In this first episode, I will share with you three books about slavery, Revolt, and the construction of race in America. The first book Is “there is a river: the black struggle for freedom in America” by Vincent Harding. This book was suggested to me by one of my all time favorite history Professors, professor Allen Coleman, who teaches both at Columbus State Community College as well as the Ohio State University. Professor Coleman also suggested the second book, entitled “The White Man's Burden” by Winthrop D Jordan, a classic look at the Historical origins of racism in the United States. the third book I will be discussing today is the book “barracoon: The Story of the last black cargo” written by Zora Neale Hurston. It took about 80 years for her book to be published, and it is a fantastic oral history account of a man who was illegally smuggled out of West Africa, toiled as a slave in America, and then struggled to adjust to a post-war Southern society that still saw him as less than human.

these books speak volumes about the horrors of slavery and the legacy of racial formation that slavery has left behind in the United States. With the rise of mass incarceration during Bill Clinton's presidency, the privatization of Prisons by Corrections Corporation, the criminalization of Blackness, and the extra-judicial murdering of black civilians by police, modern day lynchings, these historical accounts remain as relevant as ever.

“There is a river: the black struggle for freedom in America” by Vincent Harding is first and foremost a beautiful Testament to the spirit, Power, and resilience of African Americans in the United States. it details the armed struggle against slavery, the cultural survivalism, the diversity of tactics, the culture of resistance, and the long history of the freedom struggle of african americans. The book is written in a beautiful lyrical prose that is at once compelling and compassionate, as well as a stirring Call to Arms. Vincent Harding situates himself and his work in the Deep River of struggle, and sees himself as part of the current that moves that River toward freedom. Harding Begins the story on the shores of Africa in the barracoons, and details the horror of the middle passage. he takes us to America, Bound in Chains, where the earliest accounts of human bondage and legal systems to oppress black bodies began. and he writes of resistance.

The Stono Rebellion page 34
Constitution and slavery page 45
Haitian revolution page 46
Denmark Vessey page 65

Harding's text takes us through many more rebellions, maroon communities, practices of cultural survivalism, and the black presence in the Civil War. he leaves us at the beginning of the Reconstruction era with a glimpse into the Black Codes and the legal structure of Jim Crow, but warning that the river continues to Surge: that the African American Spirit will not be held in bondage by chains, nor law, nor second-class citizenship, nor terrorist violence by white vigilantes; that the struggle will continue until African Americans are, indeed, free at last.

*** wake up with books *** and wake up your mind *** get woke! Sunday morning boook cluuub! ****

The eloquent and moving oral history of 86 year old cudjo Lewis by Zora Neale Hurston Is delivered to us on cudjo's Alabama porch in between trips to the city, crab fishing and feasting, and workday's in his garden. Hurston captures cudjo’s voice in his vernacular, And following a short historical foreword, she relates to us his highly moving and heartbreaking life story.

Capture p 45
March to the barracoon p 52
Freedom p 65
Raising children in white terrorism p72, p 84

Barracoon, at its heart, is an oral history in the tradition of the Griot. It is a story that was almost left Untold. hurston's research began in 1927, and after she finished writing the book, she looked for years to find a publisher, but was ultimately unsuccessful. the first edition of her book barracoon was published in 2018, an accomplishment that Hurston was never able to enjoy. It is now in the hands of today’s storytellers to transmit the life of cudjo lewis to future generations so that we may continue to learn from the horrors and heartbreaks he endured.

The White Man's Burden by Winthrop D Jordan is a distillation of his epic work “white over black: American attitudes toward the Negro 1550- 1812.” Dr. Jordan Situates the formation of race in America in the institution of chattel slavery and Enlightenment ideology. In a brief 226 pages, dr. Jordan lays down a succinct and meticulously researched thesis that still informs relationships between white and black people in America today. early white European natural philosophers were confounded by the existence of the darker races of human beings. their obsession with taxonomy and hierarchy, the first stirrings of European scientific thought, was still deeply entrenched in the understanding that God had put man on Earth as his ultimate creation. This theory is articulated through the concept of the great chain of being, an attempt by European natural philosophers to place every living being in hierarchical order from the lowest single celled organism to their idea of god’s ultimate creation, the white man.

