halloween party” in the top five whitest moves of all time.

By creating a legally binding, race-based, intergenerational, perpetually oppressed class of human beings, Virginia revealed that all that nonsense in the colony’s first charter about God, liberty, and the “true religion” was a farce. Slavery was an American idea, not a product of the time. No law was passed in England that legalized slavery. France’s Code noir was similar, but it would come two decades after Virginia’s declaration. From its inception, America was always a pyramid scheme where the wealthy benefited from the labor of the poor. And truly, there is only one term that befits Virginia’s codified system of racial peonage: white supremacy.

The low life expectancy, combined with an infant mortality rate that was ten times the rate for white infants, had one bright spot. On rice plantations, the high risk of catching malaria, yellow fever, or other contagious diseases meant the white people didn’t bother their enslaved as much as they did on other types of plantations. Unlike those in many other slave societies, South Carolina’s enslaved worked on the “task system.”18 Enslaved people were responsible for their own food, clothing, and even their medical care. Each captive had a required amount of work they had to complete, and once they were done, they were released from their enslavers’ oversight to work in their own gardens, sew their own clothes, or make their own money. Charleston even had an elaborate “tag” system that allowed enslaved people to sell goods and food at the market. From this white-man-free vacuum emerged a new culture and language that was a hybrid of those of the Africans from the Caribbean colonies and the Baga, the Fula, the Kissi, the Kpelle, the Limba, the Mandinka, the Mende, and the Wolof of West Africa. They balanced the memories of their motherland on the bridges of their noses and hid them on the tips of their tongues. Their collective souls merged and became the Gullah-Geechee, a cultural force that no white person would ever have power and authority over.

I had no idea - task system (Gullah-geechee)

Nearly every state’s laws governing the enslaved were based, in part, on the Negro Act of 1740, proving that the uniquely American version of human subjugation was never just a thoughtless experiment. It was ingrained in the fabric of America. It was intentional: a color-coded, never-ending, legally protected, constitutionally enshrined system of human trafficking that extorted labor, intellectual property, and talent in the most brutal way imaginable. It was born out of fear and white supremacy. And yet with all the enlightened philosophies, whips, and muskets this country could muster . . . It still could not make a slave.

Just as Carl Linnaeus provided the standard for the classification of plants in Systema Naturae, François Bernier developed the first comprehensive classification of humans. In a 1684 French journal article, Bernier used an old term to describe his theory on human taxonomy.

In 1775, Friedrich Blumenbach’s On the Natural Varieties of Mankind created five different divisions of humanity, with “Caucasians” at the top.

White supremacy soon became one of the foundational principles of America. For instance, have you ever wondered why each item in the Bill of Rights is an amendment instead of a part of the Constitution? It’s because Madison didn’t think the Constitution needed one since, according to Locke and the rest of the Enlightenment faves, the important rights were universal and God-given. But Virginia refused to ratify the Constitution without one. Patrick Henry, one of the largest human traffickers in Virginia, had already helped craft his state’s Declaration of Rights, worried that the new federal army could arm Black soldiers or—even worse—free their slaves!

Notice, the Supreme Court said this about all Black people—not just slaves. White supremacy is a foundational principle of America.

Whiteness is not a social construct, nor is it as eternal or as confident as it seems. Whiteness is fleeting. It is a ghost; a shadow of an imaginary thing. It is the result of an insecurity that not only justifies man’s inhumanity to man, it reinforces the subconscious doubt in one’s own inferiority. Superiority does not require subjugation. A superior human being has no need. But what on earth is whiteness? Whiteness is fear.

When it is taught in schools, the American Revolution is described as having been born out of the white man’s indignation about how he was being governed. And sure, all that stuff about tea and taxes definitely riled up the colonists. But while that was all going down, a rumor was spreading through the colonies that really provoked their anger: allegedly, England was going to outlaw the practice of owning human beings.

James Somerset,

Is somerset, ma named after him?

In 1772, the Court of King’s Bench ruled on the case of Somerset v. Stewart that slavery wasn’t illegal, but it wasn’t enforceable by law.

Peter Salem,

Salem?

On July 10, 1775, seven days after George Washington became commander in chief of the new Continental Army formed from the disparate militias, he instructed his adjutant general to ban Blacks from fighting, as it would be seen as an embarrassment.

Lord Dunmore knew that the idea of armed slaves* exacting revenge on their masters would scare the bejeezus out of the wig-wearing colonists. In an even more bubblegut inspiring move, the governor formed the eponymous Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, a British military unit composed of African freedom fighters. Perhaps the Ethiopian Regiment’s uniforms, featuring sashes inscribed with the words “Liberty to Slaves,” most aptly described the self-freed warriors’ revolutionary position.

