Black AF History Quotes

“History can never be objective or unbiased because, no matter how hard the storytellers may try, the perception of reality prejudices all stories. The academic field of history is dominated by white men handicapped by the inability to see whiteness’s impact on America’s biography. The best historians try to approximate the truth by unbending the collection of funhouse mirrors through which the past has been viewed, but it isn’t simply a counterfeit version of history, it is a fable that erases the reflection of an entire people to ensure that the mythology of the heroes lives happily ever after.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“What we do know for sure is that both African and Native American populations had one thing in common: resistance.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“Even though he had done nothing, Vespucci’s name would be entrenched in history, making his namesake the perfect one for a country built on deception and lies.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“The Mis-Education of the Negro, in which Carter G. Woodson explains that in the American education system, the entirety of Black people’s existence “is studied only as a problem or dismissed as of little consequence.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of 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 American’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.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“But the Black church is not a place, nor does it exist in the physical realm. It is a school with no address and a meeting space with no location. It is a political machine and a human rights organization.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“In a soul food restaurant, you can order a thigh and a wing. I contend that the thigh is the most underrated and least talked-about piece of chicken, yet it is never separated from the leg in Caucasian cuisine. Legs are trash. If you’re over seven and you still eat legs, you need to grow up.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“they will deny that white supremacy is their ultimate goal. But their votes show it.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“CHRISTIAN: A follower of the European version of the teachings of Jesus Christ.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“I once saw a recipe that said “season to taste” and finally understood why white people’s chicken tastes like a crisp fall breeze blowing an American flag at a Toby Keith concert.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“Then, in 1662, Virginia’s legislature officially sealed the fate of its negro servants: WHEREAS some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or ffree, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother, And that if any christian shall committ ffornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the ffines imposed by the former act.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“The indigenous people were dying anyway. The natives had no natural immunity to European illnesses, so entire Caribbean populations died from diseases. Hispaniola’s native Taíno population went from half a million to two hundred in less than fifty years because they were literally allergic to white people. It took forty years for 90 percent of Cuba’s population to disappear. Puerto Rico took thirty years.7”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“Du Bois eloquently echoed this sentiment, asking, “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. How does it feel to be a problem?”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“These stories seem like a metaphor for something exponentially larger. But this is a poem. And”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“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.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“In this book, the country we know as the United States is just a parcel of land that was stolen and repurposed as a settler state using European logic and the laws of white supremacy. This book is a story about a strong-arm robbery. It is about family and friends trying to recover what was stolen. It is the testimony, and the verdict that a jury of our peers has never heard.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“Republicans couldn’t win elections consistently if these bigoted ideas weren’t shared by a majority of White America.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“And to fix America’s racial problem, all this country needed to do was to fix Black people. To address the drugs, crime, and poverty caused by wealth disparities, unequal employment, and lack of community resources, they decided to police, arrest, and imprison the people who were subjected to redlining, segregation, and systemic discrimination.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“MORE FIRE Read about these Black women: Daisy Bates Josephine Baker Elaine Brown Septima Clark Shirley Chisholm Anna Julia Cooper Angela Davis Charlotte Dupuy The Edmonson sisters Fannie Lou Hamer Dorothy Height Claudia Jones Barbara Jordan Marsha P. Johnson Pauli Murray Sojourner Truth Madam C. J. Walker”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“and Friends being funny.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“If Ida B. Wells had one gift, it was that she was born with what scientists have now identified as the genetic marker IDGAF.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“And joking about unseasoned chicken is actually an ethnic slur. I will not denigrate Scottish culture. They make great toilet paper.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or rat in a trap.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“In 1521, a few months after Ponce de León died from thigh poisoning”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“Still, I can’t think of a single incidence where liberty has been achieved through gradual means, nor can I point to a single example of white people saying, “You know what? I think I’m gonna stop oppressing you.” Perhaps the first step toward liberation begins with the dismantling of the idea that freedom is something that white people can give someone. Just sayin’.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“The criminal enterprise called America is nothing but a self-perpetuating white supremacy machine.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“I don’t think that’s right. My grandpop has a Confederate flag and he says it represents our heritage. Wanna see a picture? Oh, that’s not the Confederate flag. The first Confederate flag looked almost exactly like the U.S. flag, except it had fewer stripes and stars. But the United Confederation of Slaveholders hated that flag because it resembled the American flag and in battle they were hard to tell apart. In fact, you’ve probably never seen any of the actual flags that officially represented the Confederate States of America.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“She did not answer proudly, as if she wore her response as a badge of courage; she did it matter-of-factly, like doors and Black women sometimes will.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“History is written by the victors, but it is made by the rebellious.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“It doesn’t matter what anyone believes. The truth is that Confederate monuments celebrate men who committed treason against this country. The current Confederate flag represents a war to preserve the practice of human trafficking, rape, and murder. The only reason it reemerged into the national consciousness is because segregationists wanted to deny Black people their constitutional rights.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America