September 7, 2025 • 55 mins
In Part One of our deep dive into the whitewashing of American slavery, we look at the widespread effort to sanitize the brutal history of Black oppression in the U.S., from Donald Trump's attack on the Smithsonian for being too "woke" to Elon Musk’s casual dismissal of slavery as a universal human experience. We explore how this revisionist narrative is aimed at erasing the central role of slavery and the systemic racial subjugation and segregation that continues to shapes this country.
We draw the throughline from chattel slavery to Jim Crow to today’s prison labor system, showing how systems of white supremacy evolve but never disappear. We cover the attacks on birthright citizenship, the role of the Civil War, and how racial oppression not only disadvantages black people but the working class as a whole.
“The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. The whole weight of America was thrown to color caste.” — W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America
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Episode Transcript
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(00:07):
It's time for you and me to stand up for ourselves.
Hello and welcome to Unwashed and Unruly, where history stinks
and we refuse to Febreze it. Today we're diving into the
rising tide of whitewashing, thecoordinated effort to disappear
black chattel slavery and downplay this country's racist
legacy. I'm your host of today's
(00:28):
episode, Lola Michaels, in the company of Mr. Freaky footnote
Ezra Saeed. Hi, Lola.
Hi, everybody. And Miss Sleigh Guevara Cam
Cruise. Hey everybody.
Please make sure to rate and review us wherever you're
listening. You can reach us at
unwashedunruly@gmail.com. In the latest political effort
to prettify America's ugliest truths, Donald Trump went after
(00:52):
the Smithsonian for being too woke because it portrays slavery
as brutal and violent. We're hearing talking heads
claim that everyone had slaves, slavery wasn't that bad, and
that we shouldn't dwell on the past.
Who benefits from diluting the atrocities of American slavery
and erasing the deep seated oppression of black people?
This isn't just bad history, it's a strategic attempt to
(01:14):
downplay the brutality of U.S. history and rewrite the role
Black people have played in shaping this country.
From Jim Crow to mass incarceration, the legacy of
slavery hasn't vanished. It's evolved and very much with
us. So why is this revisionism
intensifying now? We'll dig into the ideological
war on so-called wokeness, the attacks on birthright
(01:35):
citizenship, and the myth that white people are saviors.
And we'll ask whether there's such a thing as American history
that isn't black history. Spoiler there isn't.
So let's talk a little bit aboutwhy this is happening.
There's been this big uptick of major government officials and
(01:58):
public figures from the White House on down coming out and
saying enough of the slavery stuff, we have to move on as a
country. All of it's intended to downplay
the importance of slavery in American history.
So why do you guys think this ishappening now?
What are they trying to achieve?So when this question was posed
to me, I was thinking about all the changes that have happened
in the 2010, specifically all the progressive liberalism
(02:21):
that's been going on. So I think this is anti woke
backlash. There's been a lot of changes.
One of the changes has been in education.
There's more focus on oppressed classes.
There is a retraction of hero status for people like
Christopher Columbus. There have been changes in
holidays. There's been race swapping in
movies, DEI. So when I hear all these
(02:45):
arguments coming up about slavery and trying to whitewash
this history, I think a lot of that has to do with trying to
reclaim the narrative. I agree.
I think there's also another aspect to it or a parallel
aspect to it, which is there aretwo things happening at the same
time. 1 is you have an administration in the White
House that is very openly racist, very openly bigoted, and
(03:10):
it allows the likes of those whoare anti black bigots and anti
immigrant bigots and all kinds of backward shit to come to the
fore. It gives them the green light
and they are coming to the fore.That's in an immediate sense.
But I think there's a broader historical sense of why this is
happening, which is black oppression in this country.
(03:31):
And the vilification of black people is as American as apple
pie. And whenever there is a period
of reaction, regardless of who it's directed at.
So right now, it's mainly immigrants that are bearing the
brunt of this. But regardless of who it's
directed at, it always takes aimalso at black people because in
this country the question of theoppression of black people is
(03:54):
the lightning rod around which all forms of racist reaction
will rally. Even if you do have a segment of
black people who buy into the anti immigrant stuff, it doesn't
change the objective reality that as a people they will be
the victims of these attacks. I totally agree.
I mean, I think part of this is that just the administration
hates black people. But I think the scariest thing
(04:15):
is that by sanctioning it, it's like you, if you erase all the
most odious parts of history, then there's no consequences for
repeating that history. The Smithsonian African American
Museum in particular, when you go to that museum, there's an
entire exhibit on slavery with all the brutality in the
(04:39):
inhumane treatment and how this system of white supremacy was
built on this extraction of bondlabor and how this society is
predicated on blacks being a supposedly uncivilized inferior
race. The idea that no, museums can't
talk about this, it's to erase that history.
(04:59):
It seems like there's also an element of America is in really
bad standing right now. There's really bad optics.
And so if you say that slavery and the history of this country
wasn't that bad, you're also saying that the situation that
black people experience today isof their own making.
(05:20):
The idea is that you can blame the victim.
I think it's useful to sort of step back a minute.
When you talk about American slavery, you are talking about
chattel slavery. And then one of the things I
think that would be useful to convey is what does the word
chattel in this context mean? And without getting into the
details, and we will in a bit actually, but without getting
(05:40):
into a lot of the details, there's different kinds of
slavery. Chattel slavery denotes that you
are not a human being. You are a piece of property.
You are owned from the minute you're born or the minute you
are captured until the minute you die.
Not only that, by the offspring you produce are owned from the
minute they are born until the minute they die.
(06:00):
Now, maybe some slave owner willgrant a freedom or manumission
to one or a handful of his slaves.
That's up to them. But you are personal property
from birth to death. There is no way out.
There is no Ave. from which you can escape this trap or this
cauldron of slavery. That was the condition of black
(06:23):
people for several centuries in this country, in the colonies
and in what became the United States.
That reality hasn't left us in the sense that of course slavery
was destroyed, but the impact and effect of slavery and the
ideological justification that the ruling class in this country
came up with to justify the mostunjustifiable thing, human
(06:47):
bondage. That byproduct of that is still
very much with us such that you can talk about the reality that
black people are a cast, a race color cast that have been
segregated at the bottom of society.
Basically, except for a very brief period after the Civil War
war, there was a slight opening during this period called
Reconstruction from around 1865 to 1877.
(07:09):
Except for that period, what you're really talking about is a
population that is permanently ground down at the bottom of
society and that serves many purposes.
Obviously it's brutal to the black population, but it serves
a whole other purpose for the ruling class.
It works in its favor to divide and rule the working class.
(07:30):
It works in its favor to impose its austerity on the whole of
working people. The effect of the oppression of
black people is beyond simply black people.
It is a symbol for all sided exploitation and oppression in
this country. Or to put it a different way,
the past isn't dead. It's not even past yet.
Yeah, I think that's a great quote that we're going to talk
about later on in this episode and then also go back to the
(07:53):
question of cast. Speaking of that, I want to move
on to this clip from Elon Musk. Do you guys know who Elon Musk
is? Just.
Kidding, never heard of him. So he did this interview with
Don Lemon. You guys know who Don Lemon is?
Do I ever? OK, so he did this interview
with Don Lemon and his main thesis was let's just move on,
(08:17):
let's stop talking about this slavery thing.
So let's take a listen. I think we want to look to the
future rather than the past and instead of engaging in positive
rehashing of the past. Because in fact, if you look at
(08:38):
history, if you study history broadly, everyone was a slate.
Everyone, yes well, not everyonewas a slave no, everyone was a
slave but we are we are we are all decided from slaves yeah
we're all of us yeah so just a question of when was it was it
more recent or less recent That's it right so the but what
(08:59):
what future do we want do we are.
Is this something we want to make part about constant
dialogue forever or do what do we want to say?
Like, let's just move on and treat everyone you know
according to just who they are as an individual.
I love how a white South Africandefender of apartheid
(09:20):
billionaire is talking about let's just treat people the way
they should be treated. Notice he doesn't say equally
either. He's like people should be
treated in a way they deserve. I think those people would like
to disappear. The history of slavery.
Not only hate black people, though they definitely hate
(09:41):
black people. I think they fundamentally hate
America. Not the mythology of America
that they have created, but the real America, with its ugly
history, with its brutalities, with its genocide of Native
Americans, with its oppression of black people who slavery to
the present, with its demonization of immigrants.
(10:02):
The very things that define the nature of this country.
What they can't look at is the mirror of what America is.
These people's hatred for this country and its real history is
so deep that when confronted, they will side not with the
fighters for liberation and freedom, but with the slave
(10:24):
owning aristocratic shits who waged war to destroy the
Republic just so they can continue in the ownership of
human beings. That's how much these people
hate America. They're heroes are the likes of
Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis,
(10:44):
people who, under any system of justice, would have been shot
for what they did. Slavery was legal in this
country, and the fact that it's even being talked about in this
way, it's like these people stand on the side of history
where it's completely acceptableto whip and shackle and buy and
sell human beings. I think it's also, in the case
(11:06):
of his statement about history, a kind of selective embrace of
certain types of history. Yeah, he wants everybody to just
move on, get over it. We have new chapters to turn to.
Every people have their history and their mythology.
You have the English still goingon about the Norman conquest of
England from 1066. That's 1000 years ago and they
(11:30):
still talk about it as the defining thing of what is
England. You have Zionist claiming that a
God they don't even believe in promised them the land 3000
years ago, right? But God forbid, God forbid that
we remember the snatching of countless human beings from
their homelands in Western Africa, the slaughter of God
(11:50):
knows how many in the Middle Passage, the brutalization and
enslavement of many millions in the New World.
And that only ended in the USA 160 years ago in 1865 when these
racist shits raised the Confederate flag.
Shrill voices will come out to claim that this is our heritage.
Suddenly all this stuff about moving on and forgetting the
(12:12):
past and having to go forward gets thrown out the window.
Suddenly they like to embrace history because what they really
like is to embrace a system thattrot over a whole people for
hundreds of years and held them in bondage.
What this is about in the end isnot arguments over history, but
this is about in the end is thatthey are justifying the
(12:34):
unjustifiable of the past so they can justify the
unjustifiable in the present. Yeah, and I think your point
about the history of the Confederacy too.
It's like, how often do they have to defend the Confederate
monuments and defend the Confederate flag?
But then if black people are talking about slavery for 400
(12:55):
years, which is just embedded inthis social system, it's no, we
can't talk about that. History has nothing to do with
today, but we can embrace the Confederacy.
