It’s Time To Unlearn Colonial American Racism

If you want to begin unlearning the white supremacist’s version of American history, read Black AF History: An Un-Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot. This is an honest, enlightening, and extraordinarily fascinating history of America’s racist past and present. Harriot also placed anecdotes about his life growing up black in America in his book, and his clever wit comes through in every page.

The history of slavery and racism in America is not often taught correctly because the masters are the ones who wrote the history books, and the horrors of slavery are glossed over. Certain states like Florida would even like to eliminate history curriculum about slavery. Conservative organizations that make “educational” content like PragerU even teach children that slavery wasn’t that bad, and it’s alright now because it’s over.

Many people might be surprised to learn that the slave-masters gave enslaved people a version of the Bible which omitted verses about freedom and emphasized verses about servitude and racial superiority. Enslaved people weren’t allowed to speak their native tongues or practice their cultures, and they could only practice the religion of their masters—Christianity or Catholicism.

Slavery in America is a chapter in American history, and Harriot describes it as this fantasy of the black folk just teleporting across the ocean and to the cotton fields! But the genocide of Africans who did not even make it on to the ships, the deaths on board, the “conditioning camps” to break the fighting spirit of the enslaved, the rebellions, and the insidious laws preventing black folk from living life even after Emancipation, were washed away in the textbooks—they were whitewashed. Even the way the American Civil War is taught is whitewashed! The story goes that the Confederacy wanted to secede to preserve “state’s rights,” but those “rights” were owning and trading slaves.

Photo via Pixabay.

Harriot threw in many little tidbits of information that helped to bring the entire picture together as well, such as how after Emancipation states had laws which prohibited black folk from learning a trade unless a white man approved, and they were prohibited from foraging for wild-growing food. Escaped slaves lived hiding in the woods for years and helped the underground railroad and slave rebellions. The slavers believed that the enslaved who wished for freedom suffered from a mental disease for wanting freedom, they called it Drapetomania! And after Emancipation, black folk were much more likely to be convicted of a crime and sent to prison, where they were essentially slaves again. Slavery never ended, it just changed forms; Harriot explains that they are free…ish.

Stories of lynchings in Black AF highlight the pervasive racism of American law, and I happened to finish the book a few days before the state-sanctioned lynchings of two innocent black men.

On September 20, 2024, South Carolina executed a man named Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah. He was convicted of murdering a store clerk in 1997, and the man who testified against him admitted to falsifying his testimony decade ago. But the prosecutor went ahead with the execution.

Then, on September 24, 2024, Marcellus “Khalifa” Williams was executed in Missouri after activists got more than a million signatures and people rallied at the governor’s office to stop the execution. He was sentenced to death in 2001 for the murder of a woman in 1998, but DNA evidence proves that he did not commit the murder. The victim’s family even stated that they didn’t want him executed. In August 2024, he accepted a plea deal which took the death penalty off the table, but the next month the governor went through with it.

The country watched as Williams was killed in a state-sanctioned lynching, but many didn’t even learn about the killing of Divine until after the fact. This comes after several literal, extrajudicial lynchings of black men took place in America. We live in a country where police kneel on people’s necks until they suffocate and civilians form lynch-mobs and get away with it. They killed Javion Magee, a 21-year-old from Illinois, as he was driving through North Carolina, for no apparent reason other than vitriolic hatred. He was found deceased and seated at the base of a tree with a rope around his neck in North Carolina on September 11. The police told the family he committed suicide.

Photo via Pixabay.

While reading Black AF I was reminded of a moving slam poem I heard years ago by a poet who performs under the name FreeQuency. They’re an American-Kenyan author and poet, and they won the Women of the World Poetry Slam in 2018 with their riveting performances called “The Gospel of Colonization” and “Dear White People.”

When black folk sing of the injustices they have experienced, we must listen. In “The Gospel of Colonization” FreeQuency asserts that the colonizers went to Africa “claiming grace, but belting gospels of genocide,” and used “their god” to justify colonizing Africa and enslaving millions. The Bible was used as a weapon, and white-Jesus was used to justify the hierarchy of racial superiority.

FreeQuency recalls an old saying that “when the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed, and when we opened them, they had the land, and we had the Bible.”

Colonizers have hidden the extent of their oppression for centuries, now is the time for people to unlearn the racism and realize what the history books never mentioned.