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Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

Book by Michael Harriot · 3 quotes · American History, Oppression, Slavery In America

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Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America Quotes

“Unlike the poor English, Irish, and native indentured servants, the African imports and their children were now considered property.... By creating a legally binding, race-based, intergenerational, perpetually oppressed class of human beings, Virginia revealed that all that nonsense in the colony's first charter about God, liberty, and the "true religion" was a farce. Slavery was an American idea, not a product of the time. No law was passed in England that legalized slavery. France's Code noir was similar, but it would come about two decades after Virginia's declaration. From its inception, America was always a pyramid scheme where the wealthy benefited from the labor of the poor.”

“Nearly every state’s laws governing the enslaved were based, in part, on the Negro Act of 1740, proving that the uniquely American version of human subjugation was never just a thoughtless experiment. It was ingrained in the fabric of the America. It was intentional: a color-coded, never-ending, legally protected, constitutionally enshrined system of human trafficking that extorted labor, intellectual property, and talent in the most brutal way imaginable. It was born out of fear and white supremacy.”

“Through a complex combination of whitewashing, guilt, and an intentional recasting of history that absolves them of their hatred, our historical translators have painted a sanitized, impressionist portrait of a struggle for Black liberation that was eventually fulfilled by American’s unwavering commitment to justice and equality. Out of whole cloth, they managed to fabricate a fantastic ahistorical myth that somehow became truth. They remember a socially conservative, respectable campaign of racial reconciliation, not a movement of anti-establishment revolutionaries. And for their sake, the doctrine of nonviolent resistance was eventually reduced to simple ‘nonviolence.’ They never speak of the ‘resisting.”