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A review by wyntrchylde
Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot
5.0
Black AF History
Author: Michael Harriot
Publisher: Dey St., William Morrow, Harper Collins
Publishing Date: 2023
Pgs: 426
=======================================
REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Genre:
History
Race Relations
America
Non-Fiction
Why this book:
I had to return to this book because I ran out of time on it and had to return it to the library previously. Thought provoking. Witty.
_________________________________________
The Page 50 Test:
√ ◄ - good to go.
Ω ◄ - struggle to finish this.
$[̲̅$̲̅(̲̅ιοο̲̅)̲̅$̲̅] ◄ - this is money.
‼ ◄ - better than expected
(≖_≖ ) ◄ - side eyeing this
( • )( • ) ◄ - this brings no honor to the empire
❚█══█❚ ◄ - this requires heavy lifting
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ◄ - IDK. We’ll see
(-(-_(-_-)_-)-) ◄ - too many voices, too crowded, no story, just talking
……
The Page 100 Test:
√ ◄ - good to go.
Ω ◄ - struggle to finish this.
‼ ◄ - better than expected
(≖_≖ ) ◄ - side eyeing this
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ◄ - IDK. We’ll see
……
The Feel:
After Harriot tell us that all historians bend the story to their own path, I forgot to look at his work with the same jaundiced eye. Critical thinking means critical thinking.
A vibrant portrait of American history from a perspective too long missing from the wider…whiter narrative.
Favorite Character:
Esteban nee Mustafa Azemmouri is an incredible character who is given extremely short shrift by White history. He was with Cabeza de Vaca. He is probably the only reason that de Vaca survived his Gulf coast excursion. And for his trouble, Azemmouri was promptly reinslaved when they reached Mexico City. I hope the folkloric story of his having First People help him fake his death so he could live free in the Southwest is a true story.
Least Favorite Character:
Argall and Smith were leeches on the face of humanity…possibly the ass of humanity.
Hoover was a racist SOB. He may not have pulled the trigger, but he was intimately involved in the deaths of Malcolm, and too many others. This hasn't tied him to Martin's death, yet, but it wouldn't surprise me. But once you get beyond Martin and Malcolm, Hoover is implicated in so much more. He was an evil sonuvabitch, bathed in the blood of generations.
Favorite Scene:
In the introduction when he talks about Reagan's election and having planned his family's escape to Canada for election night because he didn't understand that the adults were being sarcastic when they said that they'd have to leave or risk being sent back to the fields. And his expanding his knowledge in the “middle room”. Wish I would've had a middle room growing up.
When John Smith takes a nap on a bag of gunpowder and catches himself on fire, and by himself I mean his genitals. And with healthcare being what it was in the early 1600s, you can just imagine what that looked like when he recovered. But again, left out of the history books that we ALL read and only mentioned by historians willing to counter and challenge the Heroic Anglo Narrative.
Favorite Quote:
“That story of America is a fantastical, overwrought, and fictive tale. It is a fantasy where Christopher Columbus discovered a land that he never set foot in. It is the story of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower building a new nation. It is George Washington’s cherry tree and Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin. It is the story of slaves who spontaneously teleported themselves here with nothing but strong backs and a brainful of negro spirituals. It is Betsy Ross’s sewing kit and paul Revere’s horse and Thomas Jefferson’s pen and Benjamin Franklin’s eyeglasses and George Washington’s teeth and liberty and justice for all. And it is a history predicated on lies.” That is a powerful thesis statement for this book. Followed by “History can never be objective or unbiased because, no matter how hard the storytellers may try, the perception of reality prejudices all stories.”
Pueblo Indians describing their first encounter with European colonizers: “The first white man our people saw was a black man.”
“Whiteness is fear.” Damn.
On not letting go of the past, “…is the dread of staring truth and reality in the face, and finding out that they are inadequate. It is fear.” The book rightly points this out, but I feel that fear is also the chasing of a youth that is gone. Not many of us are ready to admit that we’re an old fat guy or an old fat girl, insert your own adjectives and you get the idea. But expand it to a cultural level, and it fits like a glove. Harriot is a genius.
In the span of two pages, Harriott dropped thought provoking quotes, one from W.E.B. DuBois and one of his own:
[DuBois] “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”
[Harriott] “Perhaps the first step toward liberation begins with the dismantling of the idea that freedom is something that white people can give someone.”
Favorite Concept:
History should make you think. History should be the full range of emotions. If it is a case of the rah-rah-rahs and salute to the flag, then it isn’t history, you’ve got yourself a case of propaganda. If it’s all doom and gloom, and the evil that men do, it’s the same. History is a mix. Too often, the Heroic Anglo Narrative is pushed as the only story, to the degree that many today consider it an article of faith, almost a religion.
