Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

ACTIVITY WHITEMARE Write an essay describing the worst-case scenario that white people imagined civil rights activists were attempting to create.

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.”

In colonial America, if you were convicted of a crime, you were fined, whipped, banished from the community, or—in the worst-case scenario—you were sent to the gallows for capital punishment. You know what a gallows is, right? I don’t know how much news you get in there, but a few historical reenactors recently built one in front of the U.S. Capitol building just before they stormed in. The good people in Charleston, South Carolina, came up with a better solution. They monetized slave-whipping. The city offered a menu and a price list to send belligerent or misbehaving Africans to the “sugar house”—a municipal building staffed with people who were authorized to inflict violence on enslaved Black people for a small fee. But trust me, cuzzo, these professional torturers didn’t use boxing gloves.1 When Southern cities like Savannah adopted this profitable system, they came up with an official-sounding name: the Department of Corrections.

In 1787, the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons met in Benjamin Franklin’s home and came up with the plan for the first modern prison system. Instead of punishing criminals, they encouraged the prisoners to ask for forgiveness or “penitence,” so they called it a penitentiary. The prisoners were kept in solitary confinement, and when they weren’t subject to this inhumane treatment, they worked, prayed, and reflected on their behavior without contact or communication with other prisoners. Even when they were together, they were forced to wear masks so they couldn’t see each other. The prison system that was built in Auburn, New York, on the other hand, used corporal punishment, hard work, and silence to rehabilitate prisoners. Inmates were allowed to congregate, but they weren’t allowed to talk.

By the 1840s every prison system in America used either the Pennsylvania system or the Auburn system, but regardless of what method they chose to deploy, th...

Texas declared, “It shall be the duty of all Sheriffs, Justices of the Peace, and other civil officers of the several counties of the State, to report to the Judge of the County Court of their respective counties, at any time, all indigent or vagrant minors, within their respective counties or precincts, and, also, all minors whose parent or parents have not the means, or who refuse to support said minor.”4 When Black citizens inevitably broke these laws, they were sold to plantations and factory owners to work for free. Remember, slavery was abolished “except as a punishment for a crime,” so, technically, this “convict lease system” didn’t violate the Thirteenth Amendment. Cuzzo, this bootleg form of slavery soon became the most profitable industry in America. We were only “kinda free.”

Nationally, convict leasing averaged profits of 267 percent and was used to mitigate the growing demands of an increasingly unionized workforce in the early 1900s.6 And the profit wasn’t restricted to private entities. In 1898, 73 percent of Alabama’s entire state budget came from convict leasing.

You know they had something up their sleeves, and it wasn’t no popsicle! In 1971, President Nixon fixed the profit problem by declaring a “war on drugs.” In 1970, almost 200,000 Americans were in prison. By 1985, there were almost 482,000.9 By the end of 2019, there were 1.4 million people locked up in U.S. prisons, and Black Americans were incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of whites. Private prisons aren’t the only ones profiting from this stolen labor. It’s the $1.3 billion earned by telecom companies that have exclusive contracts with prison systems. It’s the food companies that make $1.6 billion from prison commissaries. It’s the insurance industry that makes $1.4 billion in bail fees. And it’s not just the federal government. California uses prison labor to fight wildfires. Your favorite fast-food restaurant uses prison labor to process meat. Your furniture, license plate, and many of your clothes are made by prison labor.

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 48.7 percent of Black adults had used illegal drugs in their lifetime, compared to 58.9 percent of non-Hispanic whites.12 How is it that Black people are arrested for 26 percent of the crimes but are incarcerated in state prisons at five times the rate of whites?13 I know you don’t have the answers. I’m just asking why we are always kinda free.

“What if they had taken you to jail?” she asked. “Do you want to throw your life away? Being innocent doesn’t mean anything to the police. You think they care? To them, you’re just another Black boy in America!” I think about that a lot. I think about you a lot. You are the closest thing I will ever have to a brother. Now that I can see the different trajectories our lives have taken, I understand the privilege of contemplating absolute freedom. You are in a state-sanctioned loophole that legalized enslavement, and I am just a Black man in America. And neither one of us is all-the-way free. I love you, cuz. Mikey

UNIT REVIEW THREE LITTLE QUESTIONS Why did the mass incarceration system accelerate after slavery was outlawed? To continue profiting from free labor. Because states created laws targeting Black people. It’s probably a coincidence. Wait . . . When was slavery outlawed?

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Why doesn’t it have the lowest crime rate? Because incarceration doesn’t stop crime. Crime is caused by poverty, not lack of cages. It’s probably a coincidence. Seriously, was slavery outlawed?

