Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 442

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America," by Michael Harriot.

 

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.

But unlike in Europe or elsewhere in the world, color-based slavery was regulated as a part of America’s founding document. Slaves from antiquity were still seen as human, and their enslavement was not solely based on skin color. Slavery existed in Africa before white people showed up, but human beings were not commodified or chattel. In pre-colonial Africa, enslaved people had legal rights, their status was not passed down to their children, and they did not serve as a major labor force. In fact, most of the previous iterations of human bondage around the world offered a path to freedom. To be fair, it is much easier to refer to America’s unique institution as “slavery” than it is to call it the “perpetual, race-based, constitutional, human trafficking enterprise that legally reduces human beings to chattel through the means of violence or the threat thereof.” That’s quite a mouthful. But at its heart, that’s what it is. 

And what is America? 

Is it a plot of dirt littered with the discarded bones of those who stood in the way of manifest destiny, or is it a constitution? Is it an assemblage of huddled masses yearning to breathe free, or is it merely a series of borders on a map? Was this idyllic dreamland of opportunity always here, beckoning the conquering swords of history to unearth its existence? Was it manifested from destiny out of thin air and gradually expanded across this continent like a virus? 

These are not rhetorical questions. To understand the history of Black people in this country, we must first come to a consensus on how we define “this country.” Because if what we refer to as “Black history” includes the jigsaw puzzle currently known as “the United States of America,” then the twenty-something enslaved Africans who arrived in Virginia in 1619 were more than a century late to the cookout. 

Almost one hundred years before 104 white “adventurers” from the Virginia Company of London landed on a Virginia beachhead on May 14, 1607, Africans had already ventured to America, slaughtered natives, and built plantations. In the words of the immortal historian Ray J: “We hit it first.”

Regardless of what happened, Esteban would eventually be erased from American history. However, Native American tribes still share stories of the mysterious black-skinned man who discovered more of America than Christopher Columbus, Ponce de León, and Leif Erikson combined. In fact, 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.”

The citizens of the newly freed country would forever remember the history of their brutal oppression at the hands of Europeans. Dessalines and the new citizens tossed the Spanish and French names, renaming the country in the language of the now extinct Taíno people: the island would be called Ay-ti or Haiti, meaning “the land of the mountains.” Since that day, a white man has never ruled the place we now call Haiti. 

Today, Haiti’s legacy is often tarnished, known more for its tragedies than its rich legacy. But the reason for its impoverishment today is that America and France instituted what is possibly the most racist economic foreign policy that ever existed, and upheld it for over two centuries. They did this while other European powers watched quietly. Understanding what two of the most powerful countries in the world did to Haiti requires a suspension of disbelief, because it is so absurd that it sounds like fiction.

Two decades after Haiti gained its independence in 1804, France demanded that Haiti compensate former French slaveowners for the value of all those slaves who set themselves free. Yes, France essentially demanded reverse slave reparations. In 1825, France sent warships to Haiti and demanded 150 million francs. Not only did the United States agree with this, but it backed up France’s demands for the debt on the international stage, imploring European countries to ignore Haiti’s existence until it paid this money. 

One could argue that this debt, which thrust the new nation into poverty and took 122 years to pay, was at least half the fault of the European countries who silently allowed France to enact this racist policy. One could perhaps fault America for helping France to extort Haiti. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine had explicitly stated that “any attempt by a European power to oppress or control any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be viewed as a hostile act against the United States,” which America overlooked in this particular case. We just let it slide, because—let’s be honest—using violence or the threat of violence to extract wealth and labor from Black people is kinda America’s thing. America reprimanding France for stealing from Haiti would be like the Rolling Stones calling out the Beatles for appropriating Black music. 

When Haiti became an independent country in 1804, white Americans just about lost it. Having just witnessed the power of a Black revolt in the Revolutionary War, the newly formed white supremacist country ruled by rich plantation owners and Northern bankers feared that the Haitian uprising would inspire Black American slaves to do the same. Furthermore, they were threatened by the idea of a tropical paradise that could produce more crops than the U.S. agrarian economy. Prominent enslaver and American president Thomas Jefferson refused to recognize the self-freed country, a tradition of ignorance that continued until 1862, when Americans decided to take a different tack. Ever the colonizers, the United States sent troops to Haiti’s doorstep seventeen times between 1862 and 1915. Andrew Johnson even wanted to annex Haiti and make it part of America—that’s how badly they wanted to suppress and control this region. 