There's also this element from Elon Musk's mouth that sounds
like poor, poor white people. That's his position, that's his
position. In South Africa, you have an
administration that is eager to kick out every immigrant they
(13:15):
can get their hands on, undocumented or documented.
Meanwhile, it's opened up the USto quote UN quote, refugees,
white refugees from South Africawho are facing a supposed white
genocide. It's absurd, but it's just an
indication of how deep the racist bigotry runs.
And I think what the argument isfundamentally trying to say is
(13:37):
that black slavery in America was unremarkable.
And because it's unremarkable, that means that white people are
being treated unfairly with policies like DEI and anything
else that they think is racist against them.
I'm glad that you raised the DEIstuff, because this is obviously
(13:57):
in the context of repeated and concerted attacks against
anything deemed woke or DEI, which is perceived to mainly
benefit black people. First of all, these things are
highly criticized. DEI and woke ISM as corporate
tokenism, and I think we share alot of that criticism.
It's really a way to put black faces in high places and pretend
(14:19):
like there's a level of equalitythat doesn't actually exist in
this economic system. DEI, What it really represents
is liberal America's failure of the promise of integration in
the wake of the civil rights movement.
They don't even talk about integration anymore.
They call it diversity, which basically means we need to fill
some quotas and we're done. And we need to worry about it
(14:41):
just in our particular school orin our particular job or
whatever it is that that the DEIoffice is involved in, and we're
done with it. There's no sense of society as a
whole needs to be overturned to fight for the equality and the
full integration of black peoplein this country.
Now, of course, they're being attacked from right wing racist
forces and we oppose the attacks.
(15:03):
Yeah, like their view is that anything that is even a
semblance of diversity, equity or inclusion is a bad thing.
Exactly. Exactly.
So they're not attacking DEI because they think it's
insufficient. They're attacking DEI because Oh
my God, how could something evenbe perceived to be supporting
black people? But to the main point, if you
(15:24):
look at the history of this country, the question of black
oppression has played the central role.
It has been in many ways the motor force of what makes this
country. Work.
Yeah. And you raised this earlier when
you were talking about the end of the Civil War 160 years ago.
Slavery ended with the defeat ofthe Confederacy in 1865.
(15:46):
But this idea of race and of racial hierarchy obviously did
not end. And those 400 years of servitude
became the fabric of this society.
And I think it's worth reiterating what actually
happened since the Civil War. This is going to be an
incredibly brief account of thatthat does nothing justice except
(16:06):
to just point you into hopefullycertain directions that those
who are interested can learn more about.
But if in a in a way, it's summarized by WEB Du Bois, the
great sociologist, thinker and cultural critic who wrote the
book Black Reconstruction in America in 1935.
And then there he has this phrase where he says the slave
went free, stood A brief moment in the sun, then move back again
(16:31):
towards slavery. The whole weight of America was
thrown to color cast. I think that summarizes the post
Civil War history. So the slave went free.
That's the end of slavery. The defeat of the guys that
these people celebrate, the defeat of the Confederacy stood
a brief moment in the sun. And that would be the promise of
(16:55):
equality that was vehemently fought for by the black masses,
the former slaves, as well as their allies in the Radical
Republicans construction. Well, not former abolitionist.
I mean, slippery is over now. If you want a couple of names, I
would say the two who stand out the most would be Thaddeus
Stevens in the House and CharlesSumner in the Senate.
(17:17):
But they weren't the only ones. These were, by American
standards, very radical politicians.
So that's the brief moment in the sun.
That brief moment in the sun wasbetrayed and crushed.
And by 1877, Reconstruction was no more.
In a lot of ways it ended about 5-6 years before that in most
southern states, but it's official end is 77.
(17:40):
Then move back towards slavery and that would be Jim Crow.
Within the two decades after Reconstruction, you had the
consolidation of the sharecropping system in the
South, and with it came the hardened Ridgid segregation of
Jim Crow, which was legalized in1896 in the Plessy V Ferguson
(18:03):
decision in the Supreme Court. And Plessy versus Ferguson was
separate but equal. Exactly.
That is the separate but equal decision which made Jim Crow
basically the law of the land for any state that wished to
implement it. In the South.
Well for any state that wished to implement it's just the ones
in the South were the ones that wished to implement it and then
he concludes that sentence. The whole weight of America was
(18:25):
thrown to color cast. And while things have changed
since then, that clause is absolutely true because with the
defeat of Reconstruction, what happened was the consolidation
of black people as an oppressed color cast in America at its
bottom rung. So you had the Great Migration,
and that was in the early 1900s.That continued for a couple of
(18:49):
decades, and that represented black people trying to escape
the sharecropping system. And many do escape it.
And where they're going is to the North to enter the factories
and becoming a crucial part and in time, the most militant and
radical part of the American working class.
You had the civil rights movement coming off the Korean
War and in the midst of the Vietnam War, which fought
(19:11):
against the legalized segregation of black people.
And how did the government respond to that?
So because of the struggles, there was a move to do away with
Jim Crow. But just like with the end of
slavery, there was sharecroppingand the rise of Jim Crow.
So with the end of Jim Crow camethe rise of mass incarceration.
(19:34):
And that rise of mass incarceration coincided with the
mass deindustrialization of the United States, which basically
closed the avenue of decent paying unionized jobs for black
workers. And that was how a lot of black
families made it into this so-called middle class.
And instead you got America's Dungeons.
In 1980 the prison population was around 330,000.
(19:58):
Within 20 years, it was 2 million.
Yeah, that historical thread is so important, and I know it was
telescoped. We can provide a bibliography
for this episode and some key reading material.
But I think this is also touching on, I know in the last
few years at least, Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim
(20:19):
Crow became very popular. And one of the things that she
opens her book with is cast and the dominance of the one drop of
blood rule, which defines your role in society and how the
color line dominates. She also punctures this idea
that we live in a colorblind society.
And her point about mass incarceration being the new Jim
(20:44):
Crow, I think is a popularized way of explaining some of this
for people who want to read moreabout it.
This idea that institutions likeslavery and Jim Crow appear to
die, but are reborn in a new form.
Yeah. It's to reiterate a point that I
think is in some ways captured in the negative by the Nation
(21:07):
magazine. In 1877, right at the end of
Reconstruction, The Nation magazine, you know, the same
liberal magazine that exists to this day, published an article
celebrating the end of Reconstruction.
And what they wrote is the Negrowill disappear from the field of
national politics. Henceforth, the nation as a
nation will have nothing more todo with him.
(21:31):
Jesus, that's vile. That's really sad.
Well, not only is it vile, it's wishful thinking.
It doesn't happen that way. They can pretend away black
oppression, but it is in their face, inescapable.
And if I were to put it in a phrase, I would say America
hates black people like a sick man hates his own lung with
(21:54):
every breath. He needs it to sustain him, but
it also reminds him of his ailment.
That's what America sees in the black man.
The thing that keeps it alive isthe thing that holds up the
mirror of what a vile creature it is.
I think this is also why some ofwhat we're seeing today with the
(22:15):
fortification of slavery is somewhat unremarkable, just in
the sense of how much ever sinceslavery there has been a
romanticization of slavery. There's been an attempt to
prettify it. Gone with the Wind is a perfect
example. There were these false
narratives created after the Civil War to serve all these
(22:38):
political agendas. Oh the honor of the Confederacy.
It was a lost cause, the white slave ocracy where these
benevolent masters or the Civil war was just about states race.
And then all the caricatures that emerged that attempted
during the slave times, which continued to try to present
(23:00):
blacks as always being inferior,incapable of caring for
themselves and just grateful fortheir masters.
The Uncle Tom, the Mammy, presenting this as though it was
just the happy slave in this mutually beneficial
relationship. That's a very good point.
I just want to add to it. You've mentioned Gone with the
Wind. The other one is Birth of a
Nation, released in their early teens under the Woodrow Wilson
(23:23):
administration. It's telling that this was
America's first blockbuster film.
It's it's a celebration of the slave ocracy and a denigration
of black people and also their allies.
I was thinking about this film before we started today.
And one of the reasons I mentioned Thaddeus Stevens
earlier is because there is a white character who is portrayed
in that movie. And it's obviously Thaddeus
(23:46):
Stevens, but they don't name him.
And he is portrayed as this venal, horrible, disgusting
person. But one of the reasons is
disgusting is because he hangs out with and cavorts and is
friendly with Black. People, people, right?
On an equal footing, it was played at the White House.
This was not just some movie that was a blockbuster on its
(24:07):
own. Woodrow Wilson played it in the
White House and screened it there, and it caused a or helped
'cause it was part of a whole resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.
Exactly and. In the United States.
And of course, all the characters who were playing
black people, who were all rapists and criminals in the
(24:27):
movie, were all white people on blackface running around and
chasing women. This is a movie that a lot of
people know about because it's actually taught in film school,
but I don't know if the historical significance is
really brought home in the same way as it should be.
I don't know either. I know for a fact that Gone With
the Wind escapes that historicalsignificance all the time.
(24:50):
People see it as just some kind of Southern romance movie with
this war thing happening in the background.
I don't know how many times I'veheard people say, oh, that's my
favorite movie, So lovely and beautiful and it's like.
What company do you keep Ezra? This also connects to our next
clip, which is ACNN debate with the fitness instructor Biggest
(25:15):
Loser host Jillian Michaels, where she presents white people
basically as the victims. Slavery's ancient It has nothing
to do with race. Only a few white people held
slaves. So stop bullying them.
Stop pretending like this has anything to do with black
people. So let's take a listen.
(25:36):
Have you looked at two of the things?
Yeah. Slavery.
Yeah, slavery was a bad thing, that.
Was to talk about OK, like he forgot he's not white washing
slavery so he's not. No, he's not.
And you cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just
one race, which is pretty much what every single exhibit does.
But let's talk about the fact that when you lose anti slave,
(25:56):
let's talk about the fact that slavery.
Slavery in America was. Only less than 2% of white
Americans owned slaves. But it was a system of white
supremacy. You know, as the slavery is
thousands of years old, you knowwho slave owners and American
first race by the end first race.
I'm very surprised that you're stronger to.
Litivize. I'm really surprised.
(26:17):
Do you realize that, Gillian? I'm surprised that you're trying
to litigate who was the beneficiary of slavery, and I'm
not. What I'm trying to tell you is
the context of American history.In the context of American
history, what are you saying is incorrect by by saying that it
was white people oppressing black?
People. Single thing is like Oh no no,
no, this is all because white people bad and that's just not
(26:41):
the truth. Like for example, every single
exhibit I have a list of every single once.
Like people migrated from Cuba because white people bad, not
because of past. Yes, no, it's in there.
