Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:22):
Welcome to the latest edition of one hundred The Ed
Gordon Podcast. Today a conversation with columnist, writer, and political
commentator Michael Harriet. His latest book, Black af History, The
Unwhitewashed History of America, has landed on the New York
Times bestseller List. The book looks at American history from
(00:44):
a black perspective and offers an unvarnished and sometimes funny
and ironic look at the way American history has been told.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
So look, man, I told you off my congratulations. Did
you expect not necessarily the New York Times bestseller List,
but did you expect the kind of embrace that you've
received for the book?
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (01:12):
It was shocking to me. You know, I tend to
work without thinking of the reception. But you know how
once the work, when, how the work will be finished
and how how not how it will be received, but
how how good it will be and so. But but
I always thought that people black people, especially once they
(01:36):
if they knew about the book, uh, they would buy
the book. And if they bought the book, they will
tell other people about the book. Because I put a
lot of work into it. You know what's funny is
that so when you write one of these books, there's
a while before you record the audiobook that I recorded
the audiobook, so I would like read the audiobook during
(01:58):
the recording, and that was like, oh, that's funny.
Speaker 5 (02:01):
Oh that was good.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
And because because you write it in pieces, right, and
so it was, uh, you know, when I finished the book,
they had this marketing plan and I was like, no,
here's what we should do. And it was non traditional
and they were skeptical of it, but really black without
(02:23):
it was a grass effort and black people really went
out and brought this book and I was and I
was pleasantly surprised.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
You know, those of us who dealt with the publishing
world know that, you know, there's a kind way of
saying it's traditional, but it really doesn't know our culture
to a great degree. There are things that they want
to do that we know as authors and Black folk
that that ain't. That may work for y'all, but that's
not working for us. I'm wondering about the title and
the af part of it. Was there pushback at all
(02:51):
for that? Did they understand that? What was.
Speaker 4 (02:55):
So? It took me three years to write this book,
and one of the things they worried about was like,
will people be saying af for in three years? And
I was like, yeah, because we were saying it, you know,
before y'all knew about it, Like black, We were saying
it before before y'all knew about it, and so it
(03:16):
might not be a cool white thing to say, but
it'll be still in you know. And there was a
little pushback, but then ultimately they conceded and agreed with it.
What's funny is so this was actually supposed to be
the second of a two book deal. The first book
(03:38):
was a book about whiteness, and they thought we should
flip the order because the subtitle of the first book
they thought they had put I had pushed back against
because they thought it was a subject that nobody had
never heard of. It was a subject that I studied
in graduate school, and the subject was, and this is funny,
(04:02):
the subtitle was white Pepology toward a more critical race Theory.
They thought nobody had ever heard of it critical race
theory thing. So weld we should do the first the
second book first, and now everybody's talking about critical race theory.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
How much of you being homeschooled until you were I
think twelve, Yeah, how much of that even as a
black person. That did that allow you a different purview
of history just in general, because I think about how
you know, the mass the masses were taught about history,
you know, George Washington and Cherry Tree, you know, and
(04:41):
on down the line. But being homeschooled, like I would imagine,
you had a different purview than most of us.
Speaker 5 (04:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
So one of the things that homeschooling and learning history
that we did for me is so it wasn't part
of like I wasn't in history last, So history was
part of my English curriculum, and the English curriculum is
part of my you know, Civics curriculum, and all of
(05:10):
that was combined. It wasn't like I I everything was
bifurcated or separated. So it offered context and it also
offered a way for me to kind of explore history
on my own, go into the topics that interested me.
And then the history that I was taught had people
who looked like me, who you know, who came from
(05:32):
my background, you know, who had who were descendants.
