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Listen Again: Michael Harriot on this moment for Black history
00:28:36
We're revisiting our episode with award-winning journalist and writer Michael Harriot, who spoke with Geoff Bennett about his best-selling book, "Black AF History," and what we can learn from Black history today.
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody. Jeff Bennett here. We wanted to let you know that Settle in is taking a brief summer break, but we plan to be back with new episodes very soon. In the meantime, please enjoy one of our favorite conversations. And as always, you can subscribe to Settle in wherever you get your podcasts. Michael, Harriet, thanks for making time for us. We appreciate it.
- [00:23]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [00:25]
A
You opened this book with the story of what's called the Middle Room. This was a sanctuary of sorts in your grandparents. How did that space shape not just what you learned about history, but how you learned to question history?
- [00:40]
B
That room was, you know, in a house that my grandfather built, and before I was born, he lined it with shelves. And so it was not just kind of my mother and my family's library, but all of the members of our houses. My aunts and uncles, when they were growing up, they deposited their books there too. And so I got to college, kind of see what they were reading, what generations before me were reading. And because I was homeschooled and my education was largely self directed and we were always voracious readers, it gave me a chance to time travel in sort of a way through the minds of my family, through people who came before me, and through people I didn't even know. My grandfather died before I was born, so it gave me a chance to absorb that history. And it was also a gathering spot where we played games and sat and listened to the rest of the family members tell stories. And so that room was kind of a formative place for my intellectual discovery and my ability to tell stories.
- [01:52]
A
A space that shaped your worldview. You write in this book that American history is white history except for this narrative. What does it mean to unwind? Rather than simply add black figures to an existing narrative, we view history through
- [02:09]
B
the dominant narratives in America. That's a white narrative. It reinforces the mythology of America and it kind of ignores some other groups. Right. And I wanted to look at America and what happened in America through the eyes of black people. So, for instance, during the American Revolution, right. That really wasn't a concern for most of the black people in America. They were only concerned about, hey, how can I get free? At this time, they weren't concerned about the price of tea or about taxation without representation. They had wholly other concerns. And that's the way I wanted to look at history, what America was like through the eyes in the communities where black people live.
- [02:59]
A
There's so much reverence around America's founding story. And your take on Jamestown stands out because it was so irreverent and biting. And you portray the English settlers not as these heroic figures, but as these sort of bumbling founders. Tell me more about that.
- [03:17]
B
Yeah, well, first of all, like, of the 109 people who came here, there were nine survivors. They cannibalized each other. They starved to death because they ate all their provisions. They didn't know how to plant. They thought they could like climb in the tree and see the Pacific Ocean. They thought there would be diamonds in the rivers. Remember, these were investors. People came here to make money. They weren't like adventurers. They weren't people who explored other nations. And they perished because of their incompetence. And that reframing objectively, right, Instead of a mythology of these rugged individualists who came here looking for freedom, we know that that's not what they came here for. And to tell that truth, not just through the eyes of black people, but through an objective lens is important.
- [04:11]
A
And then there's what transpired in 1619, which gets a lot of attention now because of the book. But you look at this not as a symbolic moment, but as a structural one. The point at which the American colonies became viable because of slave labor.
- [04:29]
B
And even the term slave labor insinuates that it was like the muscles and the brawn and the hard work of those enslaved people. But it is important to understand the intellectual capacities of these people. The intellectual know how the skills that they brought to this country really kind of made America a viable proposition for the investors in Europe. Right. They didn't have an edible cash crop until the enslaved people in South Carolina start growing rice. And that rice growing culture through language, through the ability to eat and through the average life expectancy that created this country. And not this idea of like white people came here and worked hard and made this country what it was.
- [05:26]
A
How do you help people understand that racial hierarchy wasn't accidental, wasn't unintentional, but that it was actually engineered?
- [05:39]
B
We go through in the book, right, the invention of whiteness. Remember, there wasn't this pan European ethic that gave English people the credit for what Greek people did and the French people credit for what the Romans did until it was created in the Enlightenment era and how it was refined in large part by Jefferson to create this racial hierarchy that still kind of dominates America. And the reason it is important to understand in American history specifically is because when you talk about slavery and all those other countries and what it meant to America, we were a brand new country and it was enshrined in our Constitution. So when we talk about slavery. Slavery has existed in every culture on earth, but a constitutionally enshrined form of human trafficking that reduces human beings to chattel is unique to America, and it is at the foundation of this country.
