by Caroline Randall Williams | June 2020
I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument. Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Confederate Monuments] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Slavery] [Systemic Racism] [Accountability]
Resource Links Tagged with "Slavery"
Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears; America’s Forgotten Migration – the Journeys of a Million African-Americans from the Tobacco South to the Cotton South
by Edward Ball | NOVEMBER 2015
“My grandfather went to the folks who had owned our family and asked, ‘Do you have any documentation about our history during the slave days? We would like to see it, if possible.’ The man at the door, who I have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, ‘Sure, we’ll give it to you.’ “The man went into his house and came back out with some papers in his hands. Now, whether the papers were trivial or actual plantation records, who knows? But he stood in the door, in front of my grandfather, and lit a match to the papers. ‘You want your history?’ he said. ‘Here it is.’ Watching the things burn. ‘Take the ashes and get off my land.’ “The intent was to keep that history buried,” McQuinn says today. “And I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically.”
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Slavery] [History] [Silencing POC] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [White Privilege]
The Invention of the Police, Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.
by Jill Lepore | July 2020
In Philadelphia, in 1705, the governor expressed the view that the militia could make the city safer than the watch, but militias weren’t supposed to police the king’s subjects; they were supposed to serve the common defense—waging wars against the French, fighting Native peoples who were trying to hold on to their lands, or suppressing slave rebellions. The government of slavery was not a rule of law. It was a rule of police. In 1661, the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law; revised in 1688, it decreed that “Negroes and other Slaves” were “wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws . . . of our Nations,” and devised, instead, a special set of rules “for the good Regulating and Ordering of them.” Virginia adopted similar measures, known as slave codes, in 1680.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Slavery] [History] [Policing] [Police Shootings] [Systemic Racism] [Black Lives Matter] [White Supremacy] [Prison System] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Politics]
A Conversation about Truth and Reconciliation in the US
by Ezra Klein | July 2020
What would it take for America to heal? To be the country it claims to be? This is the question that animates Bryan Stevenson’s career. Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a clinical professor at the New York University School of Law, a MacArthur “genius,” and the author of the remarkable book Just Mercy — which was recently turned into a feature film where Stevenson was played by Michael B. Jordan.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Confederate Monuments] [Role Model] [Advocacy] [Prison System] [History] [Denial] [White Blindness] [Slavery] [Civil War] [Economics] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism]
How Slaveholders in the Caribbean Maintained Control The whip was not the only tool in their arsenal: slaveholders were masters of manipulation too.
by Christer Petley | November 2018
As elsewhere in the Americas, the right of masters in Jamaica to punish slaves was enshrined in law, and the violence that sustained slavery went far beyond whipping. Punishments could include amputation, disfiguring, branding and more. … Privileging some enslaved people above others was another effective means of sowing discord. Slaveholders encouraged complex social hierarchies on the plantations that amounted to something like a system of ‘class’. At the top of plantation slave communities in the sugar colonies of the Caribbean were skilled men, trained up at the behest of white managers to become sugar boilers, blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, masons and drivers. Such men were, in general, materially better-off than field slaves (most of whom were women), and they tended to live longer.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [Slavery] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Silencing POC] [Systemic Racism] [Economics] [Denial]
White Supremacy Shaped American Christianity, Researcher Says
by Carol Kuruvilla | July 2020
It wouldn’t be hard for many white Christians to find examples of white supremacy’s claims on their own family’s trees, Jones said. But white Christians’ image of themselves and their religion has been warped by what Jones calls “white-supremacy-induced amnesia.” Jones wrestles with that amnesia in his new book, “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.” He argues that white Christians ― from evangelicals in the South to mainline Protestants in the Midwest to Catholics in the Northeast ― weren’t just complacent onlookers while political leaders debated what to do about slavery, segregation and discrimination. White supremacist theology played a key role in shaping the American church from the very beginning, influencing not just the way denominations formed but also white Christians’ theology about salvation itself.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Faith-Based/Spiritual] [History] [Slavery] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Blindness] [White Privilege] [Police Shootings] [Accountability] [Politics]
GREAT NEGRO PLOT OF 1741: THE RUMORS AND LIES THAT LED TO EXECUTION OF OVER 30 BLACK AMERICANS IN NEW YORK CITY
by Blackthen | August 2020
The details of the events that took place in New York City in the spring and summer of 1741 are recorded in numerous historic and later accounts, many of which contain contradictory information. According to nearly all accounts, a fire on March 18, 1741, at Fort George—then Lieutenant Governor George Clarke’s home—was the first in a series of fires in the city that may or may not have been set by slaves. The fires occurred at regular intervals and then with increased frequency until April 6, when four fires were set in a single day. Rumors raced across the city when a witness claimed to have seen a black man, identified as a slave named Cuffee, running from the scene of one of the fires.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [History] [Slavery] [Accountability] [Systemic Racism] [Policing] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [White Blindness] [Silencing POC] [Assumptions]
William Penn Kept Enslaved People. These are Some of Their Names. An Important Piece of Pennsylvania’s Founder’s Legacy.
