"Black AF History" author on whitewashing the past: "They have tried every way possible to erase us"

As an '80s baby that carved my way through the public school system, I was taught that early settlers in America were brave explorers looking for new opportunities, and that the captured Black Africans, who provided the labor that built this country, were just mindless slaves. I also learned that an early pioneer like Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant thinker, which made him an honorable president.  Michael Harriot, host of the podcast "Drapetomaniax: Unshackled History" explained the dangers of a single person narrative and the incomplete, in accurate way we are educated on a recent episode of "Salon Talks." 

Harriot is most known for his column at The Grio and MSNBC and CNN commentary. His new book "Black AF History" details America’s history in the most true and unapologetic way possible. Readers of Harriot’s book will learn to approach history from a vantage point opposite of the oppressor, meaning that those early settlers in America weren’t necessarily brave explorers, but land-stealing cannibals, yes they robbed Native Americans and ate brown leather belts in addition to fetuses to survive those blistering cold winters before they learned to work the land. And that the Black mindless slaves were doctors, educators and leaders in their homeland, not just laborers. And that as Thomas Jefferson wasn’t just a president, but also a slave-owning rapist. Knowing the complete truth changes everything. 

You can watch my "Salon Talks" episode with Michael Harriot here or read a Q&A of our conversation below to learn more about new episodes of the "Drapetomaniax" podcast, the real history of America and the future of book banning.  

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Let's start with the title. I was wondering if you wanted to call it “Black As F**k History” and the publishing company was like, "Well, we can't say f**k on the front of a book."

I never wanted to call it anything but “Black AF History.” The publisher was wondering, "Do we want to call it ‘Black AF History’?" I was like, "That needs to be the name." I've been using that as a motto for over a decade. In poetry as a writer, I called myself The Black One and I was always Black AF. If you're wondering which Michael? The Black one. It was never a choice of any other thing that I wanted to do except “Black AF History.” So the publisher was with it, even though their only question was, because I started this project four years ago, they wondered, “Well, will 'Black AF' still be a thing by then or will 'AF' be a thing?”

Yeah, we're going to be Black AF forever.

Right. Exactly.

It don't wash off.

Yeah, I don't think so. So yeah, it was always “Black AF.”

I was reading the book and I was getting to just learn a little bit more about your personal story because I've been following your work for a while, and I was like, wow, this guy is so smart probably because he was homeschooled. What role did that play in your journey? 

Instead of having to just swallow and regurgitate information and memorize stuff, my education was largely self-directed so it made me think critically and examine stuff because there wasn't a template for how I was taught. I've been thinking about this lately because I think part of the reason they don't want us to talk like that about Jefferson or Lincoln is because they teach us about Lincoln and Jefferson and George Washington when we're in the second grade, and then when we get to high school or maybe middle school, we learn that they were slave owners and all of that, so we can't comport the two things. I think that just learning about Black people from the beginning, I realized, oh, that's why, because they don't learn about really what this country did to Black people.

They don't get it.

If they learn at all, they don't learn until they're older, so they've already idealized this valorized idea of America in their head and they can't comport the two things.

This book disrupts the narrative that they want us to subscribe to.

Right. Because one of the things about their narrative is that they try to make it seem like we're being mean to the founders. No, you don't have to say shady s**t about the founders. You can just show how incompetent they were. They don't even have to be evil because they were so incompetent. 

One of the points of this book is that when you think about Black people and how we survived in this country, one of the most remarkable things is how incompetent white people have been throughout the history of America in trying to kill us. They have tried every way possible to erase us from the fabric, from the promise of this country, and they've been largely ineffective.

They're cooking up something new right now.

Right, they're going to give us some reparation bucks laced with cholera or something like that. 

And Jordans that explode on your feet.

It's going to be something, but our ability to survive and thrive is remarkable. We don't have to make a villain out of them because you could just tell their story, and the viewer or the reader or the listener can make their own decision.

Reading your book, I learned about 1503, which is when the first Black person, Juan Garrido, came to America. 

There were Black people – it wasn't just Juan Garrido – and then 1619. There was a bunch of Black people here even a century before 1619. 1619 is when the first English colonist brought enslaved Africans here, which is an arbitrary date because it matters because white people are important. That's the only reason it would matter. 

Juan Garrido came here with the first European to step foot on the continent from Europe, and he came here with Ponce de León to a place. They thought it was an island; they named it La Florida or Florida. He was the first African-American, if you count stepping foot as being an African-American. If not, then the first expedition brought enslaved Africans here. They revolted in 1525, drove the white people back out of this country, and they stayed. That was nearly a century before 1619.

