Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“As long as the white men kept their distance, the chief of chiefs believed the two groups could coexist in peace, which was a strange concept for the Europeans.”

This quote showcases the humor that permeates this book. It also points out that the settlers were entirely responsible for the violence between them and Indigenous Americans. Though Wahunsenacah made efforts to be hospitable, the settlers did not extend the same courtesy to his people.

“This was not about human rights. They fully understood that building an entirely new society required human subjugation. Nearly all of them agreed that there was a better way to go about colonizing the New World: African slaves.”

This quote discusses the prosaic attitudes of the often mythologized “discoverers” of America. Understanding that their limited European skill set and labor force stood no chance of creating profit, even the priests who decried violence against Indigenous peoples agreed that exploitation in some form was necessary to colonize the Americas.

“The elders who passed down the oral tradition of Pueblo Indians in New Mexico have a distinct way to describe their first encounter with European colonizers: ‘The first white man our people saw was a black man.’”

This quote uses the vivid wordplay at which Harriot excels. It also points out the fundamental lie of traditional American historical narratives. Black explorers from European voyages were all over America, particularly the South, decades before Jamestown was founded.

“South Carolina stands as the capital of the known world. Understanding the history and legacy of Africans in America, and America itself, cannot begin with the tea-tossing frat boys of Boston or even the self-righteous constitution writers of the North. America’s fortune, fame, and even its independence began in South Carolina.”

This quote exemplifies Harriot’s goal of “recentering” American history around the Black experience. For Black Americans, South Carolina, the slave trading capital and home to a formidable economy run by the expertise of captive Africans, was the most significant location in America.

“Whiteness is not a social construct, nor is it as eternal or as confident as it seems. Whiteness is fleeting. It is a ghost; a shadow of an imaginary thing. It is the result of an insecurity that not only justifies man’s inhumanity to man, it reinforces the subconscious doubt in one’s own inferiority. Superiority does not require subjugation. A superior human being has no need. But what on earth is whiteness? Whiteness is fear.”

This quote is partly a response to Du Bois’s “The Souls of White Folk,” which posits whiteness as entirely a social construct. Responding conversationally to Du Bois is a recurring literary device in this book.

“When it came time for the Continental Congress to create a national army, Southern gentlemen couldn’t bear the thought of fighting alongside the men they considered less than human.”

This quote showcases the ignorance and entitlement of the Founding Fathers, who refused to grant enslaved people any benefits for fighting for them, and even barred them from fighting altogether, a fact that the British quickly exploited to their advantage. The Southern gentlemen realized that excluding Black people was harming them, but by that point, enslaved people were escaping to the British in droves.

“The rebels in Haiti were not concerned with taxation, representation, or tea. They were fighting for the universal freedom all men desire: liberty, straight up.”

This quote showcases Harriot’s signature playful style as he discusses the Haitian Revolution. He skewers the more frivolous “causes” of the American Revolution and points out the urgency and necessity of the Haitian Revolution, since the enslaved Black Haitians desperately needed to escape the brutality of the “grands blancs.”

“Two decades after Haiti gained its independence in 1804, France demanded that Haiti compensate former French slaveowners for the value of all the slaves who set themselves free. Yes, France essentially demanded reverse reparations.”

Harriot points out the hypocrisy of America and France, two nations that fought for “freedom” but exploited the nation of Haiti for trying to accomplish the same thing. Harriot sums up the cruelty in his casual, incisive style.

“Cartwright’s racist pseudo-psychology illustrates another delusion of whiteness: namely, the continued justification of oppression—state-sanctioned rape, murder, and unending torture—by portraying Black people’s insatiable inclination toward freedom as a sickness or a criminal impulse.”

This quote points out the nonsensical nature of “drapetomania” as a diagnosis for enslaved people. Harriot underlines the ways in which politics, culture, and even the medical community all intersected to create a multidimensional white supremacist culture.

“If Black people began to worship the exact same God as white people, they might want the same thing white people enjoyed: freedom.”

This quote discusses the unease that white enslavers initially felt at sharing Christianity with their captives, since a lot of Christian biblical rhetoric involves freedom from bondage. After Virginia enshrined into the law the status of Black people as subhuman, enslavers relaxed this policy. However, enslaved Black people still utilized Christianity in exactly the way white people had feared: as a tool for mental and physical escape.

“This war was won through the efforts of escaped slaves, whose mere absence would eventually cause the collapse of the Southern empire.”

This quote emphasizes the economic power that enslaved people represented. Simply by refusing to give their labor to their enslavers, formerly enslaved people dealt a crippling blow to the Southern economy that led to their defeat at the hands of the Union Army.

“The Emancipation Proclamation—enshrined in white history as the document that kick-started the freeing of slaves—was essentially a formality, a performative gesture by a president who didn’t have the authority, intentions, or backbone to free the people he deemed inferior.”

This quote points out the real-world redundancy of the Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves were already freeing themselves regardless of any proclamation. In contrast to the traditional narrative according to which Lincoln was the white savior of enslaved Black people, Harriot points out that Lincoln’s proclamation to free enslaved people was entirely meant to cripple the Southern economy, and Lincoln did not acknowledge that Black people were equal to white people, nor did he particularly support their freedom.