Skulls on a shelf, p 102-103 peter camper

the othering of black Africans by white Europeans, their preoccupation with the quote unquote heathen African lifestyle and cultural traditions, their inability to understand religions or cultural expressions different from their own as inherently human or civilized, and a lingering perverse fascination with imagining African having sex with Apes, are all foundational to understanding the construction of race and how it still operates in the United States. scientific racism, like social Darwinism, is a direct product of Enlightenment thought. European natural philosophers’ primitive and pseudo-scientific understanding of other cultures had catastrophic implications for Africans who would soon be sold into chattel slavery and given the legal standing of livestock. through the institution of chattel slavery, eugenics and the breeding of quote-unquote black stock, as well as the careful counting of blood quantum, which we now know has little to do with race at all, became codified in colonial and later in United States law through a series of Black Codes that aimed at controlling and policing black bodies and maintaining their status as the property of their white owners. As other black researchers have noted, these slave patrols and black codes are the predecessors of the United States police force and criminal justice system, which continues to criminalize blackness in the interest of maintaining white supremacy through the visceral violence of state power.

My favorite part of doctor Jordan's book is the chapter entitled “Thomas Jefferson: self and Society.” in this chapter, dr. Jordan lays bare what a shitbag Thomas Jefferson truly was. in addition to being an owner of slaves, and a heinous misogynist, Thomas Jefferson believed that black people were mentally inferior to white people on the basis of their quote-unquote biological race. P 171

upheld as one of America's Finest founding fathers and an Enlightenment thinker, Thomas Jefferson’s Views on race were informed by his belief in natural rights philosophy.

Natural rights philosphy p 167

Ultimately, Thomas Jefferson could never Square his own competing ideas that humans had some natural rights bestowed upon them by his invisible sky god, with the fact that some humans (read: African American and African slaves) must be denied those rights in order to uphold the institution of chattel slavery of which he himself was a constant beneficiary. This cognitive dissonance would pervade the American psyche until the end of the Civil War, after which it was sublimated into convict leasing, Jim Crow laws, and the prison industrial complex.

Doctor Winthrop Jordan shows that the construction of white supremacy and the criminalization of Blackness were necessary to justify the inhumane and morally reprehensible institution of chattel slavery and the rise of western capitalism. Africans were not enslaved because of anti-black racism, Africans were enslaved because European slave Traders augmented an already-existing Market for African slaves and turned it into a genocidal capitalist venture. The transformation of nation funded mercantilism to free market capitalism depended on the Free Labor of African American slaves. As this development occurred at the same time as the enlightenment Revolutions in America, France, Haiti, and Latin America, and the military and economic power of these new nations, with the exception of Haiti, depended on slave labor, anti-black racism was necessary to deny black humans their Humanity and therefore any natural rights they would have been allotted as members of the human race.

the foundation of anti-black racism in America is so deep in our culture, language, and legal system, that whites today are still unable to see black people as people, and still unable to see black lives as lives that matter, and lives that must be valued and protected by our society. To understand the black lives matter in a historical sense, white Americans must return to the roots of anti-black racism in chattel slavery and in the foundation of capitalism in order to see the truth for what it is. that truth, the American greatness was built on the backs of black slaves, bought and sold and breed as livestock, in this peculiar and horrifying Institution of chattel slavery -- Seeing and understanding this truth is necessary for peace and Reconciliation in America. there is a wage owed, Justice, reparations, atonement, there is a great debt that white Americans owe to African Americans. and until we white Americans are able to divest ourselves from our possessive investment in whiteness and white supremacy (george lipsitz), that Debt will not be repaid.

thanks for joining us this week, May your next 6 days be filled rainbows and sunshine, as you work to put whiteness in crisis (george yancy).