That's what I'm saying. You don't actually know what's
in there. Do you know that when you walk
in the front door, the first thing you see you have gave?
(27:02):
For folks listening, this clip has been circulated online and
gotten a lot of comments, but this is CNN rolling out its most
esteemed historians in debate. Yeah, if you're if you're not
familiar, Jillian Michaels is America's foremost MAGA lesbian.
Oh, is she? I did.
I was not familiar. I'll be honest with you, I
(27:22):
didn't know who Jillian Michaelswas before I saw this clip.
MAGA lesbian. That kind of rolls off the
tongue. MAGA lesbian.
It does. It does.
But I can't say that my life is richer for having known her.
I mean, there's an element here,even though it's a very serious
subject we're talking about, it's very hard to take these
people seriously because. Because they're stupid, they're
(27:44):
ignorant, but that's the least of their problem and their their
problem is not ignorance. You can always fix ignorance.
They have already determined what the conclusion is before
they've even cracked open a bookor learned anything.
They've already determined that white people are the eternal
victims of apparently slavery too.
I mean modern slavery on the 2%.It's irrelevant.
(28:08):
It's an utterly irrelevant figure for two reasons.
One, she's counting the whole ofthe US white population when she
gives that 2%. Well, slavery was not in the.
Entire. US, yeah.
By the time you're talking aboutthe the height of American
slavery, it was a Southern institution, even though its
impact was nationwide. So first of all, you got to take
(28:30):
that out. But second of all, and more
importantly, the reason it's an irrelevant statistic is that
it's not about the numbers. It's actually kind of the point.
This tiny class of nasty, vicious aristocrats held
millions of people in bondage and controlled the whole
Southern system and by extensionthe whole fucking country until
(28:50):
he had to be overthrown through a social revolution called the
Civil War. You don't have to be numerous a
number. It's the system of chattel
slavery which was run by these people.
So, you know, there's no point arguing about 2%, three percent,
5%. God, she's an idiot.
And, and, and not only is she anidiot, the people arguing
(29:11):
against her are also idiots. But I want to come back to.
That. I don't know that I would have
done better, but I don't think their arguments are very
effective. Because if you simply pose this
as a question of blacks are oppressed, which is absolutely
true, and whites benefit from that oppression, I think you're
(29:32):
basically feeding the arguments of the racist.
And more importantly than that, you're simply wrong.
That's not how history works. That's not what happened, even
in the South. So much of this feels like an
emotional response to me. It feels like people are angry
and upset that they're vilified or they feel that their race is
(29:55):
vilified. And I think that also that
frustration is compounded by theeconomic crisis because telling
a bunch of people who are barelymaking it that they are, quote,
UN, quote, privileged through their white privilege, I think
it's really hard to swallow. I think this argument in this
line about white privilege, which really amounts to all
(30:15):
white people benefit from the oppression of black people, is a
bunch of bullshit. A denies one of the central
points of the purpose behind theoppression of black people,
which is to depress the conditions for all people at the
bottom of society, all working people and others at the bottom
of society. And it's simply not true.
(30:38):
If you look at the history of, for example, the South under
slavery, conditions for the poorwhites there were pretty bad.
Now that doesn't mean that the poor whites in any way, shape or
form sympathized with the black slaves.
Quite the opposite. In some ways, they were very
hardened in their racism becausethey saw the vicious ideology of
(31:00):
white supremacy as basically theonly cudgel that they could have
over the black population. What separated them from blacks
is they were free. The black population was
enslaved, and why were they free?
And the black population was enslaved because they're part of
the master race, basically. And so they held on to that.
But the fact that they are racist and deniably racist
(31:24):
doesn't change the fact that slavery actually made life worse
for them in an economic and material sense.
So let's look at a couple of examples.
It degraded all labor in the South.
Slavery did by suppressing wagesand limiting economic growth,
and created an incredible stigmain the South, social stigma that
(31:47):
equated manual work with the lowly status of slaves.
Why would a plantation owner paya white man wages to do some
work in a field when he has a slave to do that work?
The plantation system required massive use of land and stood in
vehement opposition to industrialization.
(32:09):
You had basically no jobs. Labor itself was vilified.
Since then, every attack on black people has presaged an
attack on all of working people in America.
If you recognize that black people are today deeply
oppressed as a population, and you think that white people as a
(32:30):
whole benefit and get privilegesout of that oppression, my
question is why are the conditions for white people
getting worse? Yeah, that's an excellent point
too. I think that what's missing from
this discussion and from the overall consciousness out there
is that black oppression is a means to subjugate all of the
(32:52):
oppressed and keep all of the working class in the population
at each other's throats. This idea that any sort of
benefit seen as going to the black population is going to
come at the expense of the hard working working class white
person. This was very much part of the
MAGA mystique. When you were talking, I was
immediately thinking of the welfare queen analogy.
(33:15):
The biggest recipients of welfare were single white
mothers. But the way that it was
presented was that all these black women are popping out
babies so they can get more money and never have to work.
And that was pushed by the government for so long.
It was pushed by the Reagan administration very vehemently.
(33:37):
It was racist, it was vile, and it was meant to demonize black
women in particular. And it was then carried over
into the Clinton administration in the 1990s.
And he finished what Reagan started, which was to, as he put
it into welfare as we know it now.
Once you ended welfare as we know it, a lot of black people
and a lot of black mothers who were on welfare were hurt.
(33:59):
There's no question about that. But so were a lot of white women
who are on welfare. We're also hurt.
That's what I mean. From the sharecropper shack to
the modern warehouse floor, attacks on black labor have
always shaped the conditions forall of Labor.
The strategy is very simple and cruel.
You keep one group dispossessed and underpaid and use their
(34:23):
vulnerability to suppress everybody else.
You can see examples of this throughout history in the US,
including even up to this day with the gig economy, the use of
prison labor, the massive growthof the prison industry.
All of these things point to howthe oppression and attacks on
(34:44):
black people presage a greater attack on the working class as a
whole. Now within that attack, yes,
black people will get it the worst, as is always the case,
but not a lot of people are going to do very well.
That's why even though you have a lot of white workers who may
think otherwise, who are racist in their hearts and racist in
(35:06):
their core, the oppression of black people doesn't do them any
good. It actually works against them,
even if they don't understand that who it does good for, who
has the privilege, It's the white ruling class.
That's who's got the privilege, and they're laughing all the way
to the bank. Yeah, that's a class
distinction. And I think anytime you have the
(35:26):
tax on any sort of benefits, unemployment benefits or
government or subsidized housingor education or anything like
that, it's obviously going to hit the people at the bottom of
society and those who are the most subjected to the dire
conditions of capitalism. Some of what you were talking
about, Ezra, in terms of the divide and conquer technique
(35:49):
that the ruling class uses to pit people against each other at
the bottom of society, and particularly how the
vilification of black people is used to elevate the position of
the white ruling class. I feel like the government uses
this method against immigrants today to redirect that anger at
the base of society. I wanted to talk specifically
(36:12):
about the 14th Amendment and theattacks on immigrants.
Donald Trump is steadfast on overturning the 14th Amendment
from his first day in office. He issued this executive order
seeking to end the constitutionally guaranteed
right to birthright citizenship.And this is the part in the 14th
Amendment that states that all persons born in the US and
(36:36):
subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the US
and of the state wherein they reside.
I don't know if everyone knows how this is connected to the
Civil War and to slavery, so I'mwondering if you can comment a
little bit about that. The 14th Amendment was ratified
in 1868. It came out of the Civil War,
which had ended three years previously in 65, and what it
(36:58):
stipulated was, as you said, anyone born in the US and under
the jurisdiction thereof has theright of citizenship automatic.
It was ratified in response to the struggles of black people
after freedom for equal rights and citizenship within the
United States. The question of freedom was the
first step. But what happens to those four
and a half million people now that they're no longer slaves?
(37:21):
What position do they occupy legally in the United States?
There were those who wanted colonization, whether to Africa
or to the Caribbean or elsewhere.
There were those who wanted themto have more limited rights and
official status of second class citizenship.
And then there was what the Friedman themselves fought for,
which was full equality and fullcitizenship rights, and again,
(37:41):
what their allies in the RadicalRepublican Party fought for.
That included the right to vote,the right to citizenship, and so
on. What the 14th Amendment did is
it said anybody born in the United States is a citizen, end
of story. The reason that's important is
because there was a previous lawthat defines citizenship as
someone born in the US who is white and was not in condition
(38:05):
of servitude. In other words, you had to not
be a slave, and you also had to be white.
This 14th Amendment took out thereference to servitude and took
out the reference to race. That resolved the question for
the four and a half million slaves.
They became American citizens. Since then, the 14th Amendment
has been crucial for immigrants in the US Somebody moves here,
(38:27):
even if they're undocumented, even if they never get papers.
Their children born in this country are American citizens
automatically. There's no reference to blood.
There's no reference to any of that stuff.
It's a territorial system of citizenship.
That fact that it's now under attack and could very well be
overturned just illustrates how in this country black rights and
(38:50):
immigrant rights will either go forward together or fall back
separately. It is not an accident that this
amendment, born of the Civil War, is now under attack by an
administration that has decided that all of America's ills, all
on the backs of immigrants, undocumented, a document.
I think you've made the point that whenever you are going to
(39:15):
rollback a gain for black peoplethat it's going to go down very
badly for anyone else at the bottom.
You mentioned earlier that blackhistory is intertwined in every
way with American history. Is there such a thing as
American history that's not black history?
No, again, I want to use a quote.
This one is also from Dubois. He's responding to a white who
(39:38):
says this is my country. He says, your country.
How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed, we
were here. Would America have been America
without her Negro people? There is no American black
history without U.S. history, and there is no U.S. history
without black history because the two define each other.
(40:00):
And to pick another quote that Ilove, it's from James Baldwin.
White Americans do not want to know what it means to be black
in America. That they know very well that
without the black man, America could not be America.
Yeah. And I think also just on a more
contemporary level, when you arelooking at what is uniquely
(40:22):
American and what people see as American, it's always the
product of the culture and identity and struggles that
Black people have forged in thiscountry, even if their
contribution is always erased. Yeah, all the best stuff from
America comes from black people.Food, Jazz music, Hip hop, art.
And struggle, I would say, when you're talking about all of
(40:44):
these moments in history that have been instrumental in terms
of the overturning of slavery orthe desegregation of schools,
civil rights, all that stuff is always presented in the history
books as though American democracy and American
government just handed these things over.