by Michaela Winberg | August 2020
Penn, though a pacifist Quaker, kept several Black enslaved people during his time overseeing his colony — even as the practice grew increasingly unpopular among Pennsylvanians. The records that exist aren’t totally clear, but it seems as if Penn enslaved roughly 12 people at his Pennsbury Manor estate, which was located in what is now the Philly suburbs. These people were purchased off the first slave ship known to have arrived in Philadelphia, and were of African and Carribean descent.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [History] [Slavery] [Indigenous] [Quaker] [Systemic Racism] [Economics] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Denial] [Accountability]
Letter to My Son; “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.”
by Ta-Nehisi Coates | July 2015
Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history. …When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely being aspirational. At the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term people to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. As for now, it must be said that the elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice-cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [History] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [-ing While Black] [Policing] [White Blindness] [Slavery]
How the Myth of a Liberal North Erases a Long History of White Violence
by Christy Clark-Pujara and Anna-Lisa Cox| August 2020
Anti-black racism has terrorized African Americans throughout the nation’s history, regardless of where in the country they lived. There is a toxic myth that encourages white people in the North to see themselves as free from racism and erases African Americans from the pre-Civil War North, where they are still being told that they don’t belong. What Langston experienced was not the massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 or Rosewood, Florida, in 1923—this was Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1841, 20 years before the Civil War broke out. This was the third such racist attack against African Americans in Cincinnati in 12 years. This article was originally published as the first of a five-part series titled “Black Life in Two Pandemics: Histories of Violence” and provides link to view all parts.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [History] [Myths] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Slavery] [White Privilege] [Silencing POC] [Denial]
Whites Only: SURJ And The Caucasian Invasion of Racial Justice Spaces
by DiDi Delgago | April 2017
Anti-racism work with a white lens is inherently flawed. White-led anti-racism groups have existed for hundreds of years, and they’ve often been problematic, counterproductive, and just fucking weird since their inception. Take, for instance, the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society of 1833, which believed that slave owners were missing out on a business opportunity by not putting slaves on the payroll. They argued that paying slaves “would make them doubly valuable to [their] masters,” because paid laborers are more motivated than forced laborers. That’s the whitest thing I’ve ever heard, and I own two Hanson records. I can think of a thousand better reasons not to own a person aside from increased productivity… I suspect many white people combatting racism have been so busy checking their privilege that they’ve forgotten to check their egos. It seemed that one chapter finally got it right, and they did so by realizing they got it wrong.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [Anti-Racism] [White Privilege] [Slavery] [History] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Supremacy] [Individual Change] [Reparations] [Black Lives Matter] [Accountability]
The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black
by Ijeoma Oluo | April 2017
And with that, the anger that I had toward her began to melt away. Dolezal is simply a white woman who cannot help but center herself in all that she does—including her fight for racial justice. And if racial justice doesn’t center her, she will redefine race itself in order to make that happen. It is a bit extreme, but it is in no way new for white people to take what they want from other cultures in the name of love and respect, while distorting or discarding the remainder of that culture for their comfort. What else is National Geographic but a long history of this practice. Maybe now that I’ve seen the unoriginality of it all, even with my sister’s name that she has claimed as her own, she will haunt me no more and simply blend into the rest of white supremacy that I battle every day.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Anti-Racism] [Slavery] [Role Model] [White Privilege] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Fragility/Tears] [Implicit Racism]
Black Codes, Slave Patrols and Policing Today
fearing the rise of the abolition movement in the North, slaveholders throughout the South strengthened laws governing slaves and free people of color, known as “black codes.” The black codes governed enslaved people as well as four categories of free people. By putting both into one legal category, whites divided the population along racial lines, not along categories of free and unfree.