Who profits from mass incarceration? Corporate-run private prisons that receive state and federal funding. The people who get free labor. No one. Seriously, you mentioned earlier tha...

ACTIVITY ONE GOOD REASON Aside from America’s racial history, give a logical, evidence-based reason why Black Americans are incarcerated at highe...

What would the founders say about paying reparations? “Allow a government to decline paying its debts and you overthrow all public morality.”—Alexander Hamilton “It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes.”—Thomas Jefferson Nothing. They’re dead. “You freed what!?!”

DRIVE A CAR: Car lenders charge higher rates to Black buyers.14 Same with car insurance companies. Essentially, Black buyers subsidize lower rates for white buyers.15

That’s how a Black woman inspired this little phrase in the part of the Massachusetts Constitution known as the “Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts”: “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”3 Does that sound familiar?

Belinda and her daughter were awarded the equivalent of $2,500 per year. But here’s the thing: the “Massachusetts General Court” wasn’t a judicial body. It was the name of the state’s legislative body. She had won her reparations by a legislative act. In 1818, Winny sued her enslavers in the Missouri courts. But instead of arguing her slave status, Winny charged her master Phebe Whitesides (Pruitt) with assault and battery and unlawful imprisonment for holding her against her will. Winny contended that since slavery wasn’t allowed in the Missouri Territory or the Northwest Territory, the moment they brought twelve-year-old enslaved Winny to the Northwest Territory in 1793, she was legally free. The Whitesides lived there for three or four years before moving to the Missouri Territory, holding Winny as a prisoner for about twenty years. Winny was awarded damages of $167.50, or $4,102 in 2022 dollars. Whitesides appealed, and the Missouri Supreme Court case Winny v. Whitesides eventually set the standard for freedom petitions.

As you consume this collection of stories about the Black experience, you will invariably have questions. For instance, you might notice that for the first half of America’s history, the Democrats were the bad guys who fought to uphold the institutions of slavery, Jim Crow, and legalized racial subjugation; then, all of a sudden, the Democrats became the good guys. One of the favorite assertions of Candace Owens, and other Black people who happily let white people touch their hair, is that negroes have been bamboozled by the Democratic Party. They often ask why the Democratic Party tends to get the Black vote by default. I’m sure you’ve heard some variation of this argument. With a false sense of superiority bestowed upon them by conservative negro-whisperers, they will say that Black voters are stuck on the “Democratic plantation.” They argue that Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan and supported segregation while Republicans are the party of Lincoln, self-determination, and, most of all, “bootstraps.” But how did it happen?

The Democratic Party, on the other hand, was, until the 1960s, the party of the South. It was the party of social conservatism. It wanted to preserve slavery and segregation. The party’s Southern contingent generally opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. It was the party of states’ rights, small government, and Jim Crow. They wouldn’t even allow Black people to be present at their convention until 1924.

Is this how Texas used to be blue? Is there any hope?

Before I was born, Black voters were as likely to identify as Democrats as they were Republicans.3 In the South, it was a little different. Like many voters in the South, my mama ’nem identified as Republicans because they said Southern Democrats were kinda racist. And when they said “kinda racist,” you gotta keep in mind that Southern folk think the sun is “kinda hot.” Black folks in the South never say what they mean. Like when a Black woman tells you that she has “a trick for yo’ ass,” she is not about to teach you magic. Your best bet is to disappear like Black folks did from the Republican Party. And I heard you wanted to know why that happened.

But to understand the politics of Baby America, all you have to know is one fact: White supremacy is the defining characteristic of America’s politics.

But a lot of the beef was about slavery. Even though many Federalists owned slaves, Anti-Federalists were afraid that a strong federal government dominated by Northern aristocrats could essentially ban the institution. They wanted their new nation to treat in the manner suggested by a more beloved group of men known as the Isley Brothers once suggested, “It’s your thing, do what you wanna do.” And so they compromised. Ultimately, the new Constitution of the United States of America actually told the states who to sock it to.

The Democrats’ main platform centered around the concept of “nullification”—the idea that states had the right to invalidate laws they deemed unconstitutional. Of course, the only law they wanted to nullify was the one about owning human beings. Democrats thought the federal government should leave those decisions up to the states.*

It is true that the Republican Party was founded on the principles of anti-slavery. Founded in 1854, the GOP’s only real concern was stopping the expansion of owning men.* They were so in favor of ending America’s peculiar institution that members were often called “Black Republicans” as a slur. And trust me, they weren’t talking about Kanye West. Republicans also elected the first woman to Congress, supported Black suffrage, and pushed for civil rights legislation before Martin Luther King was born.5 The Civil War, in effect, was a clash over the evolution of America’s two political parties—one that wanted the right to own men and another that vehemently opposed the possession of human beings by others.