Then you have Esteban de Moor or Mustafa Azemmouri. He traveled more of this country probably than any other human being ever on the face of this continent. He lived here, traveled from South Carolina to Florida to Texas all the way through New Mexico, the first person to cross the Sierra Madres. As a matter of fact, the Pueblo people say, they have a saying, “the first white man we ever saw was a Black man.” The history of Black people starts before 1619. This history of Black people in America starts before 1619. But if we're going to categorize America as an English colony and what we evolve from, I think that's why people look at the 1619 date as significant.

One of the biggest misconceptions about slavery in general is when people say there were slaves in Africa too, as if slavery in Africa and slavery in America was the same thing.

Yeah. So that's another thing we talk about in the book, the distinction between — because what is a slave? Is a person in a forced marriage a slave? Is an indentured servant or agricultural worker who isn't paid? — so what we talk about is race-based constitutional servitude that reduces human being to property. That was the American form that we kind of euphemized as slavery. 

What we did in America was different because whatever you think about the Africans who sold slaves or whatever, or who participated in it, first of all, no one on the face of the planet could have ever conceived of what they were doing with the Black people here. 

The other thing is, if Africa was in slavery, Africans were enslaving Africans and it was just as bad because of the Africans, then why wasn't it as bad over there? Why didn't they have a big slavery economy, for instance? Because we grew the same stuff over here that they grew over there. That's where we got rice from. You have to wonder, why didn't it take over Africa like it did [here]? Why didn't fireworks evolve into the deadliest weapon, gunfire, in Asia until white people showed up? Why wasn't there an international coca leaf, cocaine distribution network until white people showed up in South America? You know what I'm saying? You could say, well, there were coca leaves there and the Chinese invented fireworks, and the Africans were enslaving people, but it never gets real bad until the white people show up.

Different parts of Africa, some of what you put in the book and somehow already knew, you can marry your way out of it, you can join another tribe, you can work your way out of. You're not being hung from a tree and having your baby slit out of your belly.

And the important part is that those people were eternally involved in internal conflicts. So they were prisoners of war who initially were sold to Europeans. But when the Europeans show up, they convinced the Africans to say, "Look, if you just catch people, you steal people and sell them to us, then we could have an international economy of human trafficking." That's what the difference is between a slave and property, the thing that Europeans introduced to the Western hemisphere basically.

One of the sections that I really, really enjoyed was reading about Jemmy from Angola. Can you introduce us to Jemmy?

Yeah. First of all, I think he's probably one of the most significant figures in the history of America. So Jemmy was an Angolan warrior in South Carolina who started what we now call the Stono Rebellion in 1739. The 1739 Stono Rebellion sparked the Negro Act of 1740. Every slave code, Jim Crow law is derived from this one dude who started the Stono Rebellion. It is responsible for stuff like saying human beings are property. It's responsible for Black people can't gather groups of three or more. It's responsible for stuff like outlawing reading because Jemmy was literate. It's responsible for them saying, "Hey, we got to teach them about this Christian religion," because Jemmy worshiped African gods. 

Almost all of the stuff that we see, all of the slave laws, were adoptions of the Negro Act of 1740, and that was specifically because of this Angolan warrior who basically roamed the countryside and slaves joined in and they killed every white person they saw. It was called the Stono Rebellion, and it's still significant to this day.

A conversation that I think needs to be talked about in schools is the Haitian Revolution. They'll talk about the American Revolution, which ended in a republic. It doesn't even really feel that way if you're Black. If you're poor, you definitely don't feel that. The French Revolution ended in a dictatorship, but the Haitian Revolution ended in a pure democracy. 

Right. The other thing about the Haitian Revolution is its impact on America. The Haitian Revolution was essentially the largest slave revolt in the history of the world, and they won. They beat the French Empire, Napoleon and them. A ragtag group of Black people beat Napoleon's army and got their freedom and they beat them so bad that the French said, "Hey, look, we're going to get out this slavery game. Hey, you all want this land?" That land was the Louisiana Purchase. 

So the Haitian Revolution doubled the size of the United States. We never talk about that. It's why Thomas Jefferson and the founders were really afraid at the outset because they thought . . . Haiti's right there. Haiti isn't far from America. They said, "Well, what if that kind of revolution spreads in our country? So yeah, we got to get this land. We got to have this international policy to basically separate Haiti from the rest of the world and make them pay France reparations." The United States enforced that policy, which is the reason Haiti is poor today. Their national economy has been going to pay reparations to France until 2017, and the United States enforced that. 