Overused Phrase/Concept:
The Heroic Anglo Narrative is going to be referred to a lot in this. It will be shortened to HAN whenever I feel like giving it a shorter shrift.
Hmm Moments:
White people should worry. The same foundational laws that keep the Black man down and hold the supremacists up, have a codicil that they should be more aware of. Sure they, The Powers That Be, will claim that it’s an old law and not necessarily active or enforceable as we live in an era in which abortion laws from the 1800s have become law of the land again in many states. But I digress. The “should worry” part comes from the lines, repeated in many state constitutions, “a citizen shall be any free white person…of good character.”
WTF Moments/RUFKM Moments:
Really not freaking cool his mom not backing him on the coat thing. Really, really messed up. And heartbreaking.
The Jamestown settlers in their 4th winter went cannibal. There is evidence. That sure is kept out of the Heroic Anglo Narrative.
Reconstruction was a joke. What was done to African Americans in that era was horrifying, and continued way beyond that era. Lynchings aren’t as much a part of the past as “civilized” Americans like to act like it is.
The Sigh:
James Madison, Patrick Henry, and George Mason, founding fathers and founding father adjacent, all have their fingers in the white supremacist pie that is the Constitution. The important rights were universal and God-given. But Virginia said no. Madison thought that rights were inherent in the Constitution as written. While Virginia disagreed. And thus, the Bill of Rights was born.Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, predating the Bill of Rights and serving as a model. Virginia wanted something to assuage their worries that the federal army could arm Black soldiers or even worse free the slaves. “In this state there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?” The before said by Patrick Henry in the Virginia debate on ratification of the Constitution. Madison quelled those fears by adapting George mason’s writings in the Virginia constitution to form the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the rights of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The Right to Bear Arms in America is directly related to slaveholders being able to keep their slaves and fight the government to keep them.
Suspension of Disbelief:
Harriot’s acerbic wit got me. I just looked up whether the Taino People were genuinely allergic to White people. SMH. THe diseases the Whites brought certainly tore through the population and destroyed the Taino, but they weren’t “allergic” in the normal sense.
Apropos of Nothing and Everything:
Stone Mountain, the Confederate Mount Rushmore in Georgia, opened on the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth. The United Daughters of the Confederacy who funded it had actually run out of money, but when the Civil Rights movement and Desegregation began moving through the South, suddenly, they had ample donations. America is an example of the politics of “I’ll show you” after all.
Confirmation Bias:
Can't believe what France and the U.S. did to Haiti. And the aftermath of them requiring Haiti to pay France back for the slaves who freed themselves in the Haitian Revolution still has ongoing repercussions in modern Haiti. …Actually, yeah, I can believe it.
Your ~ism is Showing:
So, decades before Boston did it, the Pineville Police Department was formed in South Carolina to hunt escaped and renegade slaves. So the first police departments were slave hunting militias.
Juxtaposition:
Argall and the other Jamestown settlers were lucky that Wahunseneca wasn’t as much of a barbarian as they were. If he had acted towards Jamestown in the same way that they did towards the native settlements in the area, burn them down if you can’t conquer them, history would’ve been extremely different.
Questions and Answers:
Why would a country send aristocrats without carpenters, miners, fishermen, hunters, etc to a new world with no support system? Arrogance. They were just going to show up and it was going to be just like home. Sounds very American aristocracy today. Apparently, this was lamented in John Smith’s diaries, but that part gets left out of the HAN too.
The Unexpected:
The Ku Klux Klan started as a bunch of frat boys at Washington and Lee College during Robert E. Lee’s reign as chancellor, post-Civil War. Both fitting and shocking. The lay person like me probably always saw them as an agrarian tumor-like growth based on racism and anger as opposed to frat boy stupidity and faux ritual, “thank you sir, may I have another”, but it fits. Who would have time to go riding through the woods committing evil in the name or white supremacy, the farmer who has to get up in the morning and work his ass off, or the college frat boy and his office working dad, who has specific targets in mind for their night rides. The idea dovetails in a way that makes way more sense than the classic image. And hiding the identity too. Today it’s the police chief and mayor who would be hiding…then too apparently.
Forgotten Lesson/Forgotten Common Sense:
1616, the first stolen people were stolen again from the Spanish captain who enslaved them in what is today Angola and transported them across the ocean. Those first slaves were the catalyst that saved Jamestown. With no farming skills among the aristocrats and rumors back in England of cannibal ways in the starving times scaring off potential emigres, which came every winter or when a supply ship was late, the slaves saved them with an influx of farming skills and forced labor, at the point of a whip and at peril of life.
_________________________________________
Conclusions I’ve Drawn:
African Americans shouldn’t trust Caucasian Americans. White people haven’t done anything but perpetuate the racism born and bred in the South and enraged by their defeat in the Civil War. Horrors. NIghtmares. Injustice. No justice, no peace, indeed.