From the arrival of the White Lion and the Treasurer to the second that you are reading these words, these two congruent themes of survival and resistance describe the existence of being Black in what is now America. The goal was never to become American, but to live, and live freely. To become and remain whole human beings. “The history of the American Negro is this strife,” wrote Du Bois. “This longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and true self.”15 At the dawn of the battle for American independence, Black people in the colonies had a glimpse of liberty, and they looked to extend that moment for eternity.

Around the world, the concept of revolution had gone viral. North of the island, the germ had caused a rebellion that created a brand-new country called the United States of America. A revolution was happening in France, too. Thomas Paine, one of America’s Enlightenment thinkers, was publishing articles defending political revolutions called The Rights of Man, asserting that freedom was a universal right that all human beings deserved. That spirit of rebellion, revolution, and the offering of “deez hands” was about to show itself in Haiti. On August 14, 1791, a tropical storm was bearing down on the island when a group of enslaved Africans met in the Bwa Kayiman (Alligator Forest) to hold a secret ceremony. Historical accounts would later call this meeting a “voudou ceremony” and refer to the attendees as “slaves.” Had these freedom-seeking Africans been white, we would call them “founding fathers” who were planning a revolution.

A week later, eighteen hundred slave concentration camps would be burned to the ground, and more than a thousand plantation owners would suffer the same fate as that unfortunate hog. The rebels in Haiti were not concerned with taxation, representation, or tea. They were fighting for the universal freedom that all men desire: liberty, straight up. While most historians agree that the stormy exercise in democracy was the genesis of the Haitian Revolution, it was also the largest slave rebellion in the history of the world.

Soon, the largest colonial powers on the planet were easing their way into the fight for the profitable island. Napoleon was starting wars all over Europe, so Britain employed a defensive tactic that would later become a foundational principle of all hip-hop battles: “If we’re beefing, then nothing is off-limits!”*

On April 29, 1794, Black soldiers killed 150 Spanish soldiers at a garrison and left a note threatening to kill all white men unless they returned to their country. Stunned, the Spanish generals accused Louverture of treason, but he wrote to them explaining that he was sick in bed when that attack happened, denying involvement. When the suspicious Spanish commander summoned Louverture to a meeting, Toussaint showed up with a posse that was slightly smaller than Beyoncé’s backup dance team—150 men—asking, “What’s up? I heard you had my name in your mouth?” The Spanish leader—who was essentially Louverture’s commanding officer—invited Louverture to dinner a few days later, but Louverture never showed up.

The citizens of the newly freed country would forever remember the history of their brutal oppression at the hands of Europeans. Dessalines and the new citizens tossed the Spanish and French names, renaming the country in the language of the now extinct Taíno people: the island would be called Ay-ti or Haiti, meaning “the land of the mountains.” Since that day, a white man has never ruled the place we now call Haiti.

Today, Haiti’s legacy is often tarnished, known more for its tragedies than its rich legacy. But the reason for its impoverishment today is that America and France instituted what is possibly the most racist economic foreign policy that ever existed, and upheld it for over two centuries. They did this while other European powers watched quietly. Understanding what two of the most powerful countries in the world did to Haiti requires a suspension of disbelief, because it is so absurd that it sounds like fiction.

On December 7, 1711, New York City’s Common Council passed one of its earliest zoning laws. It ruled that the city’s official place for selling and renting humans would be at a wooden structure near the edge of the city under a buttonwood tree. The area was protected by a rampart built by Dutch settlers, who called it “De Waal Straat.”

In 1792, twenty-four of New York’s wealthiest men signed the document that would create the New York Stock Exchange. To commemorate its slave-trading past, the men named the charter after the site where they exchanged souls for money. They called it the Buttonwood Agreement. The location described by the Dutch moniker eventually evolved into a simpler name: Wall Street.

That’s where all of Haiti’s wealth lies. Whenever Haiti couldn’t make its payments to the French, the country would take out loans, sending it deeper into poverty, because the loans could only come from French banks. Over the years, French banks lent the Caribbean nation money so often that Haiti wasn’t simply repaying its original reparations debt: it was paying the loans, interests, and fees. As late as 1915, nearly 80 percent of Haiti’s government revenue was paid to service its debt. And by the time it made the last payment in 1947—eighty-four years after the Emancipation Proclamation and 143 years after dismantling the shackles of its own slaveowners—Haiti was still in debt. Those payments didn’t include the money that was taken by U.S. Marines when they marched into the Haitian National Bank, took $500,000, and deposited it at 111 Wall Street, New York, N.Y., for “safekeeping” during a period of unrest in 1919. The cost of German soldiers who assisted the American army in occupying Haiti from 1915 to 1934 didn’t count either. Neither did the 40 percent of Haiti’s national income that it was forced to pay to the United States and France when the U.S. occupiers wrote the demand into Haiti’s 1918 constitution.