African American voters overwhelmingly supported Franklin Roosevelt’s four presidential campaigns in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944, but for other contests, as many Blacks identified as Republican as Democrat. Then, in 1948, disgusted with Democrat Harry Truman’s order to desegregate the U.S. Army and the Democratic Party’s support for anti–Jim Crow laws, thirty-five delegates from the Deep South walked out of the Democratic National Convention and formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrats). Black voters flocked to the Democratic Party. To be clear, Black people didn’t switch parties. Their votes had always been split between the two political factions; they just stopped voting for Republicans. Indeed, they had a trick for the racist Republicans’ collective ass.

In 1981, Lee Atwater, the political campaign architect who refined the Southern Strategy for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, described the Republican Party’s winning template: You start out in 1954 by saying: “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So, you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites . . . “We want to cut this” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”13

In 1964, when members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan abducted and murdered James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, Klan organizer Edgar Ray Killen was arrested and charged with the murders, but his first trial ended in a hung jury. On August 4, 1964, forty-four days after they disappeared, authorities found the bodies buried in a dam on the Old Jolly Farm, a stone’s throw from the open field where Reagan chose to give his speech. As the mostly white crowd that included members of the Klan looked on, Reagan gave a thirty-three-paragraph, dog-whistle-filled speech about the dangers of welfare and “outsiders” to a rousing round of applause. That man knew what he was doing by conjuring up the worst elements of whiteness. He believed that he could employ the Southern Strategy and cement the South as Republican territory. More than fifteen thousand people showed up. I’m not saying this was racist . . . Because I don’t have to.

No, the GOP is not more racist than the Democratic Party. A party is just a name and a logo. There has always been a party that served as the home for white supremacy, and the Republican Party is just the current base. You can call it the Democratic, Republican, conservative, or MAGA, but among Southern whites there ain’t but one party—the anti-Black party.

The country has always had a two-party political system: White people. Everybody else.

It is entirely possible that Republican politicians aren’t racist. It is not reasonable to believe that most white people are not. But just like the slaveholding declarers of independence and the white nationalists who started an uncivil race war and the Reconstruction-era terrorists and the white women who advocated for the necessity of lynching and the segregationists and the mass incarcerators and the vote suppressors and the election-denying insurrectionists who just wanted to make America great again, they will deny that white supremacy is their ultimate goal. But their votes show it. The success of politicians who openly espouse the premises of white supremacy shows it. This country’s history shows it. The ones who claim they want to make America great again have never lifted a finger to transform this make-believe democracy into a more perfect union. They dindoo nuffin.

Which term best describes the pre-Goldwater Democrats and the modern-day Republican Party? Southern conservatives. Right-wing. Anti-Black. Pro-white.

When did America become a democracy? When all white men won the right to vote. When white women won the right to vote. When Black people won the right to vote. I’ll let you know.

IDENTITY POLITICS Euphemisms are often used to describe political groups. With no research whatsoever, guess whether the following euphemism is used to describe a group that is mostly: (W) White (B) Black (E) Equally proportionate Red states States’ rights Dixiecrats Evangelicals Goldwater Republicans Alt-right Reagan Family values Silent majority Christian conservatives Black voters Soccer moms NASCAR dads The negro vote Suburban voters Economically anxious MAGAs Urban voters Liberals Independent voters College-educated voters Conservatives

Although they didn’t give me express permission to document these anecdotes and reveal them to the world, I have no reason to think they will object, because I was raised with three of the greatest snitches in history. My three sisters—Comelita, Robin, and Sean—have never competed in track and field, but they were world-class athletes when it came to running and telling.

When Barack Obama declared his presidential campaign, all the racism you read about in previous chapters emerged. A furious search for his birth certificate was premised on the claim that he was secretly an immigrant from Africa. He had to resign from Trinity United Church of Christ, where his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a graduate of historically Black Howard University who served in the Marine Corps and the navy, preached radical “Black liberation theology.” Obama was accused of being a Muslim, consorting with radical left-wing extremists, and being anti-white. He was not a “real” American. His church was plotting against white people. He was a carpetbagger. To America, Barack Obama was, and will always be, a “Black president.”

