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Heather McGhee Biography

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“Today, as in colonial Virginia, the wealthy and powerful maintain an unequal society with the complicity of white people who share color with them but class with almost everybody else.... Though my view of Bacon's Rebellion has changed over the years, I keep coming back to it. There's something vexingly American in the story, in the violence and in the hope--and in the lengths that the powerful will go to try to stop the most natural yearnings of all, for human connection and for freedom.”

AmericaWealthRaceClassPovertyUnited StatesInequalityDivisionRace RelationsBacon S Rebellion
Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
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“In 1680, four years after the [Bacon] rebellion, Virginia passed the Law for Preventing Negro Insurrections. It restricted the movement of enslaved people outside plantations; anyone found without a pass would be tortured with twenty lashes "well laid on" before being returned. At a time when white servants and African slaves often worked side by side, the hand of the law reached in to divide them. Prison time awaited "English, and other white men and women intermarrying with negros or mulattos." Already any indentured white servant caught running away with an enslaved African person was liable for their entire lost term of service, meaning that the servant risked becoming permanently unfree. The law separated the members of the lowest class by color and lifted one higher than the other. The goal, as it has been ever since, was to offer just enough racial privileges for white workers to identify with their color instead of their class. The Virginia legislature ended the penalties imposed on rebels for the insurrection of 1676, but only the white ones, removing a source of lingering solidarity among them.”

LawRaceClassSlaveryDivisionAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsLawsWhites
Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
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“We've got to get on the same page before we can turn it. We've tried a do-it-yourself approach to writing the racial narrative about America, but the forces selling denial, ignorance, and projection have succeeded in robbing us of our own shared history--both the pain and the resilience. It's time to tell the truth, with a nationwide process that enrolls all of us in setting the facts straight so that we can move forward with a new story, together.”

AmericaRacismRacial JusticeRace Relations In AmericaRacial Equity
Book:The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
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