And if a land grab didn’t work, the next best thing that America could do was to economically destroy the nation. Yes: the most egregious part of the story is that the decline of Haiti’s wealth was an entirely American proposition, beginning in America’s greatest superstore—the slave market.

Perhaps the best way to contextualize the contemporary Black tradition of faith is to realize that, for the most part, the new Black residents of America did not convert to Christianity or Islam; Christianity and Islam converted to African America, and morphed into new expressions of spirituality that combined African rituals, Christian theology, Muslim doctrine, and the essential precepts of survival and resistance.

Everyone knows that Harriet Tubman had a thing against slavery, but most people don’t know that during her time as a Civil War scout and nurse, she freed even more slaves than she did as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. On June 2, 1863, Tubman became the first woman—Black or white—to lead a U.S. military operation, directing an armed assault during the Combahee Ferry Raid. Leaving with 150 Black soldiers from Beaufort, South Carolina, Tubman provided reconnaissance and helped three gunboats dodge Confederate mines. Once they reached their destination, the men eased off the boats and attacked the Heyward, Middleton, and Lowndes plantations, three of the South’s largest agricultural slave camps. They burned the rice plantations to the ground and filled the Union steamboats with more than seven hundred instantly freed bondsmen. Not one soldier was lost.

In 1865, Saxton’s officials lined up the formerly enslaved, many of whom had set up tents and temporary shacks at McLeod’s They handed each of the heads of the families a piece of paper, and explained that the deeds they just received meant they now owned the plantations they had spent their lives building for free. Some rejoiced, while others collapsed in tears. One of the men—America’s foremost expert in Sea Island cotton—broke into song. For the first time in his life, William “Hardtime” Dawson had a home of his own. But this joy did not last. 

On April 15, 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, leaving Confederate sympathizer Andrew Johnson as president. Johnson was a Southerner, a slaveowner, and a Democrat who had been chosen for the vice presidency in the hopes of stopping the South from seceding. As a former senator of the Great State of Tennessee, Johnson repeatedly let his Democrat friends know where he stood on the issue of freedmen: “As for the Negro I am for setting him free but at the same time, I assert that this is a white man’s government,” he said in an 1864 speech, reiterating his earlier promises of “a free, intelligent white constituency, instead of a negro aristocracy” after the war. When Johnson ascended to the presidency, his first course of action was to stop that slaves-getting-land nonsense. 

As second in charge of the new Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Brigadier General Saxton refused to comply with Johnson’s orders, writing that “the faith of the Government is solemnly pledged to these people who have been faithful to it and we have no right now to dispossess them of their lands.”

Johnson fired him.

 

If Ida B. Wells had one gift, it was that she was born with what scientists have now identified as the genetic marker IDGAF. Wells’s uncompromising stance, combined with her inability to accept even the slightest hint of racism and discrimination, is what made her one of the fiercest truth-tellers in the history of America. With her relentless reporting and unwavering advocacy, she became the undisputed leader of the anti-lynching movement. She didn’t just call out white violence, either; Wells also fought for women’s suffrage, children’s rights, and labor reform. She called for peace and armed self-defense. She was Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. And Oprah. And Beyoncé. Using a combination of statistical data, investigative techniques, and fearless truth-telling, she revolutionized journalism, and during her time, she was arguably the most famous Black woman in America, period.

Over time, it became clear that the government was trying to frame everyone in the Black Panthers’ ranks. Panther cofounder Huey Newton faced four trials for two different murders. His 1968 conviction for killing a police officer would be overturned, and he would be acquitted of killing a white woman in 1974. Officials charged Panther cofounder Bobby Seale with murder because he happened to be in town for a few hours when the death took place. Seale would beat the case, but not before he faced conspiracy charges for organizing an anti-war protest in 1968. Seale was found not guilty, but served four years in prison for contempt of court. The conviction was later reversed. During his murder trial in 1969, Seale was bound and gagged. The offenses were so egregious that a young law student organized law school students to document violations of Seale’s civil liberties. That student? None other than Hillary Clinton.