Author: Michael Harriot
Publisher: Dey St., William Morrow, Harper Collins
Publishing Date: 2023
Pgs: 426
=======================================
REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Genre:
History
Race Relations
America
Non-Fiction
Why this book:
I had to return to this book because I ran out of time on it and had to return it to the library previously. Thought provoking. Witty.
_________________________________________
The Page 50 Test:
√ ◄ - good to go.
Ω ◄ - struggle to finish this.
$[̲̅$̲̅(̲̅ιοο̲̅)̲̅$̲̅] ◄ - this is money.
‼ ◄ - better than expected
(≖_≖ ) ◄ - side eyeing this
( • )( • ) ◄ - this brings no honor to the empire
❚█══█❚ ◄ - this requires heavy lifting
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ◄ - IDK. We’ll see
(-(-_(-_-)_-)-) ◄ - too many voices, too crowded, no story, just talking
……
The Page 100 Test:
√ ◄ - good to go.
Ω ◄ - struggle to finish this.
‼ ◄ - better than expected
(≖_≖ ) ◄ - side eyeing this
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ◄ - IDK. We’ll see
……
The Feel:
After Harriot tell us that all historians bend the story to their own path, I forgot to look at his work with the same jaundiced eye. Critical thinking means critical thinking.
A vibrant portrait of American history from a perspective too long missing from the wider…whiter narrative.
Favorite Character:
Esteban nee Mustafa Azemmouri is an incredible character who is given extremely short shrift by White history. He was with Cabeza de Vaca. He is probably the only reason that de Vaca survived his Gulf coast excursion. And for his trouble, Azemmouri was promptly reinslaved when they reached Mexico City. I hope the folkloric story of his having First People help him fake his death so he could live free in the Southwest is a true story.
Least Favorite Character:
Argall and Smith were leeches on the face of humanity…possibly the ass of humanity.
Hoover was a racist SOB. He may not have pulled the trigger, but he was intimately involved in the deaths of Malcolm, and too many others. This hasn't tied him to Martin's death, yet, but it wouldn't surprise me. But once you get beyond Martin and Malcolm, Hoover is implicated in so much more. He was an evil sonuvabitch, bathed in the blood of generations.
Favorite Scene:
In the introduction when he talks about Reagan's election and having planned his family's escape to Canada for election night because he didn't understand that the adults were being sarcastic when they said that they'd have to leave or risk being sent back to the fields. And his expanding his knowledge in the “middle room”. Wish I would've had a middle room growing up.
When John Smith takes a nap on a bag of gunpowder and catches himself on fire, and by himself I mean his genitals. And with healthcare being what it was in the early 1600s, you can just imagine what that looked like when he recovered. But again, left out of the history books that we ALL read and only mentioned by historians willing to counter and challenge the Heroic Anglo Narrative.
Favorite Quote:
“That story of America is a fantastical, overwrought, and fictive tale. It is a fantasy where Christopher Columbus discovered a land that he never set foot in. It is the story of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower building a new nation. It is George Washington’s cherry tree and Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin. It is the story of slaves who spontaneously teleported themselves here with nothing but strong backs and a brainful of negro spirituals. It is Betsy Ross’s sewing kit and paul Revere’s horse and Thomas Jefferson’s pen and Benjamin Franklin’s eyeglasses and George Washington’s teeth and liberty and justice for all. And it is a history predicated on lies.” That is a powerful thesis statement for this book. Followed by “History can never be objective or unbiased because, no matter how hard the storytellers may try, the perception of reality prejudices all stories.”
Pueblo Indians describing their first encounter with European colonizers: “The first white man our people saw was a black man.”
“Whiteness is fear.” Damn.
On not letting go of the past, “…is the dread of staring truth and reality in the face, and finding out that they are inadequate. It is fear.” The book rightly points this out, but I feel that fear is also the chasing of a youth that is gone. Not many of us are ready to admit that we’re an old fat guy or an old fat girl, insert your own adjectives and you get the idea. But expand it to a cultural level, and it fits like a glove. Harriot is a genius.
In the span of two pages, Harriott dropped thought provoking quotes, one from W.E.B. DuBois and one of his own:
[DuBois] “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”
[Harriott] “Perhaps the first step toward liberation begins with the dismantling of the idea that freedom is something that white people can give someone.”
Favorite Concept:
History should make you think. History should be the full range of emotions. If it is a case of the rah-rah-rahs and salute to the flag, then it isn’t history, you’ve got yourself a case of propaganda. If it’s all doom and gloom, and the evil that men do, it’s the same. History is a mix. Too often, the Heroic Anglo Narrative is pushed as the only story, to the degree that many today consider it an article of faith, almost a religion.
