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November 19 - November 19, 2023
We were not actors but acted upon. We were not contributors, just recipients. White people enslaved us, and white people freed us. Black people could choose either to take advantage of that freedom or to squander it, as our depictions in the media seemed to suggest so many of us were doing.
I will never forget the woman I met after giving a talk in New Orleans, one of the most brutal slave-trading cities in our country. Almost ninety years old, she came up and hugged me, wiping her eyes as she thanked me for helping birth a project that had allowed her to release the shame that comes with being told that the only thing Black people have contributed to this country is our brute labor. “I always knew the truth,” she told me. “But I didn’t have the facts of what happened.”
We also added a series of photographic portraits, some from the distant past, some contemporary, of regular Black Americans, the descendants of American slavery, who have lived through all this history with resilience, beauty, pride, and a humanity that is too often unrecognized.
The story of Black America cannot be disentangled from the story of America, and our attempts to do so have forced us to tell ourselves a tale full of absences, evasions, and lies, one that fails to satisfactorily explain the society we live in and leaves us unable to become the society we want to be.
white Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.36
Eight in ten Black people would not be in the United States were it not for the institution of slavery in a society founded on ideals of freedom.
“Tyranny is a central theme of American history,” the historian David Brion Davis writes in his 2006 book, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, and “racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.”
White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life—a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.84
To answer the question of how they could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously denying liberty to an entire race back home, white Americans resorted to the same racist ideology that Jefferson and the framers had used at the nation’s founding: that Black people were an inferior race whose degraded status justified their treatment.
We are the most likely to support programs like universal healthcare and a higher minimum wage and to oppose programs that harm the most vulnerable.
The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance and visions for equality.
The laws that invented race also created a regime intent on policing Black women’s sexuality and controlling Black women’s bodies. Many generations later, we are still living with its legacy of entangled racial injustice and sexual violence.
By attributing this urban crisis to Black family pathology instead of structural racism, Moynihan’s analysis promoted policies that tied poverty-relief programs to harsh crime-control interventions in Black neighborhoods.
A study by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality showed that adults tend to view Black girls between ages five and fourteen as less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers and treat them as if they are grown-ups. This phenomenon is so common that the term “adultification” is used to describe it.51 Black girls are perceived as needing less protection and nurturing than white girls, and as having advanced knowledge about adult topics like sex.
Angela Y. Davis: “Black women have always embodied, if only in their physical manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both dramatic and subtle ways.”
Black women not only were less likely to be able to afford an abortion but also were more likely to be deemed sexually reckless, to undergo coerced sterilizations, and to die from pregnancy-related causes. These Black feminists decided to caucus separately and came up with the term “reproductive justice” to describe a new framework that included the human right to have children and to raise them with dignity in a safe, healthy, and supportive environment, along with the right not to have a child, which dominated pro-choice advocacy.66
During the 1750s, England became the “supreme slaving nation in the Atlantic world,” write historians James Rawley and Stephen D. Behrendt.10 In Bristol, England, a local annalist writing about the eighteenth century noted, “There is not a brick in the city but what is cemented with the blood of a slave.”11
New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling. The number of enslaved labor crews on its sugar plantations doubled. And in every sugar parish, Black people outnumbered white.
Louisiana led the nation in destroying the lives of Black people in the name of economic efficiency.
As W.E.B. Du Bois so eloquently wrote in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”55 The domestic terrorism that ended Reconstruction and destroyed so many Black lives was particularly vicious in the sugar region.
And if Black sugarcane farmers succeeded in the face of all these obstacles, they still had to face racist actions by government agencies, banks, and real estate developers who conspired to take their land.
The Mississippi River is and always has been the lifeblood of the region, nurturing the
southern Louisiana soil and linking this place to a many-centuries-old Atlantic market in sugar and the enslaved. It bears witness to all that has happened here—the human beings stolen, shipped, and sold on plantations, the harsh realities of lives cut short by sugar.
The glaring double standard reflects a centuries-old pattern in which Black strivings for liberation have been demonized, criminalized, and subjected to persecution, while white people’s demands for liberty are deemed rational, legitimate, and largely unthreatening.
Nothing has proved more threatening to our democracy, or more devastating to Black communities, than white fear of Black freedom dreams.