Speaker 5 (05:35):
Of enslaved people. So that helped.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
And the other thing it was helped me do, right,
is it taught me that like I just really very recently,
maybe a couple of years before I started writing this book,
when I realized how other people learned history, Like I realized, like, oh,
they so I have with my children were going to school,
(06:02):
like my children are in college now. When my children
were in school, I realized, oh, this is how they
learned history, because you know, what's normal to you is
just normal, right, And so I realized, Oh, they learned
about George Washington being this valiant defender of liberty, and
then like years years later they learned own slave, and
(06:25):
then the same with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. So
they make them heroes. And that's why it's so hard
for them to understand how they could be flawed men
in the first pace. So they don't learn a comprehensive
history that's even linear. They've learned a myth first, and
then they spend time kind of felling in the areas
(06:50):
around the myth. And I, when I learned that, it
made sense. Fortunately I didn't learn history that way.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Yeah. You know what I loved about what you did.
It's not only did you decide to kind of tell
history from our side, but it really took front and
centered the idea of you know, you talk about unwhitewashed history.
I've always called it the Hollywood version of history. You know,
we have built in America this to your point, always valiant,
(07:21):
always smart, always heroic, always always always, and the white
male in particular was always the star of it. Right,
give me a sense of, you know how you wanted
to deconstruct that notion, because it's a notion that we've
all been pushed and taught on from the day we
you know, were born.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
Frankly, well, the first thing is, right, So when we
think of just like black history of American history, we
think of it in two ways. We think of a
history of black people told by black people that cent
as black people. And then we think of history American
(07:59):
history through right, it's you know, from the white perspective
by white historians. What I wanted to do was give
black and both ways have been done a million times.
What I wanted to do is give a perspective of America,
that this whole country from black people's perspective.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
Right. So, in my.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
Version, the Revolutionary War was just two different kinds of
white people fighting, because that's how it would have been
if you were living in seventeen seventy six, right, like
it was just some white people fighting over something, and
you would fight for the side which most effected your freedom.
Speaker 5 (08:41):
Right.
Speaker 4 (08:42):
And the reason I wanted to do that, and the
reason that the way we learn history is flawed is
because of what you said.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
Right.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
So when we talk about those white men who are always, always,
always slave saviors, as you said, the reality is, man,
if you think about the story of black people in
America where we came from, arriving on these shores with nothing,
(09:14):
the communities and the history and the culture and the
families and the institutions that we've built, it is already
the greatest story in the history of the world. Right,
Like to think about black people arriving here with nothing,
no language, no loved ones, not even a way to communicate,
(09:36):
and their purpose was to have everything extracted from them,
the labor, and then for them to die. And not
only that, but everything the greatest, wealthiest country in the
world was against them and they were going to do
it to black people. That's already the greatest story in
(09:57):
the world. Why is there a need for this mythology
when America really already has the greatest story that has
ever been told, and I wanted to tell that story
instead of this myth that we've been making up as
we go along.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
And here's another thing that's interesting. You know, you say,
you know why the need And it seemed to me
that if you know history, those that came to the shores,
the whites that came to these shores were the dregs
of society elsewhere and all of that, you know, and
there was a need to really start to tamp down
how extraordinary the Africans that were brought here enslaved were,
(10:40):
that the people of color, indigenous people, and all the
extraordinary nature of who these people were and are. And
the idea continues today. We see it with this whole
advent of trying to sweep away truth in general. There
is this need to make extraordinary not only ordinary, but substandard,
(11:06):
which is amazing to me.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
Yeah, I think it's hard for them to justify what
they did to these people, black people, indigenous people if
they allow them to be seen as people. So you know,
you can't subject someone to the worst kind of violence
(11:32):
to a system that had frankly never been a race based,
color based, constitutional, perpetually inescapable, intergenerational system of force to
labor through violence or the threat of violence. You can't
have someone subjected to that if they are also human.