Overused Phrase/Concept:
The Heroic Anglo Narrative is going to be referred to a lot in this. It will be shortened to HAN whenever I feel like giving it a shorter shrift.
Hmm Moments:
White people should worry. The same foundational laws that keep the Black man down and hold the supremacists up, have a codicil that they should be more aware of. Sure they, The Powers That Be, will claim that it’s an old law and not necessarily active or enforceable as we live in an era in which abortion laws from the 1800s have become law of the land again in many states. But I digress. The “should worry” part comes from the lines, repeated in many state constitutions, “a citizen shall be any free white person…of good character.”
WTF Moments/RUFKM Moments:
Really not freaking cool his mom not backing him on the coat thing. Really, really messed up. And heartbreaking.
The Jamestown settlers in their 4th winter went cannibal. There is evidence. That sure is kept out of the Heroic Anglo Narrative.
Reconstruction was a joke. What was done to African Americans in that era was horrifying, and continued way beyond that era. Lynchings aren’t as much a part of the past as “civilized” Americans like to act like it is.
The Sigh:
James Madison, Patrick Henry, and George Mason, founding fathers and founding father adjacent, all have their fingers in the white supremacist pie that is the Constitution. The important rights were universal and God-given. But Virginia said no. Madison thought that rights were inherent in the Constitution as written. While Virginia disagreed. And thus, the Bill of Rights was born.Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, predating the Bill of Rights and serving as a model. Virginia wanted something to assuage their worries that the federal army could arm Black soldiers or even worse free the slaves. “In this state there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?” The before said by Patrick Henry in the Virginia debate on ratification of the Constitution. Madison quelled those fears by adapting George mason’s writings in the Virginia constitution to form the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the rights of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The Right to Bear Arms in America is directly related to slaveholders being able to keep their slaves and fight the government to keep them.
Suspension of Disbelief:
Harriot’s acerbic wit got me. I just looked up whether the Taino People were genuinely allergic to White people. SMH. THe diseases the Whites brought certainly tore through the population and destroyed the Taino, but they weren’t “allergic” in the normal sense.
Apropos of Nothing and Everything:
Stone Mountain, the Confederate Mount Rushmore in Georgia, opened on the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth. The United Daughters of the Confederacy who funded it had actually run out of money, but when the Civil Rights movement and Desegregation began moving through the South, suddenly, they had ample donations. America is an example of the politics of “I’ll show you” after all.
Confirmation Bias:
Can't believe what France and the U.S. did to Haiti. And the aftermath of them requiring Haiti to pay France back for the slaves who freed themselves in the Haitian Revolution still has ongoing repercussions in modern Haiti. …Actually, yeah, I can believe it.
Your ~ism is Showing:
So, decades before Boston did it, the Pineville Police Department was formed in South Carolina to hunt escaped and renegade slaves. So the first police departments were slave hunting militias.
Juxtaposition:
Argall and the other Jamestown settlers were lucky that Wahunseneca wasn’t as much of a barbarian as they were. If he had acted towards Jamestown in the same way that they did towards the native settlements in the area, burn them down if you can’t conquer them, history would’ve been extremely different.
Questions and Answers:
Why would a country send aristocrats without carpenters, miners, fishermen, hunters, etc to a new world with no support system? Arrogance. They were just going to show up and it was going to be just like home. Sounds very American aristocracy today. Apparently, this was lamented in John Smith’s diaries, but that part gets left out of the HAN too.
The Unexpected:
The Ku Klux Klan started as a bunch of frat boys at Washington and Lee College during Robert E. Lee’s reign as chancellor, post-Civil War. Both fitting and shocking. The lay person like me probably always saw them as an agrarian tumor-like growth based on racism and anger as opposed to frat boy stupidity and faux ritual, “thank you sir, may I have another”, but it fits. Who would have time to go riding through the woods committing evil in the name or white supremacy, the farmer who has to get up in the morning and work his ass off, or the college frat boy and his office working dad, who has specific targets in mind for their night rides. The idea dovetails in a way that makes way more sense than the classic image. And hiding the identity too. Today it’s the police chief and mayor who would be hiding…then too apparently.
Forgotten Lesson/Forgotten Common Sense:
1616, the first stolen people were stolen again from the Spanish captain who enslaved them in what is today Angola and transported them across the ocean. Those first slaves were the catalyst that saved Jamestown. With no farming skills among the aristocrats and rumors back in England of cannibal ways in the starving times scaring off potential emigres, which came every winter or when a supply ship was late, the slaves saved them with an influx of farming skills and forced labor, at the point of a whip and at peril of life.
_________________________________________
Conclusions I’ve Drawn:
African Americans shouldn’t trust Caucasian Americans. White people haven’t done anything but perpetuate the racism born and bred in the South and enraged by their defeat in the Civil War. Horrors. NIghtmares. Injustice. No justice, no peace, indeed.