- [06:46]
A
How do you respond to people who
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B
are
- [06:50]
A
might suggest that your take on this is in some way controversial or in some way a revisionist history?
- [06:58]
B
Well, so if I'm being honest, I fortunately haven't kind of encountered that because no one has ever argued about the contents of the actual history in this book. The only argument against it is, well, why do you have to bring up that version of history? Don't you think that is divisive? And I always wonder what part of the truth is divisive? Right? What part of recognizing everyone's humanity and telling everyone's side of the story is divisive for most black children in America? We've been educated to revere men who are white supremacists. We've been educated to respect men who saw us as less than human. And to tell those children, to give those children a story about their past that shows their humanity, that shows that they are worthy of respect, that shows that their parents, their grandparents, and their great grandparents did great things and contributed to this country is important to me. And I don't think it's divisive. And I think that we can respect all of it. Right. There's never been one side arguing that we shouldn't revere Thomas Jefferson or think that he is a founding father. We are saying that you should contextualize everything that he did. And if you choose to respect the documents and the stuff that he wrote rather than the stuff that he did, that is perfectly fine. But don't hide the stuff that he did and say the stuff that he wrote is all that we should know.
- [08:51]
A
I will say I started following you and your work and your brilliance on Twitter years ago, and then the columns that you wrote for Griot and the Root, and now, of course, this book. What might not come through in this conversation is that the book is really funny. It's hilarious. Why was comedy and having a funny take on this the right vehicle through which to tell this story?
- [09:14]
B
One of my goals was to write this book in the language in which black people speak to each other. Like, I could be at my grandmother's funeral, and if somebody walks in with a crazy hat, my cousin sitting beside me is going to crack a joke. Right? And so I think that was important to kind because learning about black history can be kind of harrowing. It has a weight to it. And so I use that humor to lessen the weight and to make the history more relatable.
- [09:50]
A
How has digital culture shaped your voice? As a historian, as a person who
- [09:56]
B
was homeschooled, I honestly didn't know how little history that people knew, how much mythology most people had absorbed. I never knew that people assumed that school, like what they teach you in school, was all that you were supposed to know of history. Right. I felt like, oh, they just teach us that for the test. But that's not what I'm supposed to think about history. Right. And so the digital culture, seeing, interacting with people around the world and around the country on social media and on the Internet, has allowed me to, one, see how people view history. And the other thing that I think that it's done right is given us the perspectives of other people that we wouldn't have had, and the ability to see other people's values and to experience other people's thoughts and to see other people's experiences is valuable. You know, there's a lot of slopes on social media, but I think that is one of the good things about it.
- [11:06]
A
Yeah. Well, given that you have this sort of outsider's perspective, given your background through homeschool and so on, do you have a sense of why Americans cling so tightly to myth, even when the documentary evidence is so overwhelming on some of these stories that you recount in the book?
- [11:25]
B
So we have to remember that the study of black history, and especially black studies on the university level, it's fairly new. Right. It came of age in the early the late 60s and really blossomed in the 70s. But really, most of the people who taught me and you and most of the people in this country never learned black history. So they had absorbed a whitewashed version, and the people who taught them had absorbed a whitewashed version. I don't want to ascribe this nefarious intention to it. Right. The culture and technology and the knowledge base of the world evolves, but history is the one place where we've been keeping and holding. Like, we revere the old stuff and think that it shouldn't be changed. We should think of Abraham Lincoln in one certain way. We should think of Thomas Jefferson and, you know, what happened in 1776 in one standard way, even though what we know of those times has evolved. But the only way you can keep that myth alive is by reinforcing it through this mythological story that created this country and what we have now.
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A
We're speaking during the 100th Black History Month. As America approaches 250 years, there are books that have been banned, curriculum that has been restricted, museums that are being scrutinized. Why is the fight over history so intense right now?
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B
This is a pattern that has reverberated throughout history, right? It's, you know, you talk about the Lost Cause movement that emerged after the Civil War, right? You talk about the fight over black studies in the 60s. You talk about the same thing happened in the 80s. So we are prone to thinking that we are living or experiencing something unique when there's always been an effort to kind of return to the era of times when white people were comfortable, right? And so I think that is part of it. And I think part of it is backlash, right? You hear MLK talk about it. You hear Frederick Douglass talk about it. You see Du Bois write about it. After every period of the expansion of freedom, there is always this contracting backlash by the majority. And part of what we're seeing is after the greatest protest in American history, the George Floyd summer, we're seeing the backlash to that, right? With this anti woke, anti DEI initiative that has filtered throughout the culture. And I think that's part of it. And I think the combination of those two makes this seem unique, but it's not real.
