Sept. 7, 2025
The Whitewashing of American Slavery, Part 1
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
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, the coordinated effort to disappear black chattel slavery and downplay this country's racist legacy.
0:28
I'm your host of today's 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.
0:47
In the latest political effort to prettify America's ugliest truths, Donald Trump went after 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.
1:04
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 downplay the brutality of U.S. history and rewrite the role Black people have played in shaping this country.
1:20
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 citizenship, and the myth that white people are saviors.
1:39
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 about why this is happening.
1:55
There's been this big uptick of major government officials and 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 is happening now?
2:11
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 that's been going on.
So I think this is anti woke backlash.
2:27
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.
2:43
So when I hear all these 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 are two 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 it allows the likes of those who are anti black bigots and anti immigrant bigots and all kinds of backward shit to come to the fore.
3:19
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.
And the vilification of black people is as American as apple pie.
3:36
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 aim also at black people because in this country the question of the oppression of black people is the lightning rod around which all forms of racist reaction will rally.
3:59
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 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.
4:28
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 inhumane treatment and how this system of white supremacy was built on this extraction of bond labor and how this society is predicated on blacks being a supposedly uncivilized inferior race.
4:53
The idea that no, museums can't talk about this, it's to erase that history.
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 is of their own making.
5:20
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?
5:36
And without getting into the details, and we will in a bit actually, but without getting 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.
5:54
Not only that, by the offspring you produce are owned from the minute they are born until the minute they die.
Now, maybe some slave owner will grant 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.
6:11
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 people for several centuries in this country, in the colonies and in what became the United States.
6:29
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 most unjustifiable thing, human bondage.
6:48
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.
7:09
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.
7:25
It works in its favor to divide and rule the working class.
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.
7:43
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 question of cast.
Speaking of that, I want to move on to this clip from Elon Musk.
8:02
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, let's stop talking about this slavery thing.
8:19
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.
8:36
Because in fact, if you look at history, if you study history broadly, everyone was a slate.
Everyone, yes well, not everyone was 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 what future do we want do we are.
9:01
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 African defender of apartheid billionaire is talking about let's just treat people the way they should be treated.
9:25
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 black people.
9:42
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 owning aristocratic shits who waged war to destroy the Republic just so they can continue in the ownership of human beings.
10:34
That's how much these people hate America.
They're heroes are the likes of Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, people who, under any system of justice, would have been shot for what they did.
10:51
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 acceptable to whip and shackle and buy and sell human beings.
I think it's also, in the case of his statement about history, a kind of selective embrace of certain types of history.
11:12
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 going on about the Norman conquest of England from 1066.
11:28
That's 1000 years ago and they 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 knows how many in the Middle Passage, the brutalization and enslavement of many millions in the New World.
11:56
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 past and having to go forward gets thrown out the window.
12:16
Suddenly they like to embrace history because what they really like is to embrace a system that trot over a whole people for hundreds of years and held them in bondage.
What this is about in the end is not arguments over history, but this is about in the end is that they are justifying the unjustifiable of the past so they can justify the unjustifiable in the present.
12:39
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 years, which is just embedded in this social system, it's no, we can't talk about that.
12:59
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 can get their hands on, undocumented or documented.
13:18
Meanwhile, it's opened up the US to quote UN quote, refugees, white refugees from South Africa who 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 is fundamentally trying to say is that black slavery in America was unremarkable.
13:41
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 DEI stuff, because this is obviously in the context of repeated and concerted attacks against anything deemed woke or DEI, which is perceived to mainly benefit black people.
14:07
First of all, these things are highly criticized.
DEI and woke ISM as corporate tokenism, and I think we share a lot of that criticism.
It's really a way to put black faces in high places and pretend like there's a level of equality that doesn't actually exist in this economic system.
14:25
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 just in our particular school or in our particular job or whatever it is that that the DEI office is involved in, and we're done with it.
14:50
There's no sense of society as a whole needs to be overturned to fight for the equality and the full integration of black people in this country.
Now, of course, they're being attacked from right wing racist forces and we oppose the attacks.
Yeah, like their view is that anything that is even a semblance of diversity, equity or inclusion is a bad thing.
15:11
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 even be perceived to be supporting black people?
But to the main point, if you look at the history of this country, the question of black oppression has played the central role.
15:30
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 of the 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 that that does nothing justice except to just point you into hopefully certain directions that those who are interested can learn more about.
16:12
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 towards slavery.
16:33
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.
16:53
And that would be the promise of 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.
17:09
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 Charles Sumner in the Senate.
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 was betrayed and crushed.
17:28
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.
Then move back towards slavery and that would be Jim Crow.
17:44
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 in 1896 in the Plessy V Ferguson decision in the Supreme Court.
18:05
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.
18:23
The whole weight of America was 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.
18:42
So you had the Great Migration, and that was in the early 1900s.
That continued for a couple of 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.
19:05
You had the civil rights movement coming off the Korean War and in the midst of the Vietnam War, which fought 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.