Part of that is presenting blackpeople as these recipients of
(41:08):
reform from the top. But all of that stuff came
through very, very intense struggle that was linked to the
struggles of all of the oppressed and benefited all of
the oppressed as well. Yeah, on the culture point, I
completely agree with Cam. Anything that is uniquely
American in terms of a cultural expression, just about anything,
(41:29):
maybe there's one or two things I'm forgetting comes out of the
experience of black people. Think about it.
You had these hundreds of thousands, millions of people
snatched from different parts ofWest Africa.
They spoke different languages, had different traditions, had
different cultures, different religions, all different
backgrounds. And they were thrown into this
land to be slaves. And they not only survived
(41:52):
through their struggles in this wretched institution, they
thrived and developed a unique identity and a unique culture
that was not just a replica of where they were snatched from,
but something fashioned. And you, yes, influenced by the
past, but also influenced by their new surroundings.
And that is the core of Americanculture that the world sees and
(42:15):
understands. You strip the black component
out of American culture. What do you got left?
What you have left is disparate,different immigrant groups
expressing their cultures of where they came from, which
often the US wants to suppress, and basically a vulgarized,
bastardized version of differentexpressions of European culture
(42:38):
that is American culture withoutthe black contribution.
Either they're trying to copy Europe badly, or it's the
expressions of, you know, Mexican culture, Chinese culture
among certain communities. Yeah, all they've got is
mayonnaise and Norman Rockwell. Yeah, as to the point that Lola
raised, and I think it's a very parallel point, and again, it
goes to the heart of why the struggle for Black freedom is in
(43:01):
the interest of the whole of theworking class.
We talked earlier about how the oppression of Black people is
used to attack all of working people, but the inverse is also
true. Every time Black people fought
for their rights, an expanded democracy, like after the Civil
War, like when you have to understand the Civil War
completely redefined citizenship, redefined what the
(43:24):
country is that used to be the United States are, and then you
complete the sense it was done in the plural.
After the Civil War became the United States is became a
singular entity. The struggle for black freedom
did that consolidated the nation, and out of that came the
expansion of democratic rights. Those rights didn't just expand
for black people, they expanded for everybody.
(43:45):
And in fact, they expanded for everybody.
And then they got taken away from black people.
But every single time blacks fought for their rights and one
or one something, they weren't the only beneficiaries.
It's where a lot of the expansion of democratic rights
and benefits of all working people come from.
Yeah, you're talking about a history of incredible resilience
(44:05):
in the face of adversity. So I think talking about this
period that we're in, we're currently in a period of extreme
backlash where there's a lot of talk about so-called
meritocracy. And we know that the present
system is defined by these institutions and policies and
(44:25):
customs and laws and this entiresocial system that prevents
black people from being equal citizens.
I want to just hear from you guys a little bit about that
imprint of slavery today. There's so much to mention here.
The lack of opportunity, poverty, depressed wages, mass
unemployment, segregation, marginalization, ghettoization.
(44:50):
We talked about imprisonment. What are the things that you
both see as how the legacy of slavery is present today and how
it's really part of the fabric of American Society?
One of the policies that I thinkimpacted Black people most and
has the most lasting effect are redlining policies.
These policies stopped Black people from being able to buy
(45:13):
property in certain areas. And as you guys know, one of the
biggest ways to grow generational wealth in America
is through land ownership or property ownership.
So by being frozen out of this opportunity, it's held people
back. And there's been times in
history, in the 1950s, I know also in the 70s, that white
flight was being subsidized by the federal government.
(45:34):
So essentially white people werebeing given a handout and these
opportunities to have lasting wealth passed down through their
families where black people werenot given that opportunity.
Yes, absolutely. This was a very conscious
policy, like you're saying. After the Second World War, the
US economy was very strong coming off the war because it
(45:57):
was the only economy left. And one of the things they did
was destroy the urban centers. Some of them used to be called
salt and pepper neighborhoods because of the distribution of
blacks and whites in those areas.
And basically they subsidized, as you're saying, white flight
into suburbia. So to just give you a figure,
(46:17):
between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed about
$120 billion in new housing loans.
Most of that came after the Second World War with AGI bill
and things like that. That's about 1 1/2 trillion
dollars in today's money. Of that enormous amount of
money, more than 98% went to whites.
(46:41):
So you can imagine the repercussions of this generation
after generation for black people who are excluded from
that generational wealth. The flip side of that was those
who did own homes in what becamethe ghettos saw the value of
their investment plummet. Yeah.
And another area we see the legacy of slavery I think is in
(47:01):
healthcare in America, we had race based slavery.
And I think that one of the things that's exceptionally
horrible about that is it means that there starts to be a
dehumanizing of the class of people who are the oppressed
class. And one of the ways that we see
that still exists today is the language that's used in medical
textbooks. Recently, there was a textbook
that had to apologize for a section they had that was giving
(47:25):
nurses advice on how to administer pain medication.
And in this section, it said that Black people will report
experiencing more pain than they're actually feeling.
And what's kind of embedded in that statement is that they
don't feel as much pain as they say they are or that they feel
less pain. And we know that during slavery,
slaves were used for medical experimentation.
(47:46):
So that's the legacy. That's the residue of this kind
of thinking that we still see today.
And another area that we see a really huge disparity is in
maternal care for Black women. Black women are much more likely
to die during childbirth. They experience more
complications before and after childbirth.
And it's kind of a common occurrence for them to be
dismissed by medical professionals.
(48:08):
It's just really sad to see thatone of the legacies of slavery
are these attitudes towards black women.
Yeah, I always think about how black women in particular face
this triple oppression because they're part of this race color
cast. They're segregated at the bottom
of society and then they're women.
So they're responsible for caring for children and the sick
(48:31):
and the old. And then they're also workers.
So they're exploited as wage slaves.
And what you mentioned, Cam, about the medical abuse against
black women and how that dates back to slavery and seeing black
women as just breeders for the next generation, for the racist
masters. And then you have all the
(48:52):
experimentation and attempts to get rid of the feeble minded and
for sterilization campaigns and stuff like that.
I think that continuity is critical for people to
understand that that's not just random, but actually comes from
the kind of. Mindset.
(49:15):
I think it comes from the economic system.
I don't think it comes from a mindset.
I think it comes from a system that's dedicated and built on
the oppression of black people, and separate and unequal is
still the law of the land, even if it's not law.
I find it personally useful to make a distinction between
(49:35):
racism and racial oppression. Racial oppression is the
systematic denigration, the systematic subjugation of black
people within a capitalist order.
The things you talked about, like redlining these
neighborhoods, we're not going to give them any loans because
black people are there. Racism is basically the racist
(49:58):
attitudes that your average person has towards black people.
One flows out of the other. I think the racial oppression
produces the racism in the same way that the enslavement of
black people produced the concept of race and the lie of
the supposed inferiority of black Africans.
It's not that they enslaved black Africans because they
(50:19):
thought they were inferior. It's that they enslaved black
Africans and then they had to come up with a reason to justify
it. They came up with this idea and
we live with it to this day. And then by the same token, I
think the fundamental driving force of black oppression, it's
the actual structure of Americancapitalism.
It needs it. It can't live without it because
(50:40):
otherwise it wouldn't have the thing that makes it run.
And then that produces a lot of racist attitudes in society.
I have a question for you guys. I feel like if we had this
podcast 10 years ago, I do thinkwe would get some responses from
our audience of but what about Obama?
(51:02):
Do people raise that anymore, oris it just so blatant that that
meant nothing in terms of the actual social conditions of
black people? Cam you have a better connection
with the people than I do so? Well, it was my understanding
that Obama cured racism in this country.
That's that's what I'd heard you.
Word on the street. I'm an old man, so I remember
(51:24):
those days, way back in 2008, nine, when dinosaurs roamed the
Earth. They used to call it post racial
America. They had a whole phrase for it.
And did they write about that inThe Nation?
Yeah, they sure did. They sure did, actually.
Yeah. And the idea was the color bar
has fallen. I think that was the New York
Times headline when he got elected.
(51:45):
I mean, I don't want to go down this road right now, but I will
because that's me. I think Obama won because first
of all, because eight years of Bush will do that to you, but
also because he was named BarackHussein Obama.
In other words, think about it. His mother was a white American.
His father was a black Kenyan. The black side of his family had
(52:08):
no connection to American black struggle, had no connection to
the civil rights movement. The very thing that you think
would have gone against him, hisname and his background, this is
the very thing that I think actually allowed him to become
president. Yeah, but it was also extremely
convenient and very rewarding for the ruling class to have him
(52:29):
as a figurehead. And it gave this prettier image
of American imperialism. You have a cool black man in the
White House who can better dronebomb your population of brown
skinned people. Yeah, I remember he went to
Berlin. I can't remember if it was right
before or right after he got elected.
Some like 200 or 3, 1000 people came out to greet him.
(52:51):
Remember, he won the Nobel PeacePrize.
Oh yeah, that was crazy. That didn't he win the Nobel?
Peace Prize like he had he had it was like 2 months.
Yeah, by existing and. Then became the drone president
of the United States and. And the immigration president?
Yep, and also Whistleblower, Punisher and.
Whistleblower Punisher. And he went personally to
(53:11):
Guantanamo Bay and put an ass whipping on those hoes.
Well. That was the one promise he
actually made because he. Yeah.
He didn't didn't he not follow through on that?
No, no, he didn't close Guantanamo.
That was the one promise he made.
Otherwise he ran on these vague notions because he's a very
smart politician. He is a very smart politician,
there's no question, and incredibly smart man.
(53:32):
But the other thing about him isthat I don't think should be
forgotten. I think the combination of Bill
Clinton and Barack Obama have been the two most devastating
administrations for black peoplein this country since the Second
World War and for the working class as a whole.
But I'm going to concentrate on black people here.
(53:53):
We already talked about a coupleof examples.
We talked about welfare, as we know with Clinton.
There's the crime bill, which Biden used to brag.
I wrote the damn bill. That was the mechanism for
increasing the prison population.
There was affirmative action. All these things were attacked
under the Clinton administration.
The Obama administration, if youremember, took power right as
the 2008 financial crisis was taking off, or had taken off,
(54:17):
and he led the bailouts of all the banks, meanwhile, the very
people who were the victims of these predatory lenders.
Or those people. Right.
A lot of them black, but also poor whites, Latinos, others.
They got fucked. They lost everything and nobody
(54:37):
bailed them out. They just went into the streets
and lost home and work and everything.
That was the Obama administration, besides joining
every country that he can get his hands on.
That's the hallmark of the Obamaadministration, and the impact
of that on the black population in this country was devastating
and still felt to this day. But we don't love anybody who
(55:06):
doesn't love. Us.