Should the U.S. Provide Reparations for Slavery and Jim Crow?
by Carlton Mark Waterhouse | May 2016
The overwhelming majority of academics studying the issue have supported the calls for compensating black Americans for the centuries of chattel slavery and the 100 years of lynching, mob violence and open exclusion from public and private benefits like housing, health care, voting, political office and education that occurred during the Jim Crow era.
TAGS: [2010’s] [History] [Reparations] [Individual Change] [Strategies] [Slavery]
Things I Didn’t Know
by James Mulholland | May 2019
Nine years ago, I began to slowly awaken to my racial prejudices and white privilege. It was a rude awakening. During the past three years, I’ve blogged about that journey from racial ignorance. Recently, someone asked me what have been the biggest surprises along the way. What do I know now that I didn’t know before? What follows is a short list of some of my bigger epiphanies and the posts where I shared these revelations.
- I didn’t know scholars and sociologists believe nearly 100% of enslaved women were sexually assaulted. I didn’t know how much the free access of white men to black bodies was part of white culture. Some sociologists estimate 50% of all children of slaves had a white father. This kind of sexual aggression continued throughout Jim Crow. I didn’t know the conviction of a white man for raping a black woman was extremely rare before 1960. When Rape Was Legal.
- I didn’t know that – in some ways – the years after the end of slavery were worse than during slavery. I didn’t know vagrancy laws allowed white people to “arrest and convict” nearly any black person and enslave them. Thousands of black families were torn apart as fathers were sent off to “serve their time” in factories and on farms. The death rate at these prison camps was as high as 50%, meaning that the penalty for “vagrancy” in the south was often death. Worse Than Slavery.
TAGS: [Slavery] [Racial Terrorism] [White Privilege] [History] [White Blindness] [2010’s]
Why Do People Believe Myths about the Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks and Monuments Are Wrong
by James W. Loewen | July 2015
“As soon as the Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done and why. The resulting mythology took hold of the nation a generation later and persists—which is why a presidential candidate can suggest, as Michele Bachmann did in 2011, that slavery was somehow pro-family and why the public, per the Pew Research Center, believes that the war was fought mainly over states’ rights.”
