Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

Chapter 15 concerns the “Southern switch,” or the fact that, in the 1950s, the Democratic Party, formerly the pro-slavery political force of the South, changed into the country’s more progressive party, while the Republican Party also switched accordingly. The author’s Uncle Rob narrates this chapter, and he begins the narrative after America’s victory against the British. Federalists like Alexander Hamilton wanted a strong central government, military, and navy, as well as a national bank. Democratic-Republicans, or Anti-Federalists, like Thomas Jefferson, wanted a small government, low taxes, and greater rights given to individual states. Harriot claims that, though it seems abstract, this argument was actually about slavery. Anti-Federalists worried that a strong federal government could outlaw slavery for the whole nation. They eventually compromised, by, among other things, reducing Black people’s worth to three-fifths that of white people. The two groups, the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, remained at odds, however. The Federalist Party became religiously conservative and pro-big-government. The Anti-Federalists became the Democratic-Republicans and favored small government, an agrarian economy, and states’ rights. The Federalist Party collapsed by 1824, and the Democratic-Republican Party splintered. Andrew Jackson formed the new Democratic Party, an anti-abolitionist, states’ rights party. The Republican Party, meanwhile, was anti-slavery.

After the Civil War, Black voters overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party. However, the growing Black voting majority led the Democrats to start to push voter disenfranchisement measures in the Southern states, while even the Republican party grew wary of the idea of a Black majority in their party. They eventually formed “an all-white faction of the party” (359). Black Republicans in the party ridiculed this move by calling them the “Lily-Whites.” The Lily-Whites joined with Democrats to suppress Black voting. The rest of the Republican Party called itself the “Black and Tan” party and quickly became a minority. The Lily-Whites tried to lure Southern white voters to the Republican side in the early 1900s. They realized that the best way to do so was to take legal steps to disenfranchise Black voters and politicians. When Democrat Harry Truman desegregated the US Army and supported anti-Jim Crow efforts, Black voters moved to the Democratic Party.

In 1968, Strom Thurmond and Richard Nixon teamed up to try to win the South as Republicans. Their “Southern strategy” involved making it clear to the white Southern voters that Black people were the problem and Republicans were the solution. The former Confederate states supported Nixon unanimously in his reelection. Ronald Reagan, a man Uncle Rob refers to as “the Conservative Beyonce” (363), got a landslide victory by appealing to the South through loaded language about “welfare,” “outsiders,” and “states’ rights.”

Harriot takes charge of the narrative again and states that since that time, the Republican Party has been the party of Southern grievance and contempt for non-white Americans. Democrats, meanwhile, are not so much in support of Black people as they are opposed to the Republicans.

Despite its political permutations, America, Harriot argues, has always functionally had a two-party system of white people and everybody else. Republicans now consistently use “white fear as a cattle prod to herd white voters under the GOP tent” (366).

Chapter 15 Unit Review

The quiz asks why no presidential candidate has ever won a majority of white and a majority of Black voters, what term best describes the early Democrats and the modern Republicans, and the time at which America became a democracy. The activity asks the reader to go through a list of euphemisms and label whether they really mean “Black” or “white.”

Supplement 1: “Chicken Bog Vs. Perlo”

This supplement discusses the subtle differences between two dishes rooted in slavery and Gullah Geechee culture: chicken bog and chicken perlo. Bog is boiled chicken with vegetables, sausage, and other added ingredients. After the boiled chicken is soft, the bones are removed and rice is added to the water. Perlo is also chicken and rice, but is not as wet as bog.

Supplement 2: “The End of the Multiracial Coalition”

Wilmington, North Carolina was majority-Black in 1898, and their city had formed the Fusion Coalition, a group of multiracial Republicans running on a progressive platform. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, used the Black predator myth to justify enforcing the law through lynching. Alexander Manly, a Black man who co-owned a newspaper in Wilmington, went on the record to point out that most of the mixed-race children in Wilmington had a white father and a Black mother. He also suggested that if white women were having sex with Black men, it was because white men could not satisfy them. The white mob, furious, used threats and coercion to keep Black voters away from the ballot box on Election Day. The Fusion Coalition still won, leading the white mob to protect democracy by burning down the newspaper building and forcing the mayor, police chief, and aldermen to resign on threat of death.

Chapter 16 focuses on the fundamental philosophical shift that Harriot believes is necessary for America to begin to heal. For all of American history, the assumption was that “something was wrong with Black people” (378). To fix the problem, America had to fix Black people. While Black people have clearly always known that the problem was systemic oppression, racism, and violence, white people are too easily swayed toward the seductive message that America is not to blame.

When Barack Obama began his presidential campaign in 2007, white America exploded with furor. Racists demanded his birth certificate. Obama was forced to resign from his congregation because his pastor preached Black liberation theology. Loud voices accused him of being secretly Muslim and anti-white. This is not dissimilar, Harriot observes, to white reactions to Black political activism throughout American history. Black voices, from Martin Luther King Jr. to the Black Panthers, have advocated for education reform, universal basic income, LGBTQ rights, universal health care, and reparations, all ideas that have become much more mainstream in the 2020s. Black people were not the problem: They were proposing the solutions. Obama’s election to the highest office in the land proved that the problem was not the individual merits of Black people. The problem is America.

That argument is only bolstered by Obama’s successor, Donald Trump. Harriot states that Trump “made his fortune like America made its fortune: taking land, profiting off of financial malfeasance, conning the masses, and refusing to pay Black and brown people for their work” (381). Trump successfully convinced poor white people that their only chance for survival was to disenfranchise and exploit people who don’t look like them. Trump’s narrative about himself and his own life mirrors America’s narrative about itself: “a mirage.”

Chapter 16 Unit Review

The quiz concerns the true end of racism, the biggest myth in American history, and the difference between “American history” and “Black history.” The activity asks the reader to create a “post-racial” America.