Although he was previously best known for his staunch opposition to the wild idea that microscopic ghosts called “germs” caused disease,1 in 1851, Cartwright would become most renowned for presenting a paper before the Medical Association of Louisiana proposing an explosive new mental illness called “drapetomania,” or “the disease causing slaves to run away.” In it, he wrote: The cause in the most of cases, that induces the negro to run away from service, is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable, as a general rule. With the advantages of proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many negroes have of running away, can be almost entirely prevented, although the slaves be located on the borders of a free state, within a stone’s throw of the abolitionists.2

Cartwright’s racist pseudo-psychology illustrates another delusion of whiteness: namely, the continued justification of oppression—state-sanctioned rape, murder, and unending torture—by portraying Black people’s insatiable inclination toward freedom as a sickness or a criminal impulse. For everyone else, the irrepressible compulsion for liberty is viewed as a symptom of a craven, barbaric psychopathy. This nation’s history is pockmarked with examples of the idea that freedom is for white people. Although most Enlightenment-era thinkers agreed that freedom is the natural state of man, they somehow carved out an exception for their belligerent negroes because, in their white minds, property rights were as important as individual freedom.

Since enslaved people were governed by property laws, running away to freedom was legally considered an act of theft, despite the ironic fact that the whole slavemaking industry was based on abduction.

The South was surprisingly also a viable option for some slaves who were infected with this ailment. There, entire communities were built that are still being discovered today, including Bas du Fleuve, a vast area between the mouth of the Mississippi and New Orleans that was controlled by runaways for most of the 1770s. During the colonial period, the all-Black town of Fort Mose in the Spanish-held Florida territory was a popular destination for those who wanted a permanent vacation from slavery. Spain had abolished slavery in the territory, and after the War of 1812, a fully armed British “Negro Fort” in Florida became the center of the Black resistance against the institution of slavery, forming its own army. The British Corps of Colonial Marines was made up of free Blacks and fugitive slaves who fought alongside Native Americans to protect the kind runaways who quarantined themselves to protect others from their contagious virus.

Historians usually refer to these collective groups of unownable Africans as “maroons,”9 but the nomenclature varied by region. In Alabama and Georgia, they were called people who lived “in the woods,” but perhaps the most telling moniker for the self-emancipated Africans came from Virginia and Maryland, in that Great Dismal Swampland. Nicknamed the “outlands,” the region was too treacherous to travel through by horse or canoe. Virginians ultimately reappropriated an adjective to describe unconquerable residents of the unconquered lands, calling these freedom-inclined Boyz n the Hood “outlandish.”10

But you know these fools couldn’t let the word out that they had been beaten by a group of ragtag negroes. Even a whiff of self-determination and resistance threatened the entire fabric of the slave-based society. The maroon hunters returned the next morning, hoping the can of whoop-ass opened by the former slaves had been depleted, unaware that Maroon Fight Club had four rules: Do not talk about Maroon Club. Do not talk about Maroon Club. Only fight when it is absolutely necessary. If white people keep showing up, there is no more Maroon Club.

And if you’re wondering how she did that if she was a runaway, well, Harriet was living right underneath her former master’s nose. During the day, she would hide in a nearby swamp. At night, she hid out in Molly’s attic, never revealing her presence to her kids. The attic had no light and at its highest point was three feet tall. Harriet managed to drill a hole in the cramped crawlspace so she could read the Bible and watch her children. She lived that way for seven years. Eventually, she escaped to New York, where she was reunited with her children and her brother, who had been sent north by Sawyer but still essentially lived as slaves. Because of the fugitive slave laws, the evil enslaver still technically owned Harriet. Every so often, he would find out where Harriet lived, and she would have to go into hiding again. It wasn’t until 1852, when Harriet was thirty-nine years old, that abolitionist Cornelia Grinnell Willis, for whom Harriet worked as a nanny, would purchase Harriet’s freedom for $300. The rapist congressman, who still owned Harriet’s children and brother, finally sent them to free states to live with Harriet. She spent the next five years writing the story of her life, but no one would publish it. In January 1861, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was finally released, and Harriet became an abolitionist icon.

In May 1803, a shipload of seventy-five captive Igbo people were purchased for $100 each to grow rice on forced labor plantations on St. Simons Island, Georgia. Apparently, the ship was infested with Cartwright’s disease, because the shackled passengers screamed all the way to America. When the captain would send members of the crew down into the belly of the ship to quiet them, the crew members were terrified to realize that the captives weren’t just screaming; they were saying one chant, over and over, in unison: “Orimiri Omambala bu anyi bia. Orimiri Omambala ka anyi ga ejina.”14 When the ship got close to the shore, the chants grew louder. “Orimiri Omambala bu anyi bia. Orimiri Omambala ka anyi ga ejina,” they prayed in unison. Then, somehow, they broke the chains, and threw the entire crew overboard. Led by a captured chieftain, the Africans then walked calmly into the sea, chanting, “Orimiri Omambala bu anyi bia. Orimiri Omambala ka anyi ga ejina,” drowning themselves rather than be slaves.