And that's the conclusion of Part 1 of this episode on how
slavery is being whitewashed andwe don't move on.
We got more to say. Join us for Part 2 to hear how
American slavery was unique and distinct from ancient slavery
and how America's oppression of black people served as a
blueprint for the Nazi Nuremberglaws and apartheid South Africa.
(55:26):
Stay tuned and make sure to rateand review us and send your
thoughts to unwashedunruly@gmail.com.
It's time for you and me to stand up for ourselves.
Hello and welcome to Unwashed and Unruly, where history stinks
and we refuse to Febreze it. Today we're diving into the
rising tide of whitewashing, thecoordinated effort to disappear
black chattel slavery and downplay this country's racist
legacy. I'm your host of today's
(00:28):
episode, Lola Michaels, in the company of Mr. Freaky footnote
Ezra Saeed. Hi, Lola.
Hi, everybody. And Miss Sleigh Guevara Cam
Cruise. Hey everybody.
Please make sure to rate and review us wherever you're
listening. You can reach us at
unwashedunruly@gmail.com. In the latest political effort
to prettify America's ugliest truths, Donald Trump went after
(00:52):
the Smithsonian for being too woke because it portrays slavery
as brutal and violent. We're hearing talking heads
claim that everyone had slaves, slavery wasn't that bad, and
that we shouldn't dwell on the past.
Who benefits from diluting the atrocities of American slavery
and erasing the deep seated oppression of black people?
This isn't just bad history, it's a strategic attempt to
(01:14):
downplay the brutality of U.S. history and rewrite the role
Black people have played in shaping this country.
From Jim Crow to mass incarceration, the legacy of
slavery hasn't vanished. It's evolved and very much with
us. So why is this revisionism
intensifying now? We'll dig into the ideological
war on so-called wokeness, the attacks on birthright
(01:35):
citizenship, and the myth that white people are saviors.
And we'll ask whether there's such a thing as American history
that isn't black history. Spoiler there isn't.
So let's talk a little bit aboutwhy this is happening.
There's been this big uptick of major government officials and
(01:58):
public figures from the White House on down coming out and
saying enough of the slavery stuff, we have to move on as a
country. All of it's intended to downplay
the importance of slavery in American history.
So why do you guys think this ishappening now?
What are they trying to achieve?So when this question was posed
to me, I was thinking about all the changes that have happened
in the 2010, specifically all the progressive liberalism
(02:21):
that's been going on. So I think this is anti woke
backlash. There's been a lot of changes.
One of the changes has been in education.
There's more focus on oppressed classes.
There is a retraction of hero status for people like
Christopher Columbus. There have been changes in
holidays. There's been race swapping in
movies, DEI. So when I hear all these
(02:45):
arguments coming up about slavery and trying to whitewash
this history, I think a lot of that has to do with trying to
reclaim the narrative. I agree.
I think there's also another aspect to it or a parallel
aspect to it, which is there aretwo things happening at the same
time. 1 is you have an administration in the White
House that is very openly racist, very openly bigoted, and
(03:10):
it allows the likes of those whoare anti black bigots and anti
immigrant bigots and all kinds of backward shit to come to the
fore. It gives them the green light
and they are coming to the fore.That's in an immediate sense.
But I think there's a broader historical sense of why this is
happening, which is black oppression in this country.
(03:31):
And the vilification of black people is as American as apple
pie. And whenever there is a period
of reaction, regardless of who it's directed at.
So right now, it's mainly immigrants that are bearing the
brunt of this. But regardless of who it's
directed at, it always takes aimalso at black people because in
this country the question of theoppression of black people is
(03:54):
the lightning rod around which all forms of racist reaction
will rally. Even if you do have a segment of
black people who buy into the anti immigrant stuff, it doesn't
change the objective reality that as a people they will be
the victims of these attacks. I totally agree.
I mean, I think part of this is that just the administration
hates black people. But I think the scariest thing
(04:15):
is that by sanctioning it, it's like you, if you erase all the
most odious parts of history, then there's no consequences for
repeating that history. The Smithsonian African American
Museum in particular, when you go to that museum, there's an
entire exhibit on slavery with all the brutality in the
(04:39):
inhumane treatment and how this system of white supremacy was
built on this extraction of bondlabor and how this society is
predicated on blacks being a supposedly uncivilized inferior
race. The idea that no, museums can't
talk about this, it's to erase that history.
(04:59):
It seems like there's also an element of America is in really
bad standing right now. There's really bad optics.
And so if you say that slavery and the history of this country
wasn't that bad, you're also saying that the situation that
black people experience today isof their own making.
(05:20):
The idea is that you can blame the victim.
I think it's useful to sort of step back a minute.
When you talk about American slavery, you are talking about
chattel slavery. And then one of the things I
think that would be useful to convey is what does the word
chattel in this context mean? And without getting into the
details, and we will in a bit actually, but without getting
(05:40):
into a lot of the details, there's different kinds of
slavery. Chattel slavery denotes that you
are not a human being. You are a piece of property.
You are owned from the minute you're born or the minute you
are captured until the minute you die.
Not only that, by the offspring you produce are owned from the
minute they are born until the minute they die.
(06:00):
Now, maybe some slave owner willgrant a freedom or manumission
to one or a handful of his slaves.
That's up to them. But you are personal property
from birth to death. There is no way out.
There is no Ave. from which you can escape this trap or this
cauldron of slavery. That was the condition of black
(06:23):
people for several centuries in this country, in the colonies
and in what became the United States.
That reality hasn't left us in the sense that of course slavery
was destroyed, but the impact and effect of slavery and the
ideological justification that the ruling class in this country
came up with to justify the mostunjustifiable thing, human
(06:47):
bondage. That byproduct of that is still
very much with us such that you can talk about the reality that
black people are a cast, a race color cast that have been
segregated at the bottom of society.
Basically, except for a very brief period after the Civil War
war, there was a slight opening during this period called
Reconstruction from around 1865 to 1877.
(07:09):
Except for that period, what you're really talking about is a
population that is permanently ground down at the bottom of
society and that serves many purposes.
Obviously it's brutal to the black population, but it serves
a whole other purpose for the ruling class.
It works in its favor to divide and rule the working class.
(07:30):
It works in its favor to impose its austerity on the whole of
working people. The effect of the oppression of
black people is beyond simply black people.
It is a symbol for all sided exploitation and oppression in
this country. Or to put it a different way,
the past isn't dead. It's not even past yet.
Yeah, I think that's a great quote that we're going to talk
about later on in this episode and then also go back to the
(07:53):
question of cast. Speaking of that, I want to move
on to this clip from Elon Musk. Do you guys know who Elon Musk
is? Just.
Kidding, never heard of him. So he did this interview with
Don Lemon. You guys know who Don Lemon is?
Do I ever? OK, so he did this interview
with Don Lemon and his main thesis was let's just move on,
(08:17):
let's stop talking about this slavery thing.
So let's take a listen. I think we want to look to the
future rather than the past and instead of engaging in positive
rehashing of the past. Because in fact, if you look at
(08:38):
history, if you study history broadly, everyone was a slate.
Everyone, yes well, not everyonewas a slave no, everyone was a
slave but we are we are we are all decided from slaves yeah
we're all of us yeah so just a question of when was it was it
more recent or less recent That's it right so the but what
(08:59):
what future do we want do we are.
Is this something we want to make part about constant
dialogue forever or do what do we want to say?
Like, let's just move on and treat everyone you know
according to just who they are as an individual.
I love how a white South Africandefender of apartheid
(09:20):
billionaire is talking about let's just treat people the way
they should be treated. Notice he doesn't say equally
either. He's like people should be
treated in a way they deserve. I think those people would like
to disappear. The history of slavery.
Not only hate black people, though they definitely hate
(09:41):
black people. I think they fundamentally hate
America. Not the mythology of America
that they have created, but the real America, with its ugly
history, with its brutalities, with its genocide of Native
Americans, with its oppression of black people who slavery to
the present, with its demonization of immigrants.
(10:02):
The very things that define the nature of this country.
What they can't look at is the mirror of what America is.
These people's hatred for this country and its real history is
so deep that when confronted, they will side not with the
fighters for liberation and freedom, but with the slave
(10:24):
owning aristocratic shits who waged war to destroy the
Republic just so they can continue in the ownership of
human beings. That's how much these people
hate America. They're heroes are the likes of
Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis,
(10:44):
people who, under any system of justice, would have been shot
for what they did. Slavery was legal in this
country, and the fact that it's even being talked about in this
way, it's like these people stand on the side of history
where it's completely acceptableto whip and shackle and buy and
sell human beings. I think it's also, in the case
(11:06):
of his statement about history, a kind of selective embrace of
certain types of history. Yeah, he wants everybody to just
move on, get over it. We have new chapters to turn to.
Every people have their history and their mythology.
You have the English still goingon about the Norman conquest of
England from 1066. That's 1000 years ago and they
(11:30):
still talk about it as the defining thing of what is
England. You have Zionist claiming that a
God they don't even believe in promised them the land 3000
years ago, right? But God forbid, God forbid that
we remember the snatching of countless human beings from
their homelands in Western Africa, the slaughter of God
(11:50):
knows how many in the Middle Passage, the brutalization and
enslavement of many millions in the New World.
And that only ended in the USA 160 years ago in 1865 when these
racist shits raised the Confederate flag.
Shrill voices will come out to claim that this is our heritage.
Suddenly all this stuff about moving on and forgetting the
(12:12):
past and having to go forward gets thrown out the window.
Suddenly they like to embrace history because what they really
like is to embrace a system thattrot over a whole people for
hundreds of years and held them in bondage.
What this is about in the end isnot arguments over history, but
this is about in the end is thatthey are justifying the
(12:34):
unjustifiable of the past so they can justify the
unjustifiable in the present. Yeah, and I think your point
about the history of the Confederacy too.
It's like, how often do they have to defend the Confederate
monuments and defend the Confederate flag?
But then if black people are talking about slavery for 400
(12:55):
years, which is just embedded inthis social system, it's no, we
can't talk about that. History has nothing to do with
today, but we can embrace the Confederacy.
There's also this element from Elon Musk's mouth that sounds
like poor, poor white people. That's his position, that's his
position. In South Africa, you have an
administration that is eager to kick out every immigrant they
(13:15):
can get their hands on, undocumented or documented.
Meanwhile, it's opened up the USto quote UN quote, refugees,
white refugees from South Africawho are facing a supposed white
genocide. It's absurd, but it's just an
indication of how deep the racist bigotry runs.
And I think what the argument isfundamentally trying to say is
(13:37):
that black slavery in America was unremarkable.