19:23
But just like with the end of slavery, there was sharecropping and the rise of Jim Crow.
So with the end of Jim Crow came the rise of mass incarceration.
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.
19:46
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.
Within 20 years, it was 2 million.
Yeah, that historical thread is so important, and I know it was telescoped.
20:06
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 Crow became very popular.
20:21
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.
20:39
And her point about mass incarceration being the new Jim Crow, I think is a popularized way of explaining some of this for people who want to read more about it.
This idea that institutions like slavery and Jim Crow appear to die, but are reborn in a new form.
21:00
Yeah.
It's to reiterate a point that I think is in some ways captured in the negative by the Nation 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.
21:18
And what they wrote is the Negro will disappear from the field of national politics.
Henceforth, the nation as a nation will have nothing more to do with him.
Jesus, that's vile.
That's really sad.
Well, not only is it vile, it's wishful thinking.
21:36
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 every breath.
21:56
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 is the thing that holds up the mirror of what a vile creature it is.
I think this is also why some of what we're seeing today with the fortification of slavery is somewhat unremarkable, just in the sense of how much ever since slavery there has been a romanticization of slavery.
22:26
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 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.
22:49
And then all the caricatures that emerged that attempted during the slave times, which continued to try to present blacks as always being inferior, incapable of caring for themselves and just grateful for their masters.
23:07
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 administration.
23:25
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.
23:44
And it's obviously Thaddeus 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?
24:00
On an equal footing, it was played at the White House.
This was not just some movie that was a blockbuster on its 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.
24:16
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 movie, were all white people on blackface running around and chasing women.
24:32
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 historical significance 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've heard people say, oh, that's my favorite movie, So lovely and beautiful and it's like.
What company do you keep Ezra?
25:08
This also connects to our next clip, which is ACNN debate with the fitness instructor Biggest Loser host Jillian Michaels, where she presents white people basically as the victims.
Slavery's ancient It has nothing to do with race.
25:25
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.
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.
25:44
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, let's talk about the fact that slavery.
Slavery in America was.
25:59
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 know who slave owners and American first race by the end first race.
I'm very surprised that you're stronger to.
Litivize.
26:16
I'm really surprised.
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?
26:34
People.
Single thing is like Oh no no, no, this is all because white people bad and that's just not 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.
26:54
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?
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.
27:12
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 didn't know who Jillian Michaels was before I saw this clip.
MAGA lesbian.
That kind of rolls off the tongue.
27:29
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 ignorant, but that's the least of their problem and their their problem is not ignorance.
27:49
You can always fix ignorance.
They have already determined what the conclusion is before they've even cracked open a book or learned anything.
They've already determined that white people are the eternal victims of apparently slavery too.
I mean modern slavery on the 2%.
28:06
It's irrelevant.
It's an utterly irrelevant figure for two reasons.
One, she's counting the whole of the US white population when she gives that 2%.
Well, slavery was not in the.
Entire.
US, yeah.
By the time you're talking about the the height of American slavery, it was a Southern institution, even though its impact was nationwide.
28:28
So first of all, you got to take 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 extension the whole fucking country until he had to be overthrown through a social revolution called the Civil War.
28:54
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 an idiot, the people arguing against her are also idiots.
29:13
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 basically feeding the arguments of the racist.
29:35
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 vilified.
29:56
And I think that also that frustration is compounded by the economic crisis because telling a bunch of people who are barely making 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 white people benefit from the oppression of black people, is a bunch of bullshit.
30:21
A denies one of the central points of the purpose behind the oppression 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 poor whites 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.
30:54
In some ways, they were very hardened in their racism because they saw the vicious ideology of white supremacy as basically the only cudgel that they could have over the black population.
What separated them from blacks is they were free.
31:10
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 doesn't change the fact that slavery actually made life worse for them in an economic and material sense.
31:32
So let's look at a couple of examples.
It degraded all labor in the South.
Slavery did by suppressing wages and limiting economic growth, and created an incredible stigma in the South, social stigma that equated manual work with the lowly status of slaves.
31:52
Why would a plantation owner pay a 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 whole benefit and get privileges out of that oppression, my question is why are the conditions for white people getting worse?
32:38
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 oppressed and keep all of the working class in the population at each other's throats.
32:58
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.
33:33
It was pushed by the Reagan administration very vehemently.
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.
33:52
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.
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 for all of Labor.
34:16
The strategy is very simple and cruel.
You keep one group dispossessed and underpaid and use their 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 growth of the prison industry.
34:39
All of these things point to how the oppression and attacks on 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.
34:57
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 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.
35:19
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 tax on any sort of benefits, unemployment benefits or government or subsidized housing or 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.
35:44
Some of what you were talking about, Ezra, in terms of the divide and conquer technique 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.
36:02
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 about the 14th Amendment and the attacks on immigrants.
Donald Trump is steadfast on overturning the 14th Amendment from his first day in office.
36:23
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 subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the US and of the state wherein they reside.