(11:53):
You can't think people will support people doing that if
you also see them as human. You can't come to
a lane and just take people's land and this slaughter
them for their land. You can't force them to move
across the country and call it a trail of tears
if you also see them as human. So that is
(12:15):
part of what du Boys called the propaganda of history
to make to shape it into a thing that valorizes
one group and dehumanizes another.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
How much did you, if at all, really hone in
on what American history the way it's taught in schools
and delivered in America. You know, we always talk about
the game that has been played on us, the psyche
deflate that we have had from day one. Did that
(12:51):
exacerbate as you started to to, you know, comb through
all this and write it. I would suspect there were times,
you know, and maybe because you're a historian in one sense,
maybe not, but it had to be infurior infuriating at times.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
There were times that were infuriating about there were some
things that you could not think help but think were intentional.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
You know.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
One of the things that's interesting to me is that
how much of our history we think is lost or
hidden when it's kind of available, and they like they
just choose not to teach it, Like it's not Some
of it is lies that are easily proven wrong, and
(13:42):
they just keep perpetuating the lie. Like yesterday was Columbus Day, right,
Think about this, Like we just celebrated Columbus Day, and
we're still celebrating Columbus Day. A man who never stepped
foot on this continent that is a national holiday, and.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Just there was lost, right, lost.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
Yeah, he was just like you know, took a wrong
turn because his GPS was broken, and we are still
celebrating him five hundred and seventy years later. It is insane,
the propaganda that we are fed intentionally.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
You know.
Speaker 5 (14:28):
One of the things that I was, you know, in.
Speaker 4 (14:31):
Researching this book, right, I always I said, well, you
know what I wish, I wish there would be a
way that instead of because one of the things I
did is instead of the French and the English colonizers
and the Dutch settlers, I just call him white people
because that's how they do Africans right right, they say
(14:52):
they're just slaves. They don't have a history or a
culture or a background or political motivation like the Pilgrims.
And I was like, ish, I could just like find
the tribes of the specific people I was talking about
in the early days of enslavement. And it turns out
you can, right, because they knew exactly where to go
to get these people.
Speaker 5 (15:10):
They went there to get them for specific skills.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
And they were like, oh, if I go get the Mendinka, right,
they are really excellent rice growers, and if I go
get the woe of they are really excellent cattle herders.
Speaker 5 (15:24):
And if I go get the others, these other people,
the Akan, they.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
Are really great at blacksmith And so they knew exactly
where to go, like they would have you believe they
you know, they had us believe that they were just
getting people for how strong they were and how big
they were and how muscly they were when they were
going to get them to do specific things that white
people didn't know how to do. And the fact that
(15:52):
they make us think the opposite is true is kind
of infuriating.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Yeah, you know, your book gives great context to that.
In the sense of you, as you suggest, history would
lead us to believe the way it's taught here that
all we were doing, you know, we always talk about
building the capitol. All we were doing is moving bricks
and lifting them and putting them in and that kind
of thing. And to your point, the intellectual property that
(16:19):
was stolen from us is almost unconscionable to think about
what would have happened had they not brought us here. Well,
so this nation would not have probably well certainly wouldn't
exist it in the way we know.
Speaker 5 (16:36):
It, right, right.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
So, a couple of years ago, I was hired to
write a piece on the plantation tourism industry in Charleston,
South Carolina. So I go to this plantation seventeen hundred
acres the size of a small city.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
And.
Speaker 4 (16:59):
There are tours going on there. Well like white people
just travel there to get to have tours. And we
were rushing through the tour because there was a wedding
later on that day. Had a plantation to whether they're
and slick where they enslaved black pole. So the woman,
the one of the women on the tours said, uh, well,
(17:20):
there was just a big flood here a few months ago,
how did did you guys have to rebuild or you know,
did it damage a lot of this property? And the
tour guy said, no, that was what they call a
hundred year flood. It only happens every one hundred years.
But the enslaved people who built the system of levees
(17:45):
and dams that grow rice. To grow rice, you have
to flood the fields and then you levee out the water.
So when a storm is coming, we bring up the
levees flood the fields. It doesn't because we used to
being flooded, and then when the stormer siegs, we let
the water out. They were using a system of devs
(18:07):
and lambs that were built three hundred years ago by
enslaved people who knew how to do that engineering that
still survives to this day. And that is what they
went there. They're still right, that intellectual property is what
they went They went there to get right, not the
(18:29):
strong backs. Because the white people did not grow rice.