And because it's unremarkable, that means that white people are
being treated unfairly with policies like DEI and anything
else that they think is racist against them.
I'm glad that you raised the DEIstuff, because this is obviously
(13:57):
in the context of repeated and concerted attacks against
anything deemed woke or DEI, which is perceived to mainly
benefit black people. First of all, these things are
highly criticized. DEI and woke ISM as corporate
tokenism, and I think we share alot of that criticism.
It's really a way to put black faces in high places and pretend
(14:19):
like there's a level of equalitythat doesn't actually exist in
this economic system. DEI, What it really represents
is liberal America's failure of the promise of integration in
the wake of the civil rights movement.
They don't even talk about integration anymore.
They call it diversity, which basically means we need to fill
some quotas and we're done. And we need to worry about it
(14:41):
just in our particular school orin our particular job or
whatever it is that that the DEIoffice is involved in, and we're
done with it. There's no sense of society as a
whole needs to be overturned to fight for the equality and the
full integration of black peoplein this country.
Now, of course, they're being attacked from right wing racist
forces and we oppose the attacks.
(15:03):
Yeah, like their view is that anything that is even a
semblance of diversity, equity or inclusion is a bad thing.
Exactly. Exactly.
So they're not attacking DEI because they think it's
insufficient. They're attacking DEI because Oh
my God, how could something evenbe perceived to be supporting
black people? But to the main point, if you
(15:24):
look at the history of this country, the question of black
oppression has played the central role.
It has been in many ways the motor force of what makes this
country. Work.
Yeah. And you raised this earlier when
you were talking about the end of the Civil War 160 years ago.
Slavery ended with the defeat ofthe Confederacy in 1865.
(15:46):
But this idea of race and of racial hierarchy obviously did
not end. And those 400 years of servitude
became the fabric of this society.
And I think it's worth reiterating what actually
happened since the Civil War. This is going to be an
incredibly brief account of thatthat does nothing justice except
(16:06):
to just point you into hopefullycertain directions that those
who are interested can learn more about.
But if in a in a way, it's summarized by WEB Du Bois, the
great sociologist, thinker and cultural critic who wrote the
book Black Reconstruction in America in 1935.
And then there he has this phrase where he says the slave
went free, stood A brief moment in the sun, then move back again
(16:31):
towards slavery. The whole weight of America was
thrown to color cast. I think that summarizes the post
Civil War history. So the slave went free.
That's the end of slavery. The defeat of the guys that
these people celebrate, the defeat of the Confederacy stood
a brief moment in the sun. And that would be the promise of
(16:55):
equality that was vehemently fought for by the black masses,
the former slaves, as well as their allies in the Radical
Republicans construction. Well, not former abolitionist.
I mean, slippery is over now. If you want a couple of names, I
would say the two who stand out the most would be Thaddeus
Stevens in the House and CharlesSumner in the Senate.
(17:17):
But they weren't the only ones. These were, by American
standards, very radical politicians.
So that's the brief moment in the sun.
That brief moment in the sun wasbetrayed and crushed.
And by 1877, Reconstruction was no more.
In a lot of ways it ended about 5-6 years before that in most
southern states, but it's official end is 77.
(17:40):
Then move back towards slavery and that would be Jim Crow.
Within the two decades after Reconstruction, you had the
consolidation of the sharecropping system in the
South, and with it came the hardened Ridgid segregation of
Jim Crow, which was legalized in1896 in the Plessy V Ferguson
(18:03):
decision in the Supreme Court. And Plessy versus Ferguson was
separate but equal. Exactly.
That is the separate but equal decision which made Jim Crow
basically the law of the land for any state that wished to
implement it. In the South.
Well for any state that wished to implement it's just the ones
in the South were the ones that wished to implement it and then
he concludes that sentence. The whole weight of America was
(18:25):
thrown to color cast. And while things have changed
since then, that clause is absolutely true because with the
defeat of Reconstruction, what happened was the consolidation
of black people as an oppressed color cast in America at its
bottom rung. So you had the Great Migration,
and that was in the early 1900s.That continued for a couple of
(18:49):
decades, and that represented black people trying to escape
the sharecropping system. And many do escape it.
And where they're going is to the North to enter the factories
and becoming a crucial part and in time, the most militant and
radical part of the American working class.
You had the civil rights movement coming off the Korean
War and in the midst of the Vietnam War, which fought
(19:11):
against the legalized segregation of black people.
And how did the government respond to that?
So because of the struggles, there was a move to do away with
Jim Crow. But just like with the end of
slavery, there was sharecroppingand the rise of Jim Crow.
So with the end of Jim Crow camethe rise of mass incarceration.
(19:34):
And that rise of mass incarceration coincided with the
mass deindustrialization of the United States, which basically
closed the avenue of decent paying unionized jobs for black
workers. And that was how a lot of black
families made it into this so-called middle class.
And instead you got America's Dungeons.
In 1980 the prison population was around 330,000.
(19:58):
Within 20 years, it was 2 million.
Yeah, that historical thread is so important, and I know it was
telescoped. We can provide a bibliography
for this episode and some key reading material.
But I think this is also touching on, I know in the last
few years at least, Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim
(20:19):
Crow became very popular. And one of the things that she
opens her book with is cast and the dominance of the one drop of
blood rule, which defines your role in society and how the
color line dominates. She also punctures this idea
that we live in a colorblind society.
And her point about mass incarceration being the new Jim
(20:44):
Crow, I think is a popularized way of explaining some of this
for people who want to read moreabout it.
This idea that institutions likeslavery and Jim Crow appear to
die, but are reborn in a new form.
Yeah. It's to reiterate a point that I
think is in some ways captured in the negative by the Nation
(21:07):
magazine. In 1877, right at the end of
Reconstruction, The Nation magazine, you know, the same
liberal magazine that exists to this day, published an article
celebrating the end of Reconstruction.
And what they wrote is the Negrowill disappear from the field of
national politics. Henceforth, the nation as a
nation will have nothing more todo with him.
(21:31):
Jesus, that's vile. That's really sad.
Well, not only is it vile, it's wishful thinking.
It doesn't happen that way. They can pretend away black
oppression, but it is in their face, inescapable.
And if I were to put it in a phrase, I would say America
hates black people like a sick man hates his own lung with
(21:54):
every breath. He needs it to sustain him, but
it also reminds him of his ailment.
That's what America sees in the black man.
The thing that keeps it alive isthe thing that holds up the
mirror of what a vile creature it is.
I think this is also why some ofwhat we're seeing today with the
(22:15):
fortification of slavery is somewhat unremarkable, just in
the sense of how much ever sinceslavery there has been a
romanticization of slavery. There's been an attempt to
prettify it. Gone with the Wind is a perfect
example. There were these false
narratives created after the Civil War to serve all these
(22:38):
political agendas. Oh the honor of the Confederacy.
It was a lost cause, the white slave ocracy where these
benevolent masters or the Civil war was just about states race.
And then all the caricatures that emerged that attempted
during the slave times, which continued to try to present
(23:00):
blacks as always being inferior,incapable of caring for
themselves and just grateful fortheir masters.
The Uncle Tom, the Mammy, presenting this as though it was
just the happy slave in this mutually beneficial
relationship. That's a very good point.
I just want to add to it. You've mentioned Gone with the
Wind. The other one is Birth of a
Nation, released in their early teens under the Woodrow Wilson
(23:23):
administration. It's telling that this was
America's first blockbuster film.
It's it's a celebration of the slave ocracy and a denigration
of black people and also their allies.
I was thinking about this film before we started today.
And one of the reasons I mentioned Thaddeus Stevens
earlier is because there is a white character who is portrayed
in that movie. And it's obviously Thaddeus
(23:46):
Stevens, but they don't name him.
And he is portrayed as this venal, horrible, disgusting
person. But one of the reasons is
disgusting is because he hangs out with and cavorts and is
friendly with Black. People, people, right?
On an equal footing, it was played at the White House.
This was not just some movie that was a blockbuster on its
(24:07):
own. Woodrow Wilson played it in the
White House and screened it there, and it caused a or helped
'cause it was part of a whole resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.
Exactly and. In the United States.
And of course, all the characters who were playing
black people, who were all rapists and criminals in the
(24:27):
movie, were all white people on blackface running around and
chasing women. This is a movie that a lot of
people know about because it's actually taught in film school,
but I don't know if the historical significance is
really brought home in the same way as it should be.
I don't know either. I know for a fact that Gone With
the Wind escapes that historicalsignificance all the time.
(24:50):
People see it as just some kind of Southern romance movie with
this war thing happening in the background.
I don't know how many times I'veheard people say, oh, that's my
favorite movie, So lovely and beautiful and it's like.
What company do you keep Ezra? This also connects to our next
clip, which is ACNN debate with the fitness instructor Biggest
(25:15):
Loser host Jillian Michaels, where she presents white people
basically as the victims. Slavery's ancient It has nothing
to do with race. Only a few white people held
slaves. So stop bullying them.
Stop pretending like this has anything to do with black
people. So let's take a listen.
(25:36):
Have you looked at two of the things?
Yeah. Slavery.
Yeah, slavery was a bad thing, that.
Was to talk about OK, like he forgot he's not white washing
slavery so he's not. No, he's not.
And you cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just
one race, which is pretty much what every single exhibit does.
But let's talk about the fact that when you lose anti slave,
(25:56):
let's talk about the fact that slavery.
Slavery in America was. Only less than 2% of white
Americans owned slaves. But it was a system of white
supremacy. You know, as the slavery is
thousands of years old, you knowwho slave owners and American
first race by the end first race.
I'm very surprised that you're stronger to.
Litivize. I'm really surprised.
(26:17):
Do you realize that, Gillian? I'm surprised that you're trying
to litigate who was the beneficiary of slavery, and I'm
not. What I'm trying to tell you is
the context of American history.In the context of American
history, what are you saying is incorrect by by saying that it
was white people oppressing black?
People. Single thing is like Oh no no,
no, this is all because white people bad and that's just not
(26:41):
the truth. Like for example, every single
exhibit I have a list of every single once.
Like people migrated from Cuba because white people bad, not
because of past. Yes, no, it's in there.
That's what I'm saying. You don't actually know what's
in there. Do you know that when you walk
in the front door, the first thing you see you have gave?
(27:02):
For folks listening, this clip has been circulated online and
gotten a lot of comments, but this is CNN rolling out its most
esteemed historians in debate. Yeah, if you're if you're not
familiar, Jillian Michaels is America's foremost MAGA lesbian.
Oh, is she? I did.
