Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

If we believed the whitewashed, safe-for-work version of the civil rights struggle, we would believe that a lone white man killed Emmett Till, jolting Black people out of a dreamlike state to suddenly realize that we didn’t have all the rights afforded to us by the U.S. Constitution. In response, Martin Luther King convinced everyone to hold hands and march peacefully until he could remember his dream. When he told the world about it at the March on Washington, America suddenly saw the error if its ways and handed Black people their humanity and everyone lived happily ever after. That is the CliffsNotes version of the civil rights struggle that exists in our collective whitewashed memory and is sold in social studies classes across America. Through a complex combination of whitewashing, guilt, and an intentional recasting of history that absolves them of their hatred, our historical translators have painted a sanitized, impressionist portrait of a struggle for Black liberation that was eventually fulfilled by America’s unwavering commitment to justice and equality. Out of whole cloth, they managed to fabricate a fantastic ahistorical myth that somehow became truth. They remember a socially conservative, respectable campaign of racial reconciliation, not a movement of anti-establishment revolutionaries. And for their sake, the doctrine of nonviolent resistance was eventually reduced to simple “nonviolence.” They never speak of the “resisting.”