- [14:31]
A
And it also feels like we're trapped in this 19th century understanding of race in this country where there's this specific duality of whiteness versus blackness. Building on that, though, just for the sake of the question, if in the book you argue that whiteness has always functioned as the gravitational center in this country, in this country's history, what does it look like if blackness then becomes the sun around which everything circulates?
- [14:57]
B
Well, I don't think they're mutually exclusive. So I lived in a black neighborhood and a black, grew up in a black family, attended a black church. So my world was black, but it wasn't exclusionary. Right? So if you grow up in a black world, it doesn't necessarily mean that you want some kind of supremacy. I think that there is, like the creation of whiteness was specifically for that, right? It came with the idea of supremacy. It came with the idea that was exclusionary. And I think that is the difference. But I don't think we have to choose. I think we can live in a world where all cultures are respected or valued. All people, no matter what they look like, no matter what their gender or their sexual orientation. I think that is the goal. Now, the thing about the history of black movements is we've been trying to push this country toward that. We're experiencing the passing of Jesse Jackson, who in 1984, all the stuff that we talk about woke up was in his presidential platform. The expansion of LBG2Q rights. Right. Reparations, expanding health care. All of that was stuff that black culture and black communities was fighting for. We think this anti capitalist, anti billionaire movement is new and woke. And Martin Luther King was working on it when he died. Right. The poor people's campaign was a campaign to fight economic inequality. So what we see of black culture. Right. Has been embracing of all cultures. It's not exclusionary. And I think that's the difference.
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A
Yeah. You can draw a direct line between elements of Bernie Sanders campaign directly to what Jesse Jackson was talking about decades earlier on that point. Who benefits the most from misunderstanding American history?
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B
No one benefits. I think that is the perception that, like, white people will benefit, but they don't. Right. Because they are objectively dumber when they don't understand or don't absorb. Absorb some information. Right. And it's hard to understand, for instance. Right. Why one side of your town, the black side, looks one way. Unless you understand redlining and the New Deal and segregation, you can't understand why some people don't have generational wealth. Unless you understand slavery and Jim Crow and all of that is necessary to fix the problems. Because black people aren't the only ones who are poor. Right. And to fix the problems in society, you have to have more information. And I think that there is this idea that if we just kind of, you know, erase black history, white people will benefit. Now, the people who are privileged will benefit. But there are a lot of poor, white, uneducated white people who would benefit from a society that was more inclusive. And the effort to whitewash that history hurts them too.
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A
What story about black America do you think hasn't been told honestly enough?
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B
One of the stories that hasn't been told enough, and I think we're kind of seeing that today is the story of Reconstruction, you know, after slavery, what black people did from 1865 until the Redemption of America. And that story of the redeemers, I think is very important because it's almost a mirror of what we're experiencing today. Right. These election deniers. Well, that happened in 1876. Right. The Compromise of 1877 was because of election deniers. We're talking about all of the great educational institutions, the HBCUs, that were built during that time. There was no American education system until black people in the south put it in these state constitutions. We're seeing the erasure of it, and we're seeing that because we've never learned it. So I think that is one part of it. And that period after Reconstruction until. Because we learned basically slavery, then we learn a little bit about the 20s, and then we just jumped to the civil rights movement. And that history in between, how black people survived and coped in a tyrannical government and how we upended. It is necessary to understanding the times we're living in today.
- [19:55]
A
So what are some of the takeaways that would be applicable to today's moment?
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B
I think one of the things we should learn is about how regular people in ordinary communities banding together can upend a system of tyranny. When you think about this, the civil rights movement, right. In the history of this planet, the civil rights movement and black people in America are the only group of people on the planet who have ever defeated a tyrannical fascist system without a military or. Or bloodshed or violence. Right? We can learn from that. Right. We can learn how regular people, not billionaires, not a bunch of funding, just regular people sharing and organizing and believing in the same ideals of democracy can affect and change a country. Right? And I think those lessons are very important because, like. But we don't learn the lesson of what came before those marches, the organizing, why they were marching, what they did to prepare for those marches, how they got those communities together, how they shared those ideals. I think those are the things that are important for us to ingest. And because they've been whitewashed out of history, we think that if, like, we just get out on a Saturday and hold some signs in March, that will change this country. And it is noble, but it takes a little bit more.