There was a plantation whether the people thought they were
going to come here and grow citrus, but the soil
was too lonely. They could try siltworm. They tried everything,
and then they realized, oh, the enslaved people we bought
from Barbados, weren't dying because they were growing rice and
that's what exploded what they called the gold Coasts or
(18:51):
the rice coast of Africa, because the rice was gold
to the Americas, and that's what they went there to get,
that intellectual property, not the labor, because they could have
used the native right. They could have used the people
who were here if they just wanted to enslave people
who could lift things. But that's not what we are
told in school.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
Yeah, and when you think about that, you know, the
way we're told history, particularly when they traveled west, it
was a rough and rugged land and most of them
didn't make it because the land was rough and rugged.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Well, most of them didn't make it because they didn't
know what to do, you know. It wasn't simply because
the land was rough and rugged. Yes, that was a
part of the story, which brings me to something that
you touched on, and I'm curious how you see this.
There are variations of the lies that have been told historically.
There is the sanitized version, and that's a part of
(19:49):
the truth, but it's cleaned up. There is the simple untruth,
and then there is the omission give me a sense
of how you see those three.
Speaker 5 (20:06):
So give me that list again.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
The there's a sanitized version partially true, but not as devastating,
not as ugly, not as nasty. There's the untruth, the
lie I eat George cutting down a cherry tree, you know,
and then there is the omission.
Speaker 4 (20:26):
Right, right, So let's start with the sanitize. The sanitized
truth is kind of a little bit propaganda, right, like everybody,
like we always say the victor Right's history, right, and
it is you know, filtered through the lens to make
(20:48):
the white heroes look good, right, and that and that's
what we're taught in school.
Speaker 5 (20:53):
But it's also created two.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
Give the student in sixth grade a sense of pride
and patriotism and to convince them to perpetuate the mythology,
not just history, not but the excellence of America, to
go and bomb other countries, to go and believe that
if you work hard at a menial job, then you
(21:23):
will succeed, when we know for black people that is true.
Like it's created, that sanitized vision is created to perpetuate
the status chrome. Now the lies, some of what America
did can't be whitewi washed, So you just got to
(21:43):
tell a lie in some instances, right, Like if you
say America is not a racist country, you should have
to say when it stopped being one.
Speaker 5 (21:54):
Otherwise you're telling a.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
Lie because, like you know, it was a racist country, right,
it created the most brutal form of human subjugation in
the history of the world. So it was so either
you have to tell the tell the end date of
that stop racism, or you perpetuating a lie. And then
(22:16):
the lies also help sanitize the earlier version that we
talked about, right, because some things, like some of the
lies we tell ourselves are in support of the status
quo too, right, they're creative for the same reason.
Speaker 5 (22:34):
And then the omission.
Speaker 4 (22:37):
As a journalist, you know this, right, when we talk
about objectivity in a story, it's not just the lie
you put in a story. It's not how you frame
this story, but it's what you choose to leave out, right,
And what you choose to leave out of a story
is as important as what you choose to put into
(22:59):
a story. So if you leave out the fact that
the blue blood families that formed America didn't just get
their wealth from the work that enslaved people did for them,
they got it because they owned slaves. They had a
head right system where we gave fifty acres of land
(23:22):
for every enslaved person they brought over here. So it
was not that they had these plantations that depended on
free label. It was just that they were enslavers that
made them rich. Slavery made them rich, not the stuff.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
That was the result of slavery.
Speaker 4 (23:36):
And those kinds of omissions, the omissions of the people
who were part of America's story that were just left out,
that were just intentionally excluded, like we talked about right
when you omit the fact that they went over there,
When you admit the names of the African people but
(23:59):
not the names of the white people, that's how you
sanitize it, and that's how you perpetuate the lie. So
they all work hand in hand right in when you're
writing history and you want to perpetuate that pathology and
perpetuate that myth of excellence and perpetuate the status quo.