36:41
I don't know if everyone knows how this is connected to the Civil War and to slavery, so I'm wondering 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 stipulated was, as you said, anyone born in the US and under the jurisdiction thereof has the right of citizenship automatic.
37:05
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 them to 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 full citizenship rights, and again, what their allies in the Radical Republican Party fought for.
37:45
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 law that defines citizenship as someone born in the US who is white and was not in condition of servitude.
38:06
In other words, you had to not be a slave, and you also had to be white.
This 14th Amendment took out the reference 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, even if they're undocumented, even if they never get papers.
38:31
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 immigrant rights will either go forward together or fall back separately.
38:54
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 rollback a gain for black people that it's going to go down very badly for anyone else at the bottom.
39:22
You mentioned earlier that black history 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 says this is my country.
39:40
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 I love, 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.
40:16
Yeah.
And I think also just on a more contemporary level, when you are looking at what is uniquely 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 this country, even if their contribution is always erased.
40:34
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 these moments in history that have been instrumental in terms of the overturning of slavery or the 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.
41:04
Part of that is presenting black people as these recipients of 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.
41:20
Yeah, on the culture point, I completely agree with Cam.
Anything that is uniquely American in terms of a cultural expression, just about anything, maybe there's one or two things I'm forgetting comes out of the experience of black people.
Think about it.
41:36
You had these hundreds of thousands, millions of people snatched from different parts of West 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 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.
42:05
And you, yes, influenced by the past, but also influenced by their new surroundings.
And that is the core of American culture that the world sees and understands.
You strip the black component out of American culture.
What do you got left?
42:21
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 different expressions of European culture that is American culture without the black contribution.
42:41
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 the interest of the whole of the working class.
43:04
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 country is that used to be the United States are, and then you complete the sense it was done in the plural.
43:30
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.
And in fact, they expanded for everybody.
43:46
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 in the face of adversity.
44:07
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 customs and laws and this entire social system that prevents black people from being equal citizens.
44:33
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 think impacted Black people most and has the most lasting effect are redlining policies.
45:10
These policies stopped Black people from being able to buy 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 were being given a handout and these opportunities to have lasting wealth passed down through their families where black people were not given that opportunity.
Yes, absolutely.
This was a very conscious policy, like you're saying.
45:50
After the Second World War, the US economy was very strong coming off the war because it 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.
46:09
And basically they subsidized, as you're saying, white flight into suburbia.
So to just give you a figure, between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed about $120 billion in new housing loans.
46:26
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.
So you can imagine the repercussions of this generation after generation for black people who are excluded from that generational wealth.
46:50
The flip side of that was those who did own homes in what became the ghettos saw the value of their investment plummet.
Yeah.
And another area we see the legacy of slavery I think is in 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.
47:13
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 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.
47:34
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.
So that's the legacy.
That's the residue of this kind of thinking that we still see today.
47:51
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 that one 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.
48:24
They're segregated at the bottom of society and then they're women.
So they're responsible for caring for children and the sick 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.
48:51
And then you have all the 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.
49:13
Mindset.
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.
49:33
I find it personally useful to make a distinction between racism and racial oppression.
Racial oppression is the systematic denigration, the systematic subjugation of black people within a capitalist order.
49:48
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 attitudes that your average person has towards black people.
One flows out of the other.
50:04
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 thought they were inferior.
50:20
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 American capitalism.
50:37
It needs it.
It can't live without it because 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 think we would get some responses from our audience of but what about Obama?
51:02
Do people raise that anymore, or is 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.
51:19
That's that's what I'd heard you.
Word on the street.
I'm an old man, so I remember 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 in The Nation?
51:36
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.
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 Barack Hussein Obama.
52:00
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 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, his name and his background, this is the very thing that I think actually allowed him to become president.
52:22
Yeah, but it was also extremely convenient and very rewarding for the ruling class to have him 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 drone bomb your population of brown skinned people.
52:43
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.
Remember, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Oh yeah, that was crazy.
That didn't he win the Nobel?
Peace Prize like he had he had it was like 2 months.
52:59
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 Guantanamo Bay and put an ass whipping on those hoes.
53:15
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 is that 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 people in this country since the Second World War and for the working class as a whole.
53:50
But I'm going to concentrate on black people here.
We already talked about a couple of 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.
54:06
All these things were attacked under the Clinton administration.
The Obama administration, if you remember, took power right as the 2008 financial crisis was taking off, or had taken off, and he led the bailouts of all the banks, meanwhile, the very people who were the victims of these predatory lenders.
54:27
Or those people.
Right.
A lot of them black, but also poor whites, Latinos, others.
They got fucked.
They lost everything and nobody bailed them out.
They just went into the streets and lost home and work and everything.
54:44
That was the Obama administration, besides joining every country that he can get his hands on.
That's the hallmark of the Obama administration, 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 doesn't love.
55:07
Us.
And that's the conclusion of Part 1 of this episode on how slavery is being whitewashed and we 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 Nuremberg laws and apartheid South Africa.
55:26
Stay tuned and make sure to rate and review us and send your thoughts to unwashedunruly@gmail.com.