I was not familiar. I'll be honest with you, I
(27:22):
didn't know who Jillian Michaelswas before I saw this clip.
MAGA lesbian. That kind of rolls off the
tongue. MAGA lesbian.
It does. It does.
But I can't say that my life is richer for having known her.
I mean, there's an element here,even though it's a very serious
subject we're talking about, it's very hard to take these
people seriously because. Because they're stupid, they're
(27:44):
ignorant, but that's the least of their problem and their their
problem is not ignorance. You can always fix ignorance.
They have already determined what the conclusion is before
they've even cracked open a bookor learned anything.
They've already determined that white people are the eternal
victims of apparently slavery too.
I mean modern slavery on the 2%.It's irrelevant.
(28:08):
It's an utterly irrelevant figure for two reasons.
One, she's counting the whole ofthe US white population when she
gives that 2%. Well, slavery was not in the.
Entire. US, yeah.
By the time you're talking aboutthe the height of American
slavery, it was a Southern institution, even though its
impact was nationwide. So first of all, you got to take
(28:30):
that out. But second of all, and more
importantly, the reason it's an irrelevant statistic is that
it's not about the numbers. It's actually kind of the point.
This tiny class of nasty, vicious aristocrats held
millions of people in bondage and controlled the whole
Southern system and by extensionthe whole fucking country until
(28:50):
he had to be overthrown through a social revolution called the
Civil War. You don't have to be numerous a
number. It's the system of chattel
slavery which was run by these people.
So, you know, there's no point arguing about 2%, three percent,
5%. God, she's an idiot.
And, and, and not only is she anidiot, the people arguing
(29:11):
against her are also idiots. But I want to come back to.
That. I don't know that I would have
done better, but I don't think their arguments are very
effective. Because if you simply pose this
as a question of blacks are oppressed, which is absolutely
true, and whites benefit from that oppression, I think you're
(29:32):
basically feeding the arguments of the racist.
And more importantly than that, you're simply wrong.
That's not how history works. That's not what happened, even
in the South. So much of this feels like an
emotional response to me. It feels like people are angry
and upset that they're vilified or they feel that their race is
(29:55):
vilified. And I think that also that
frustration is compounded by theeconomic crisis because telling
a bunch of people who are barelymaking it that they are, quote,
UN, quote, privileged through their white privilege, I think
it's really hard to swallow. I think this argument in this
line about white privilege, which really amounts to all
(30:15):
white people benefit from the oppression of black people, is a
bunch of bullshit. A denies one of the central
points of the purpose behind theoppression of black people,
which is to depress the conditions for all people at the
bottom of society, all working people and others at the bottom
of society. And it's simply not true.
(30:38):
If you look at the history of, for example, the South under
slavery, conditions for the poorwhites there were pretty bad.
Now that doesn't mean that the poor whites in any way, shape or
form sympathized with the black slaves.
Quite the opposite. In some ways, they were very
hardened in their racism becausethey saw the vicious ideology of
(31:00):
white supremacy as basically theonly cudgel that they could have
over the black population. What separated them from blacks
is they were free. The black population was
enslaved, and why were they free?
And the black population was enslaved because they're part of
the master race, basically. And so they held on to that.
But the fact that they are racist and deniably racist
(31:24):
doesn't change the fact that slavery actually made life worse
for them in an economic and material sense.
So let's look at a couple of examples.
It degraded all labor in the South.
Slavery did by suppressing wagesand limiting economic growth,
and created an incredible stigmain the South, social stigma that
(31:47):
equated manual work with the lowly status of slaves.
Why would a plantation owner paya white man wages to do some
work in a field when he has a slave to do that work?
The plantation system required massive use of land and stood in
vehement opposition to industrialization.
(32:09):
You had basically no jobs. Labor itself was vilified.
Since then, every attack on black people has presaged an
attack on all of working people in America.
If you recognize that black people are today deeply
oppressed as a population, and you think that white people as a
(32:30):
whole benefit and get privilegesout of that oppression, my
question is why are the conditions for white people
getting worse? Yeah, that's an excellent point
too. I think that what's missing from
this discussion and from the overall consciousness out there
is that black oppression is a means to subjugate all of the
(32:52):
oppressed and keep all of the working class in the population
at each other's throats. This idea that any sort of
benefit seen as going to the black population is going to
come at the expense of the hard working working class white
person. This was very much part of the
MAGA mystique. When you were talking, I was
immediately thinking of the welfare queen analogy.
(33:15):
The biggest recipients of welfare were single white
mothers. But the way that it was
presented was that all these black women are popping out
babies so they can get more money and never have to work.
And that was pushed by the government for so long.
It was pushed by the Reagan administration very vehemently.
(33:37):
It was racist, it was vile, and it was meant to demonize black
women in particular. And it was then carried over
into the Clinton administration in the 1990s.
And he finished what Reagan started, which was to, as he put
it into welfare as we know it now.
Once you ended welfare as we know it, a lot of black people
and a lot of black mothers who were on welfare were hurt.
(33:59):
There's no question about that. But so were a lot of white women
who are on welfare. We're also hurt.
That's what I mean. From the sharecropper shack to
the modern warehouse floor, attacks on black labor have
always shaped the conditions forall of Labor.
The strategy is very simple and cruel.
You keep one group dispossessed and underpaid and use their
(34:23):
vulnerability to suppress everybody else.
You can see examples of this throughout history in the US,
including even up to this day with the gig economy, the use of
prison labor, the massive growthof the prison industry.
All of these things point to howthe oppression and attacks on
(34:44):
black people presage a greater attack on the working class as a
whole. Now within that attack, yes,
black people will get it the worst, as is always the case,
but not a lot of people are going to do very well.
That's why even though you have a lot of white workers who may
think otherwise, who are racist in their hearts and racist in
(35:06):
their core, the oppression of black people doesn't do them any
good. It actually works against them,
even if they don't understand that who it does good for, who
has the privilege, It's the white ruling class.
That's who's got the privilege, and they're laughing all the way
to the bank. Yeah, that's a class
distinction. And I think anytime you have the
(35:26):
tax on any sort of benefits, unemployment benefits or
government or subsidized housingor education or anything like
that, it's obviously going to hit the people at the bottom of
society and those who are the most subjected to the dire
conditions of capitalism. Some of what you were talking
about, Ezra, in terms of the divide and conquer technique
(35:49):
that the ruling class uses to pit people against each other at
the bottom of society, and particularly how the
vilification of black people is used to elevate the position of
the white ruling class. I feel like the government uses
this method against immigrants today to redirect that anger at
the base of society. I wanted to talk specifically
(36:12):
about the 14th Amendment and theattacks on immigrants.
Donald Trump is steadfast on overturning the 14th Amendment
from his first day in office. He issued this executive order
seeking to end the constitutionally guaranteed
right to birthright citizenship.And this is the part in the 14th
Amendment that states that all persons born in the US and
(36:36):
subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the US
and of the state wherein they reside.
I don't know if everyone knows how this is connected to the
Civil War and to slavery, so I'mwondering if you can comment a
little bit about that. The 14th Amendment was ratified
in 1868. It came out of the Civil War,
which had ended three years previously in 65, and what it
(36:58):
stipulated was, as you said, anyone born in the US and under
the jurisdiction thereof has theright of citizenship automatic.
It was ratified in response to the struggles of black people
after freedom for equal rights and citizenship within the
United States. The question of freedom was the
first step. But what happens to those four
and a half million people now that they're no longer slaves?
(37:21):
What position do they occupy legally in the United States?
There were those who wanted colonization, whether to Africa
or to the Caribbean or elsewhere.
There were those who wanted themto have more limited rights and
official status of second class citizenship.
And then there was what the Friedman themselves fought for,
which was full equality and fullcitizenship rights, and again,
(37:41):
what their allies in the RadicalRepublican Party fought for.
That included the right to vote,the right to citizenship, and so
on. What the 14th Amendment did is
it said anybody born in the United States is a citizen, end
of story. The reason that's important is
because there was a previous lawthat defines citizenship as
someone born in the US who is white and was not in condition
(38:05):
of servitude. In other words, you had to not
be a slave, and you also had to be white.
This 14th Amendment took out thereference to servitude and took
out the reference to race. That resolved the question for
the four and a half million slaves.
They became American citizens. Since then, the 14th Amendment
has been crucial for immigrants in the US Somebody moves here,
(38:27):
even if they're undocumented, even if they never get papers.
Their children born in this country are American citizens
automatically. There's no reference to blood.
There's no reference to any of that stuff.
It's a territorial system of citizenship.
That fact that it's now under attack and could very well be
overturned just illustrates how in this country black rights and
(38:50):
immigrant rights will either go forward together or fall back
separately. It is not an accident that this
amendment, born of the Civil War, is now under attack by an
administration that has decided that all of America's ills, all
on the backs of immigrants, undocumented, a document.
I think you've made the point that whenever you are going to
(39:15):
rollback a gain for black peoplethat it's going to go down very
badly for anyone else at the bottom.
You mentioned earlier that blackhistory is intertwined in every
way with American history. Is there such a thing as
American history that's not black history?
No, again, I want to use a quote.
This one is also from Dubois. He's responding to a white who
(39:38):
says this is my country. He says, your country.
How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed, we
were here. Would America have been America
without her Negro people? There is no American black
history without U.S. history, and there is no U.S. history
without black history because the two define each other.
(40:00):
And to pick another quote that Ilove, it's from James Baldwin.
White Americans do not want to know what it means to be black
in America. That they know very well that
without the black man, America could not be America.
Yeah. And I think also just on a more
contemporary level, when you arelooking at what is uniquely
(40:22):
American and what people see as American, it's always the
product of the culture and identity and struggles that
Black people have forged in thiscountry, even if their
contribution is always erased. Yeah, all the best stuff from
America comes from black people.Food, Jazz music, Hip hop, art.
And struggle, I would say, when you're talking about all of
(40:44):
these moments in history that have been instrumental in terms
of the overturning of slavery orthe desegregation of schools,
civil rights, all that stuff is always presented in the history
books as though American democracy and American
government just handed these things over.
Part of that is presenting blackpeople as these recipients of
(41:08):
reform from the top. But all of that stuff came
through very, very intense struggle that was linked to the
struggles of all of the oppressed and benefited all of
the oppressed as well. Yeah, on the culture point, I
completely agree with Cam. Anything that is uniquely
American in terms of a cultural expression, just about anything,
(41:29):
maybe there's one or two things I'm forgetting comes out of the
experience of black people. Think about it.
You had these hundreds of thousands, millions of people
snatched from different parts ofWest Africa.