(24:23):
When you get to a point in the history book
where you have to either choose to tell the truth
or to tell a lie, or to sanitize it or
to omit it entirely, you make that choice and that's
how you get that jumped version where some parts say
something and some parts say another thing. But a more
(24:44):
accurate version of history. It includes black people, and it
shows the brutality that this country has committed against everyone
who is not white.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Yeah, and I think you hit on it in the
sense of I don't blame a sanitized version of certain stories,
in the sense of we all sanitize certain things when
it's from our end. But the particularly the omission I e.
Lie and the outright lie is the one that I
(25:17):
think we continue to see perpetuated i e. Trump today.
You just keep hammering that nail, keep hammering that nail,
keep hammering that lie. And as we used to say,
a lie can become the truth in many people's minds,
and we see that. Let me ask you one other
question is relates to that before we let you go,
and that is this. I'm interested in those that have
(25:40):
read the book, or at least heard about the book,
who have not been fans of it, those that have
said to you, you're the liar, You're making up these
two what's been that for those who see it from
a different perspective, I'm curious about your conversations or interactions
(26:02):
with them.
Speaker 4 (26:04):
Well, and you know this, The criticism rarely comes from
people who read the book or or read the article already,
Like they don't sit down and read it and say
and then say, you know, I think you could have
had more of this, or I think this was wrong.
Those criticism don't come from those people, but so truly
(26:26):
the people from the people who've read it. You know,
the only criticism I've heard was that, like, you can't
eat while you're reading it, because you might spit out
your water or food when you're laughing. But the criticisms
(26:47):
of people who do or who fight for a more
corrective or more accurate version of history is always the same.
There are two things that they'll always say.
Speaker 5 (27:00):
One, well, when.
Speaker 4 (27:06):
Prove it, why do you think that not all it's
basically a version of the not all white people argument, right,
white people fought for this and white people.
Speaker 5 (27:16):
And the other is that.
Speaker 4 (27:19):
If the version of history that I learned is not true,
then why do so many people say it did? Why
do historian say it this way? Why do the academics
say it this way? And I always explain to them
that the Black studies movement and the inclusion of Black
history in schools is a relatively new thing, started in
(27:39):
the late seventies, I mean the early seventies, late sixties.
And so the people who taught me in you history
for instance, in schools, they didn't know like those white
teachers didn't know history, right, they'd never learned black history.
Speaker 5 (27:55):
Their schooling had no black history.
Speaker 4 (27:57):
They didn't learn about slavery, they didn't learn about out
you know, the civil rights movement, and the people who
taught them didn't and the people who taught them didn't.
So one of the things that I always have to
remember is those white people who make those uh criticisms
don't know anything about history, right. They they were likely
(28:19):
taught by someone who didn't learn history, and so they
have believed that that mythologized version is the truth because
everybody in their world told that same story.
Speaker 5 (28:35):
And just because everyone is telling.
Speaker 4 (28:37):
The same story doesn't make it true, no matter how
hard as you said, they habler it.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Yeah, and that's and that's true of some black teachers
back in the day, right they didn't know history either,
not because they didn't want to know, but no one
in their fans and they went to white But hey man, listen, congratulations.
I hope, if nothing else, certainly like minded people will
(29:06):
read it. But I would love for those who aren't
like minded to your point, rather than just hear about it,
you know, I would hope that some of them, whatever
minute number that might be, would pick up the book
and take a look to get, if nothing else, a
more balanced objective view of what this nation was and is.
(29:28):
So again, brother, thank you for spending time, and congratulations again,
thank you so much for having me again.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Michael's book, Black af The Unwhitewashed History of America is
available now.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
One hundred is produced by ed Gordon Media and distributed
by iHeartMedia.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Carol Johnson Green and Sharie Weldon And are our bookers.
Our editor is Lance patten Gerald Albright composed and performed
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edel Gordon and on Facebook at ed Gordon Media