“I know there are people who would rather whitewash the past and romanticize the antebellum days as Southern belles sitting on front porches sipping mint juleps, but they were also willing participants in an almost 250-year genocide. Maybe one day, out of its racist stupor draped in rebel flags and white supremacist wet dreams, the South will rise again.”

This quote is the culmination of a characteristically humorous and brutal takedown of the myth of the “Lost Cause.” The Lost Cause is the idea that the Civil War was not about slavery and was actually about fighting government overreach. Myths that support white supremacy and minimize the brutality of slavery, Harriot argues, all feed into a mythological South that never existed.

“Black power was real. The workers had organized. Religious and civic institutions were building Black middle and upper classes. They controlled the political power base in the cities and the states. There was only one choice for the cowards. They summoned the mob.”

This quote points out the white terror at the significant improvements wrought by newly freed and enfranchised Black people during the Reconstruction. Faced with Black people who had some political and economic power, white people resorted to violence and intimidation to stoke fear and reestablish white power.

“There is always ‘something else.’ After emancipation, the ‘something else’ was the racial terrorism of Reconstruction. The Jim Crow era was the ‘something else’ that followed citizenship, voting rights, and due process. The Klan was ‘something else.’ If American exceptionalism exists, perhaps it lies in this country’s remarkable ability to conjure up ‘something else’ to sate its appetite for Black bodies.”

Harriot uses his characteristically forceful, vivid language to point out that nothing satisfies white racists except the complete and total subjugation of Black people. Harriot argues that white people will always use extralegal means—that is, through violence and unfair laws—to ensure subjugation.

“As DuBois hypothesized that America’s social, political, and economic structure enabled white supremacy, Wells contended, over and over again, that the problem was white people.”

This quote points out that Du Bois, a writer liberally quoted throughout the book, had his own critics. Ida B. Wells decried Du Bois’s focus on the institutions that enabled white supremacy, arguing that this approach ignored the fact that the white will for power was the real problem. Du Bois’s capitulation to white supremacy in some regards led to him becoming a beloved and more mainstream Black activist voice, while Wells was relegated to relative obscurity.

“The Northern form of American apartheid had less to do with property rights, economics, or fear of Black rule; it existed because whites sincerely believed they were more human than their Black counterparts.”

Harriot points out that while the South instituted slavery, the North was not free from racism, and in fact, its racism takes on its own insidious form. Northerners instituted segregation as a way of constructing a white supremacist society in which Black Americans were expected to be simply grateful that they were spared the brutalities of the South.

“The fight against segregation had less to do with the proximity to whiteness and more about the social, political, and economic subjugation of Black people. Resisting Jim Crow was about our humanity.”

This quote, in the voice of Uncle Rob, characterizes the intelligent, personable tone of the character. He points out that Black people had no desire to mingle closely with whites, but fought segregation in order to assert their status as human.

“I can’t think of a single instance 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 towards liberation begins with dismantling the idea that freedom is something that white people can give someone.”

The character of Uncle Rob argues that the myth of white benevolence has been proven false at every juncture in American history. In fact, the very idea that freedom is something that white people have the ability to give or take away feeds into the concept of white supremacy.

“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 we didn’t have all the rights afforded to us by the U.S. Constitution.”

This quote underlines the extensive whitewashing and minimization of the civil rights movement. The emphasis on nonviolent protest and the more respectable, white-friendly words of Martin Luther King Jr. epitomize the modern view of civil rights protests. In actuality, the activists were unstoppable and insistent, and violent racist backlash met them at every turn. The activists had to force the hand of white leaders in order to achieve anything.

“The white people who built their fortunes from low-interest loans, cheap food, and high home values don’t pay more taxes. Yet they are benefiting from current and past policies that have taken money from Black taxpayers and handed it over to whites. Doesn’t that sound like theft to you? At the very least, it’s receiving stolen goods.”

Using his casual, measured, and humorous tone, Harriot points out in this quote that reparations would address real, quantifiable economic disadvantages suffered by Black Americans as a result of the history of white supremacy in the US. Instead of viewing reparations as some kind of emotional or moral compensation, or as punishment for white people, Americans should see reparations as a leveling of the playing field.

“While other political, economic, and social issues have mattered more or less over the years, white supremacy has been the organizing principle of American politics before America even existed.”

This quote, again in the voice of Uncle Rob, points out that even though the names of political parties changed, the organizing principle of white supremacy has always been at the heart of the American government. White supremacy was baked into the colony system from the beginning and persists in different forms to this day.

“Republicans are now the party of the alt-right. It is the party of economic anxiety and birtherism. It is the party of Donald Trump, the ‘Muslim Ban,’ the border wall, David Duke, and all the white supremacists running for election on the Republican ticket in 2022 midterms. Republican leaders now spout white supremacist theories, asking what non-whites have done for civilization.”

Harriot uses his vivid and forceful language to describe the current Republican party as one that has dispensed of all pretense and just started spouting blatantly racist philosophy. This radicalism, Harriot contends, is the result of a racist backlash against Obama’s presidency.