They spoke different languages, had different traditions, had
different cultures, different religions, all different
backgrounds. And they were thrown into this
land to be slaves. And they not only survived
(41:52):
through their struggles in this wretched institution, they
thrived and developed a unique identity and a unique culture
that was not just a replica of where they were snatched from,
but something fashioned. And you, yes, influenced by the
past, but also influenced by their new surroundings.
And that is the core of Americanculture that the world sees and
(42:15):
understands. You strip the black component
out of American culture. What do you got left?
What you have left is disparate,different immigrant groups
expressing their cultures of where they came from, which
often the US wants to suppress, and basically a vulgarized,
bastardized version of differentexpressions of European culture
(42:38):
that is American culture withoutthe black contribution.
Either they're trying to copy Europe badly, or it's the
expressions of, you know, Mexican culture, Chinese culture
among certain communities. Yeah, all they've got is
mayonnaise and Norman Rockwell. Yeah, as to the point that Lola
raised, and I think it's a very parallel point, and again, it
goes to the heart of why the struggle for Black freedom is in
(43:01):
the interest of the whole of theworking class.
We talked earlier about how the oppression of Black people is
used to attack all of working people, but the inverse is also
true. Every time Black people fought
for their rights, an expanded democracy, like after the Civil
War, like when you have to understand the Civil War
completely redefined citizenship, redefined what the
(43:24):
country is that used to be the United States are, and then you
complete the sense it was done in the plural.
After the Civil War became the United States is became a
singular entity. The struggle for black freedom
did that consolidated the nation, and out of that came the
expansion of democratic rights. Those rights didn't just expand
for black people, they expanded for everybody.
(43:45):
And in fact, they expanded for everybody.
And then they got taken away from black people.
But every single time blacks fought for their rights and one
or one something, they weren't the only beneficiaries.
It's where a lot of the expansion of democratic rights
and benefits of all working people come from.
Yeah, you're talking about a history of incredible resilience
(44:05):
in the face of adversity. So I think talking about this
period that we're in, we're currently in a period of extreme
backlash where there's a lot of talk about so-called
meritocracy. And we know that the present
system is defined by these institutions and policies and
(44:25):
customs and laws and this entiresocial system that prevents
black people from being equal citizens.
I want to just hear from you guys a little bit about that
imprint of slavery today. There's so much to mention here.
The lack of opportunity, poverty, depressed wages, mass
unemployment, segregation, marginalization, ghettoization.
(44:50):
We talked about imprisonment. What are the things that you
both see as how the legacy of slavery is present today and how
it's really part of the fabric of American Society?
One of the policies that I thinkimpacted Black people most and
has the most lasting effect are redlining policies.
These policies stopped Black people from being able to buy
(45:13):
property in certain areas. And as you guys know, one of the
biggest ways to grow generational wealth in America
is through land ownership or property ownership.
So by being frozen out of this opportunity, it's held people
back. And there's been times in
history, in the 1950s, I know also in the 70s, that white
flight was being subsidized by the federal government.
(45:34):
So essentially white people werebeing given a handout and these
opportunities to have lasting wealth passed down through their
families where black people werenot given that opportunity.
Yes, absolutely. This was a very conscious
policy, like you're saying. After the Second World War, the
US economy was very strong coming off the war because it
(45:57):
was the only economy left. And one of the things they did
was destroy the urban centers. Some of them used to be called
salt and pepper neighborhoods because of the distribution of
blacks and whites in those areas.
And basically they subsidized, as you're saying, white flight
into suburbia. So to just give you a figure,
(46:17):
between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed about
$120 billion in new housing loans.
Most of that came after the Second World War with AGI bill
and things like that. That's about 1 1/2 trillion
dollars in today's money. Of that enormous amount of
money, more than 98% went to whites.
(46:41):
So you can imagine the repercussions of this generation
after generation for black people who are excluded from
that generational wealth. The flip side of that was those
who did own homes in what becamethe ghettos saw the value of
their investment plummet. Yeah.
And another area we see the legacy of slavery I think is in
(47:01):
healthcare in America, we had race based slavery.
And I think that one of the things that's exceptionally
horrible about that is it means that there starts to be a
dehumanizing of the class of people who are the oppressed
class. And one of the ways that we see
that still exists today is the language that's used in medical
textbooks. Recently, there was a textbook
that had to apologize for a section they had that was giving
(47:25):
nurses advice on how to administer pain medication.
And in this section, it said that Black people will report
experiencing more pain than they're actually feeling.
And what's kind of embedded in that statement is that they
don't feel as much pain as they say they are or that they feel
less pain. And we know that during slavery,
slaves were used for medical experimentation.
(47:46):
So that's the legacy. That's the residue of this kind
of thinking that we still see today.
And another area that we see a really huge disparity is in
maternal care for Black women. Black women are much more likely
to die during childbirth. They experience more
complications before and after childbirth.
And it's kind of a common occurrence for them to be
dismissed by medical professionals.
(48:08):
It's just really sad to see thatone of the legacies of slavery
are these attitudes towards black women.
Yeah, I always think about how black women in particular face
this triple oppression because they're part of this race color
cast. They're segregated at the bottom
of society and then they're women.
So they're responsible for caring for children and the sick
(48:31):
and the old. And then they're also workers.
So they're exploited as wage slaves.
And what you mentioned, Cam, about the medical abuse against
black women and how that dates back to slavery and seeing black
women as just breeders for the next generation, for the racist
masters. And then you have all the
(48:52):
experimentation and attempts to get rid of the feeble minded and
for sterilization campaigns and stuff like that.
I think that continuity is critical for people to
understand that that's not just random, but actually comes from
the kind of. Mindset.
(49:15):
I think it comes from the economic system.
I don't think it comes from a mindset.
I think it comes from a system that's dedicated and built on
the oppression of black people, and separate and unequal is
still the law of the land, even if it's not law.
I find it personally useful to make a distinction between
(49:35):
racism and racial oppression. Racial oppression is the
systematic denigration, the systematic subjugation of black
people within a capitalist order.
The things you talked about, like redlining these
neighborhoods, we're not going to give them any loans because
black people are there. Racism is basically the racist
(49:58):
attitudes that your average person has towards black people.
One flows out of the other. I think the racial oppression
produces the racism in the same way that the enslavement of
black people produced the concept of race and the lie of
the supposed inferiority of black Africans.
It's not that they enslaved black Africans because they
(50:19):
thought they were inferior. It's that they enslaved black
Africans and then they had to come up with a reason to justify
it. They came up with this idea and
we live with it to this day. And then by the same token, I
think the fundamental driving force of black oppression, it's
the actual structure of Americancapitalism.
It needs it. It can't live without it because
(50:40):
otherwise it wouldn't have the thing that makes it run.
And then that produces a lot of racist attitudes in society.
I have a question for you guys. I feel like if we had this
podcast 10 years ago, I do thinkwe would get some responses from
our audience of but what about Obama?
(51:02):
Do people raise that anymore, oris it just so blatant that that
meant nothing in terms of the actual social conditions of
black people? Cam you have a better connection
with the people than I do so? Well, it was my understanding
that Obama cured racism in this country.
That's that's what I'd heard you.
Word on the street. I'm an old man, so I remember
(51:24):
those days, way back in 2008, nine, when dinosaurs roamed the
Earth. They used to call it post racial
America. They had a whole phrase for it.
And did they write about that inThe Nation?
Yeah, they sure did. They sure did, actually.
Yeah. And the idea was the color bar
has fallen. I think that was the New York
Times headline when he got elected.
(51:45):
I mean, I don't want to go down this road right now, but I will
because that's me. I think Obama won because first
of all, because eight years of Bush will do that to you, but
also because he was named BarackHussein Obama.
In other words, think about it. His mother was a white American.
His father was a black Kenyan. The black side of his family had
(52:08):
no connection to American black struggle, had no connection to
the civil rights movement. The very thing that you think
would have gone against him, hisname and his background, this is
the very thing that I think actually allowed him to become
president. Yeah, but it was also extremely
convenient and very rewarding for the ruling class to have him
(52:29):
as a figurehead. And it gave this prettier image
of American imperialism. You have a cool black man in the
White House who can better dronebomb your population of brown
skinned people. Yeah, I remember he went to
Berlin. I can't remember if it was right
before or right after he got elected.
Some like 200 or 3, 1000 people came out to greet him.
(52:51):
Remember, he won the Nobel PeacePrize.
Oh yeah, that was crazy. That didn't he win the Nobel?
Peace Prize like he had he had it was like 2 months.
Yeah, by existing and. Then became the drone president
of the United States and. And the immigration president?
Yep, and also Whistleblower, Punisher and.
Whistleblower Punisher. And he went personally to
(53:11):
Guantanamo Bay and put an ass whipping on those hoes.
Well. That was the one promise he
actually made because he. Yeah.
He didn't didn't he not follow through on that?
No, no, he didn't close Guantanamo.
That was the one promise he made.
Otherwise he ran on these vague notions because he's a very
smart politician. He is a very smart politician,
there's no question, and incredibly smart man.
(53:32):
But the other thing about him isthat I don't think should be
forgotten. I think the combination of Bill
Clinton and Barack Obama have been the two most devastating
administrations for black peoplein this country since the Second
World War and for the working class as a whole.
But I'm going to concentrate on black people here.
(53:53):
We already talked about a coupleof examples.
We talked about welfare, as we know with Clinton.
There's the crime bill, which Biden used to brag.
I wrote the damn bill. That was the mechanism for
increasing the prison population.
There was affirmative action. All these things were attacked
under the Clinton administration.
The Obama administration, if youremember, took power right as
the 2008 financial crisis was taking off, or had taken off,
(54:17):
and he led the bailouts of all the banks, meanwhile, the very
people who were the victims of these predatory lenders.
Or those people. Right.
A lot of them black, but also poor whites, Latinos, others.
They got fucked. They lost everything and nobody
(54:37):
bailed them out. They just went into the streets
and lost home and work and everything.
That was the Obama administration, besides joining
every country that he can get his hands on.
That's the hallmark of the Obamaadministration, and the impact
of that on the black population in this country was devastating
and still felt to this day. But we don't love anybody who
(55:06):
doesn't love. Us.
And that's the conclusion of Part 1 of this episode on how
slavery is being whitewashed andwe don't move on.
We got more to say. Join us for Part 2 to hear how
American slavery was unique and distinct from ancient slavery
and how America's oppression of black people served as a
blueprint for the Nazi Nuremberglaws and apartheid South Africa.
(55:26):
Stay tuned and make sure to rateand review us and send your
thoughts to unwashedunruly@gmail.com.
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