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A
I wonder, though, given your specific lens and your just incredible point of view, if you see signs of progress that other people might miss.
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B
Right now I do see signs of progress. And I think right now we are seeing a coalition of people that is not just black people, adopt the strategies of inclusiveness and democracy. Right. The progress that we're seeing now, unfortunately, have been instituted by a perilous time. But how fragile this country is, and the idea that we have to work every day toward the America that we mythologized and we think existed, that is progress. And I think this multiracial coalition that we've all dreamed of, from Martin Luther King to Frederick Douglass, I think we're seeing it come closer to fruition in this time right now.
- [22:27]
A
A multiracial coalition. I'm thinking of this in real time. So forgive me. There has always been a pragmatism to black political thought in action in this country. Does that then carry over to what might be this multiracial political coalition that you're describing?
- [22:47]
B
I think there has to be a pragmatism to it. Right. Because of, again, what we talked about earlier. We have to also understand that there'll always be a backlash, and some parts of that multiracial coalition won't feel the backlash. But I think that this gives us the opportunity to educate parts of that multiracial coalition. When we talk about what we saw, for instance, in Minneapolis, like, these are the reforms that black movements have been trying to get people to understand about policing in America from the beginning. Right. And we're seeing, you know, troops being sent into these cities. Whoa. Black people in many black neighborhoods have been kind of living in occupied territories for years. And so I think we have that opportunity right now to kind of educate people so that they can understand that their ideas and their movements aren't new. Like, these are the things that we've been telling them. And it might be an opportunity for them to see not just how to realize a real democracy, but to accept the fact that some of these ideas have existed a long time and they have chosen to. To ignore them.
- [24:15]
A
You know, when you talked about Reconstruction earlier, there's so much about that era that we don't know. When you were researching this book, what were the things that stood out to you? What surprised you?
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B
The things that black people, separately in communities all across this country were formulating that kind of resembled each other, right? From slave revolts to civil rights. You know, we talk about, like, there's always been this battle on what really was the first sit in. And the idea that people in Oklahoma and people in North. In Greenville, North. Greenville, North Carolina, and people in South Carolina were coming up with the same ideas that what if we don't leave? And that the desire for equality and democracy kind of generates the same method of thinking. I think that's one of the things that surprised me. And the other thing that surprised me is how fragile democracy is. We're seeing it wholesale now. But, I mean, remember what happened after Reconstruction. Remember what happened after Plessy vs Ferguson. Remember that the Supreme Court could just say, hey, I mean, black people have no rights, which a white man is bound to respect. Those kind of singular things that makes democracy more brittle. Yet we believe if we all come together and just believe in it real hard, that we can call it a democracy. I think that is some of the things that I've taken away during my research.
- [26:08]
A
If there's a chapter in this book that you could lift out and have included in every history book in this country that school kids are given, what would it be?
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B
Oh, that's a great question. I think the chapter on Reconstruction and the idea that it was the black American Revolution. Right. And what I did is kind of mirror the ideas of the American Revolution and saying that this was black people's chance. There were founding fathers. There was a constitution with ideals. I think that's one. And then there's an excerpt on the Stono Rebellion, which kind of is the genesis of the treatment of black people. Formed our slave laws. It's formed the slave codes. It formed the black codes after 1865, and it reached into Reconstruction and until the Civil Rights movement. I think that's one of the things that we should understand.
- [27:08]
A
Is your book meant to change minds, or is it meant to equip people who already sense that something is missing from the story that America tells itself about itself?
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B
I don't know if it can change minds because, you know, the mythology of America, to believe it and to believe, you know, some of the absurd things that we believe. I don't know if facts can do that. We've seen that, you know, with a certain contingent of this country. What I intended for this book to be is if you've ever been home alone and you heard a sound or you felt a draft, and you turn to someone who was in the room with you and say, hey, did you hear that? And sometimes you feel like you're crazy because you're feeling a thing that no one else has felt or heard or seen. This book was created to make people understand that they are not crazy. You have a value, and no matter if no one else feels it, the thing that you believe about yourself in your value and your humanity and about your history, it is real and it exists, and you are not crazy.
- [28:20]
A
The book is Black AF the unwhitewashed Story of America. Michael Harriot, always great to speak with you. Thanks for making time.
- [28:27]
B
Thank you for having me again.