This notion—that Black people were inherently devious and criminal, and that white people were required to monitor and police them—ultimately defined the nature of race relations in the United States.
As historian Carol Anderson observes in White Rage, the mere presence of Black people was not the problem; the problem was “blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.”75
Throughout the civil rights movement, conservative politicians like Richard Nixon argued that the increasing crime rate was not caused by poverty or joblessness but, instead, “can be traced directly to the spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to disobey them.”88
rebellion and “white retaliation” would render racial inequality a permanent feature of American life.92
This problem of “selective hearing” of Black voices might be dismissed as a profound misunderstanding if it did not fit so neatly into a recurring pattern dating back to our nation’s founding.
James Baldwin famously said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.”
August 19, 1791 Benjamin Banneker, a mathematician, inventor, philosopher, almanac compiler, and free Black man from Baltimore, sends then–secretary of state Thomas Jefferson a letter protesting the treatment and condition of “those of my complexion” in the new nation. Two years earlier the U.S. Constitution went into effect, enshrining both the Three-fifths Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Clause. In his letter, Banneker tells Jefferson that the institution of slavery contradicts the ideals in the Declaration of Independence.
The Doctrine of Discovery, a longstanding belief that Christian nations had the right to rule over non-Christian nations and their property, helped justify English imperialism despite prior Native presence.
In New Orleans between 1804 and 1860, the average price of a male field hand aged twenty-one to thirty-eight grew from roughly $500 to over $1,500 (in 1830 dollars).38
America has evolved into one of the world’s most inequitable societies. Today, the richest 10 percent of Americans own over 75 percent of the country’s wealth, with the top 1 percent owning well over a third.92
With violence largely sanctioned by state and local governments, Black families, especially in the South, faced poverty coupled with a life in limbo, where safety, stability, access to education, and mental health were always precarious. This was true for many generations. Today, Black Americans far removed from slavery and Jim Crow continue to be handed the economic misfortune of their forebearers. This is why, as of 2017, white households were twice as likely as Black households to receive an inheritance. And when white people inherit money, it’s typically three times the amount Black
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Like many women, she was nervous about giving birth. All the more so because she was doing it in New York City, where Black women are twelve times as likely to die in childbirth as white women.
Black Americans disproportionately contracted Covid-19 because of the many ways America’s history of racial violence and inequality is baked into the institutions and structures of our society.
racializing of medicine did not end after slavery.
Two persistent physiological falsehoods—that Black people were impervious to pain and that they had weak lungs that could be strengthened through hard work—have wormed their way into the scientific consensus, and can still be seen in modern-day medical education and practice.
Black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die at birth or in the first year of life—a racial gap that adds up to thousands of lost lives every year.
Samuel Cartwright, a physician and professor of “diseases of the Negro” at the University of Louisiana in New Orleans, now Tulane University. His widely circulated paper “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” published in the May 1851 issue of The New-Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, cataloged supposed physical differences between white people and Black people, including the claim that Black people had lower lung capacity—what he called “vital capacity.”20
Yet fallacies about Black immunity to pain, extra-thick skin, and weakened lung function that were introduced into the scientific literature by these and other racist doctors continue to show up in medical education today.
In reality, it’s never been race that predicts the disease and disability that disproportionally afflict Black Americans, but racism.
When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out
of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing “God Bless America.” No, no, no. Not God bless America! God damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!2
criticized white Christians for what he saw as their historical failure to fight against slavery, violence, and racial oppression; that failure, he argued, had proved their tradition to be an unrighteous one, out of step with the essence of the gospel.
Black Power was a compelling vision of Black self-determination, and a clear repudiation of King’s emphasis on nonviolence and integration. “It is a call for Black people in this country to unite,” Carmichael explained, “to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for Black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.” It was also far more confrontational: “When you talk of Black Power,” Carmichael said, “you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created.”37
African Americans make up 13 percent of the population yet account for an incalculable amount of what moves us, and how we move.10
But there’s respectability that empowers and respectability that imprisons. And the imprisoning sort remains a bane for Black America. Its people were fully aware of the abysmal expectations minstrelsy had established: a roulette of contempt, shame, rage, self-consciousness, appeasement.
