Michael Harriot and Geoff Bennett rethink Black history on 'Settle In'

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: This month marks 100 years since Americans first celebrated what would eventually become Black History Month.

On our video podcast, “Settle In,” we marked the centennial with award-winning journalist and writer Michael Harriot. We talked about the ongoing fight over how history is taught and his bestselling book “Black AF History,” which argues that Black history isn’t a counternarrative to the American story, but the narrative itself.

Here’s part of that conversation.

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.

Michael Harriot, Author, “Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America”: Yes, 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 plan.

They thought they could, like, climb in the tree and see the Pacific Ocean. Remember, these were investors. People came here to make money. 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.

Geoff Bennett: 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.

Michael Harriot: 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 started 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.

Geoff Bennett: How do you respond to people who might suggest that your take on this is in some way controversial or in some way revisionist history?

Michael Harriot: 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 have been educated to revere men who are white supremacists. We have 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 and 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.

Geoff Bennett: If there’s a chapter in this book that you could lift out and have included in every history book in this country that schoolkids are given, what would it be?

Michael Harriot: 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, like, 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, 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.

Geoff Bennett: You can watch that full episode of “Settle In” and others on our YouTube page or wherever you get your podcasts.