Oh, the United States is enforcing reparations, huh? Wow.

Wait until you hear about Citibank, the bank that collected them. So yeah, all of that is in this book, man, and I think it's important because it's part of the whitewash history that we never get to hear.

And then it's also the other parts of the book that were really just inspiring and felt good to read, like about Charles Case. First stand-up.

Yeah. Charles Case was a mixed race person. His father was a banjo player and taught him how to play banjo. When he first went on stage, the string broke and he was so nervous that every time he would get to the crescendo of his joke, he would swing his arms because he didn't have that banjo string. Well, that is what they called it, the Charles Case punchline. That's what we know as a punchline now. 

He was the first person really to get on stage without music or a band and just talk about himself and make people laugh. They didn't even have a name for it, even though we now call it stand-up comedy. They called him a monologist, and the man who talked about his father, which is the worst motto ever, the man who talks about his father.

I hate to say it, but we know this book is going to be banned. At this point, how do we push back and fight against that?

White people have always tried to ban Black history. What we really don't realize is our parents were the first ones who actually learned Black history. They didn't teach anything in school before the generation before me. But I think the way to push back on it is to object to the white history. If they don't want you to learn about Black people, then you should be up there saying, "I don't want my child learning about no slave rapist named Thomas Jefferson. That makes my children uncomfortable." It makes you uncomfortable to learn about these lies, like Thomas Jefferson was anti-slavery when he never freed a slave a day in his life and chased on a judge until the day he literally died. We should be objecting to our children being injected with that white nonsense for 12 years in the public system.

The only way Thomas Jefferson would free a slave is it had to be one of his kids.

Yep, yep, yep. I mean, you think about how mean you got to be to not free the man who invented macaroni and cheese. Because Thomas Jefferson's enslaved person invented macaroni and cheese. Think about, “Nah, bro, you got to stay. I know you did that. Woo, it's good. But go back to the barn now.”

It’s hard for me, especially looking at how fractured our government has been for a long time, to see a clear end in sight. When does it stop? 

I don't know if it ever stops. This is why I think it doesn't stop. And this is, to me, the lesson of this book. When you look at Black people in America, think about us coming here with nothing, no language, no family, no possessions, not even a culture, not even anything, and in a relatively short period of time, the blink of an eye, we own their a*s. 

Whiteness has given people every privilege that an economy, a political society, a social class can have. They had every privilege, and we had nothing. In this short period of time, they're so scared that they want to ban affirmative action. They're so scared that they want to ban our history. They're so scared that they want us to believe that slavery was nice and that they taught us the things that we did for this country for free. That's how scared they are and that's how powerful our history is, and that's how important it is to know about your past because they see how empowering it is, and that's why they want to stop it. I think the lesson of this book and the reason why all of this is important is because it is a danger to the status quo. When people know, they can never forget.

I have one question about craft. This book is very smart and extremely easy to read. There's a quote that says, "Easy reading is really hard writing." Was it difficult for you to get it in this language, where somebody at Harvard could pick it up and enjoy it and somebody at high school can do the same?

Well, I think if there's anything that I do that has value is that I've always been able to do that, take complex subjects, break them down and make them easy to understand whether it was a professor or as a writer or as a journalist. I think that's the thing about this book. The reason I'm doing stuff with you and going places is because I know if you get this book, you make it cool and people get it and they open it, they can digest and read it. 

It ain’t no history book like your social studies book in the 11th grade. It's a really good exercise in storytelling. All I want people to do is to get it because if they open it and see these stories, it's not like some academic prose or some really smart guy sitting from the mountaintop telling you about what happened in 1722. It is us talking to each other.

Tell us about “Drapetomaniax.”

Drapetomaniax, it comes from a title that was an actual medical term for mental illness that supposedly described Black people's desire to want to be free. But supposedly, this was a real mental illness. It was in medical books until the 1920s. What we did is we took some of these unknown stories and we tell them in the most interesting and funny way possible. It's not us sitting down and saying, "And in 1922." No. We actually get celebrities to kind of act out the stories. 

We have an episode about Ida B. Wells, but instead of talking about Ida B. Wells' beefs, we do her as a battle rapper. In the book, we talk about who was the first African American. Well, we do that as a game show on “Drapetomaniax” with Charlamagne tha God and Brandon Victor Dixon. We take these ideas. We do a slave revolt as the "First 48." We have people from the culture coming in to act out and give you a new funny version of history. It's on every podcast platform and it comes out every Tuesday.