Unfortunately, Barack Obama couldn’t fix America. By simply being the Black president, he became the symbol for what America could achieve. Even if most white people didn’t vote for Barack Obama, “I voted for Obama” has become the rallying cry for people who believe in a post-racial America. The fact that his tenure as head of state did not reverse four hundred years of entrenched white supremacy shows that he was just a president. But while there are valid criticisms of Obama’s two administrations from Black and white, liberal and conservative, perhaps his most important legacy is that the result of his presidency proved that there is nothing wrong with Black people. There is something wrong with America.

Eight years, two months, and sixteen days after the election of Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump became president of the United States of America. If one were to create a sentient being out of America’s past and present, it would look like Donald Trump. It would hate anyone who is not white. It would believe itself to be an infallible “stable genius.” It would hide secrets. It would whitewash its past. It would lie incessantly. It would rip brown babies from their mothers’ arms. It would criminalize Muslims. It would mirror the intellect and sentiment of the vast majority of people who fill the country from sea to shining sea. Donald Trump is America.

Donald Trump is a rich, powerful man who has convinced the world that his empire was earned through hard work, not a sordid past that includes, but is not limited to, taking advantage of his privilege. He made his fortune like America made its fortune: taking land, profiting off financial malfeasance, conning the masses, and refusing to pay Black and brown people for their work. He became the world’s most powerful man in the world’s most powerful country through a system that rewards white men for being white men. He has no particular intelligence or expertise, yet he has convinced his poor Caucasian co-conspirators that the only way they can succeed is by pl...

And like America, most people were willing to ignore his racism for the sake of self-preservation. Unlike the white people who claimed Obama was proof of a post-racial America even though most white voters didn’t vote for him, Trump voters proudly admit that they cast their ballots for an unapologetic bigot just like the white supremacists of Reconstruction and the white nationalists of the civil rights era proudly proclaimed their objections to racial equality. They overlooked the inherent evil of his immigration policy, his fight against Critical Race Theory, and his championing of whiteness just like this country overlooked Jim Crow, segregation, lynching, and the evil that remains in every sector of society. They have forg...

And that is America. Like its history, this nation is a mirage. Its greatness is a figment of a collective white imagination that envisions a bright, shining star where there is only a dumpster fire. America is a con artist. It is a counterfeit farce of a white country convinced of its own supremacy. It is a boot on every Black throat and noose on every negro neck. Yet we remain.

ACTIVITY FINAL EXAM Create a “post-racial America.”

TEN ESSENTIAL BOOKS Lerone Bennett. Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619–1962. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2016. Keisha N. Blain, Ibram X. Kendi, eds. Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019. New York: Random House, 2021. Frantz Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Ibram X. Kendi. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016. Middleton A. Harris, Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, Ernest Smith. The Black Book. New York: Random House, 2019. Ivan Van Sertima. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America. New York: Random House, 2003. Gerald Horne. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018. John Hope Franklin. Reconstruction after the Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Ronald W. Waters. Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora: An Analysis of Modern Afrocentric Political Movements. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Rayford W. Logan. The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901. New York: Dial Press, 1954.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS: Read firsthand narratives of people who survived enslavement from the Federal Writers’ Project. Listen to recordings of a Frederick Douglass speech. Hear an old blues recording. And it’s free! NATIONAL ARCHIVES: You can download slave schedules, birth certificates, military records, and digitized transcripts from the Freedmen’s Bureau archives.

ARCHIVE.ORG: This is a valuable research tool that allows users to borrow out-of-print writings, old encyclopedias, and school textbooks. TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE DATABASE: Originally a CD-ROM, this online repository contains information on more than 35,000 human trafficking expeditions that carried more than 12 million Africans to the Americas between 1520 and 1866.

ANCESTORS AND ELDERS: Your deceased grandmother’s attic is a museum. The stories your great-uncle has told too many times are part of an oral tradition. Your family’s Bibles, diaries, and old letters are historical documents.

WHITE LIES: Whenever you encounter a weirdly specific anti-Black law, rumors of a place where Black people aren’t allowed, an account of a “race riot,” or any story about Black people that seems kinda semi-racist, there’s probably some whitewashed history hiding somewhere in there.

Michael is the creator and cohost of the podcast Drapetomaniax: Unshackled History, produced in partnership with Pharrell’s OTHERtoneMedia. His college course, Race: An Economic Construct, was adapted by university economics departments across the country as a model for teaching the combination of history, economics, politics, and class structures.

My own research indicates it was the lack of seasoning.

* I know you’re expecting a seasoning joke here, but we’re better than that. * Plus, Europe is not a continent; it is a dingleberry of the Asian landmass. Just look at a map.