More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.
According to the patriarchal mandates of British inheritance and kinship law, the children should have had the status of their white fathers.
Virginia legislators pretended slave status was a natural identity passed down through procreation. They constructed a racial-classification scheme but made it seem like an inherited condition.
The very notion of rape didn’t apply to Black women and girls, because they were considered incapable of consenting or not consenting to sex.27
The genetic contribution of European men to the ancestry of African Americans is three times greater than that of European women.
1933 and 1976, the Eugenics Board of North Carolina approved the involuntary sterilizations of more than 7,500 people—affecting Black people at a disproportionate rate—on the grounds that they were “mentally defective.”
“over the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually under federally funded programs.”
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.
Now that a white elite no longer profited from the children Black women bore, they painted Black women’s procreation as stealing money from white taxpayers.
A study that tracked more than one hundred babies born between 1989 and 1992 for two decades found that children exposed to crack cocaine in utero fared no worse than children with the same socioeconomic background whose mothers didn’t use drugs.
“All sex was consexual [sic]. Parents are unable to accept the fact of this child’s promiscuous behavior caused this situation.” How could police blame an eleven-year-old girl for being sexually abused by adult men?
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.
prosecutors are far less likely to bring charges against men accused of raping Black women than men accused of raping white women.
prosecutors were 4.5 times more likely to file charges in rapes by strangers involving white victims than Black victims.
for every fifteen Black women who are raped, only one reports the assault.
Associated Press state-by-state review prompted by the Holtzclaw case turned up nearly one thousand officers across the country who lost their badges between 2009 and 2014 for sexual misconduct.
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.
Stono Rebellion, the largest uprising of enslaved people in the colonies to date.
But even though cotton and tobacco dominated the colonial American economy, it was sugar that anchored the economy of the larger Atlantic world from the sixteenth century onward.
Louisiana’s sugarcane industry is by itself worth $3 billion, generating an estimated 16,400 jobs.
73 pounds of sugar and related sweeteners, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are consumed per person per year, according to United States Department of Agriculture
One of the great ironies of sugar’s history in the United States is that the brutal work of the enslaved created an industry whose success in producing unhealthy food for mass consumption has taken its greatest toll on Black communities today.
During the 1750s, England became the “supreme slaving nation in the Atlantic world,”
One measure of the horrors of kidnapping captives is evidenced by the British Parliament outlawing it in 1750.19
1709 and lasting officially to 1807, Rhode Islanders managed to make nearly a thousand voyages to Africa, procuring 106,544 enslaved people.
Eight years before the Boston Tea Party, colonists took part in a lesser-known Rhode Island revolt against the Sugar Act of 1764,
Louisiana sugar parishes had a pattern of “deaths greatly exceed[ing] births.”
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.”
added sugar has been linked to growing rates of certain chronic illnesses, including those from which Black people suffer the most.
“Food deserts and food insecurity,” they concluded, “are perhaps the most important deleterious consequence of residential segregation in the United States.”
Since sugar came to these shores, there hasn’t been a time when Black people weren’t getting the short end of the cane stalk.
Of the more than 7,750 demonstrations that took place in the United States between May 26 and August 22, nearly 95 percent were nonviolent, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
Even when resistance has been peaceful or purely symbolic—such as Black fists raised during the medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympics or a knee taken on the football field during the national anthem nearly fifty years later—any sign of rebellion has frequently resulted in threats or acts of violence perpetrated by white vigilantes, militia groups, and the police, often culminating in the creation or strengthening of systems of racial and social control.
The specific forms of repression and control may have changed over time, but the underlying pattern established during slavery has remained the same.
The first official slave patrol was created in South Carolina in 1704, following rumors of a planned rebellion.
Legislation in Connecticut and Rhode Island, for example, explicitly encouraged anti-Black vigilantism by authorizing any white person to capture an enslaved person who appeared to be out after nine without specified permission.28
white politicians outlawed any Black behavior that was not immediately recognizable as labor or subservience.
the war ended the South’s economic power, but it did not reduce white fear of Black liberation or the perpetual quest for racial control.
Without the stolen labor of formerly enslaved people, the region’s economy swiftly collapsed, and without the institution of slavery, there was no longer a formal mechanism for maintaining racial hierarchy and preventing “amalgamation” with a group of people considered intrinsically inferior and vile.
Poor white people feared that the abolition of slavery would erase the line that separated them from the most abused and despised people on earth.
When those efforts proved insufficient to maintain complete control, white Southerners wielded their most effective weapon: vigilante violence and terrorism.
Populist movement had joined with the Republican Party to form the “Fusion Party,” a political organization that managed to unite poor and working-class white people, formerly enslaved people and their descendants, and liberal Republicans in a movement for economic justice.
Between 1877 and 1950, more than four thousand Black men, women, and children lost their lives to lynching.
Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of Black veterans suffered brutal abuse at the hands of white vigilante mobs who viewed Black military service as an offensive and threatening assertion of equal citizenship.
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.”
FBI’s notorious counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) targeted Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture),
sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security.”
Many gains achieved through the civil rights movement seemed largely symbolic to Black people who
“What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?”80
Holy Week Uprising, thousands of people were injured, scores killed, and hundreds of buildings looted or burned, marking the nation’s greatest wave of social unrest since the Civil War.