TAGS: [Assumptions] [History] [Confederate Monuments] [White Supremacy] [Civil War] [Slavery] [2010’s] [Myths]
A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing
by Victor E. Kappeler, Ph.D. | January 2014
The institution of slavery and the control of minorities, however, were two of the more formidable historic features of American society shaping early policing. Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities. For example, New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans (National Constable Association, 1995), the St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city, and many southern police departments began as slave patrols. In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Slavery] [History] [Policing] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [Systemic Racism]
A Long History of Racial Preferences – for Whites
by Larry Adelman, California Newsreel | Month Unknown 2003
Many middle-class white people, especially those of us who grew up in the suburbs, like to think that we got to where we are today by virtue of our merit – hard work, intelligence, pluck, and maybe a little luck. And while we may be sympathetic to the plight of others, we close down when we hear the words “affirmative action” or “racial preferences.” We worked hard, we made it on our own, the thinking goes, why don’t ‘they’? After all, it’s been almost 40 years now since the Civil Rights Act was passed. What we don’t readily acknowledge is that racial preferences have a long, institutional history in this country – a white history. Here are a few ways in which government programs and practices have channeled wealth and opportunities to white people at the expense of others.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2000’s] [Slavery] [White Privilege] [History] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [Colorblindness] [Racial Covenants]
KING: Micah Johnson is the Making of America’s Own Racist Creation
by Shaun King | July 2016
Somehow, the United States of America wants to have all of the ingredients for murder and mayhem, cook it at 500 degrees for a few years, and be shocked when what comes out on the other end isn’t sweet peace and colorful rainbows. That’s not how recipes work. Building a harmonious society is no different.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [Slavery] [History] [Policing] [Denial] [Accountability] [Police Shootings] [Black Lives Matter]
Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome and Intergenerational Trauma: Slavery is like a Curse Passing through the DNA of Black People
by David Lowe | June 2016
In a society in denial, racism is proclaimed dead and an historical phenomenon. Yet it is very much alive, as manifested in the behavior of Black folk. In her book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, Dr. Joy DeGruy discusses the condition that serves as the title of her book in a video.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Slavery] [White Supremacy] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Black Lives Matter]
Why Do People Believe Myths about the Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks and Monuments are Wrong
by James W. Loewen | July 2015
The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about. We are still digging ourselves out from under the misinformation they spread, which has manifested in our public monuments and our history books. With our monuments lying about secession, our textbooks obfuscating what the Confederacy was about, and our Army honoring Southern generals, no wonder so many Americans supported the Confederacy until recently.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [Myths] [Confederate Monuments] [Civil War] [Slavery] [History] [White Supremacy]
‘Irish slaves’: Historian destroys racist myth conservatives love to share on Facebook
by Travis Gettys | April 2016
White supremacists have been promoting the myth that the first slaves brought to the Americas were Irish, not African — but a historian says there’s simply no evidence to back their racist claims.
Liam Hogan, a research librarian at the Limerick City Library, set about debunking the myth after spotting a widely shared Global Research article in 2013 and realized its potential for misinformation, reported Hatewatch.
TAGS: [Myths] [Assumptions] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [Slavery] [History]
U.S. Owes Black People Reparations for a History of ‘Racial Terrorism,’ Says U.N. Panel
by Ishaan Tharoor | September 2016
The history of slavery in the United States justifies reparations for African Americans, argues a recent report by a U.N.-affiliated group based in Geneva. This conclusion was part of a study by the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, a body that reports to the international organization’s High Commissioner on Human Rights. The group of experts, which includes leading human rights lawyers from around the world, presented its findings to the United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday, pointing to the continuing link between present injustices and the dark chapters of American history. “In particular, the legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remains a serious challenge, as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent,” the report stated. “Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching.”
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Reparations] [Slavery] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Policing] [Accountability] [White Supremacy]
White Supremacy and Colonization
This list documents white supremist and colonizing behavior in the US. As we start to see the extent and insidious nature of this behavior we can begin to realize the importance of doing things differently. This awareness will help us move toward decentering the negative white behavior and instead center the resilience, survival and strength of people of color.
More Resources
Introduction
Definitions
Facts
Maps
Assessment Tools
History
Appropriation / Aggression
White Privilege / Supremacy
Public Displays
Performance Art
Workshops
Activist Resources
Dear White People
Being Allies
Reparations
Spiritual Foundations
Dear White People
Being Allies
Reparations
Spiritual Foundations
Public Displays
Performance Art
Workshops
Activist Resources
Assessment Tools
History
Appropriation / Aggression
White Privilege / Supremacy
Introduction
Definitions
Facts
Maps
Dear White People
Being Allies
Reparations
Spiritual Foundations
Public Displays
Performance Art
Workshops
Activist Resources
Assessment Tools
History
Appropriation / Aggression
White Privilege / Supremacy
Introduction
Definitions
Facts