“Every white person in America benefited from slavery.” White Americans pedal several narratives about slavery that are historically inaccurate. Michael Harriot lists off some of the falsehoods and reveals the truth behind the most wild claims.
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Read full transcript below.
Announcer [00:00:00] You are now listening to theGrio’s Black Podcast Network. Black Culture Amplified.
Michael Harriot [00:00:05] Slavery was a long time ago and my ancestor didn’t own slaves. And how about the Black people who owned slaves? How about the Africans who sold them into slavery? And slavery existed in every society, so why can’t Black people get over it? Well, if you’ve heard any of these arguments before, I want to welcome you to theGrio Daily, the only podcast that’ll tell you about white people’s version of slavery. So I’m sure you’ve heard about slavery unless you live in Florida. If you live in Florida. We’re going to leave you out of this. You might not have heard about this. So if you’re from Florida, a long, long, long, long, long, long, long time ago, white people imported some immigrants to teach them skills that would benefit them and help America become a global economic superpower. If you’re not from Florida, then you’ve heard about this thing called slavery, but you’ve probably only heard the white people’s version of it. And those arguments that I talked about earlier, they’re part of that.
Michael Harriot [00:01:10] See, not only have we learned a white version of slavery, but white people like to perpetuate this white version of slavery. And we got to dismantle some of those things today. Like one of them is that, well, so few people owned slaves. Yeah, kinda. And in 1860, right, about 1% of white people were slave owners. Because you have to remember, most states had outlawed slavery. In the states that didn’t outlaw slavery, it was about 10%. Now, if you include the people who lived in the households that owned slaves. So, for instance, like you might not own a car, but your mama and your daddy have a car and you live in a house with three cars. So technically you’re not a car owner, but you benefit from owning cars. Well, the same is true. So about 30% of households in states that allowed slavery owned human beings. And that is important because those people not only benefited, but they lived in a society that benefited from slavery. So it wasn’t just the slave owners who benefited from slavery. Right. It was business owners who– I know we like to think of slaves as working on plantations, but a lot of slaves were actually like, we rented out to manufacturers, ship manufacturers, industrialists. There were people who owned slaves who didn’t own plantations; their entire industry came from leasing out the work of enslaved people. There were people who were slave traders, people who worked on ships in the slave trade, people who owned stores that sold clothes that were made from cotton that was use–was picked by slaves, and the free labor made the cotton cheaper, which made the shirts cheaper, which made a bigger profit for the people who owned the shops, even if they didn’t have any ties to slavery.
Michael Harriot [00:03:07] And so in a sense, everybody in America benefited from living in an economy where the biggest export was the free labor and cotton picked by enslaved people. So every white person in America benefited from slavery. The other thing that you hear is, well, Black people owned slaves. Yeah. So there were some Black people who owned slaves. 99.5% of slaves were owned by white people. So white people of all of the enslavers in America, 99.5% were white. And even saying that is a little misleading because a lot of Black people were registered as slave owners, weren’t necessarily enslavers. Well, what do I mean by that? Well, so when you bought your freedom and you managed to buy the freedom for your daughter or your wife, or if you are a free Black person who married a woman and then purchased her freedom, she was technically sold to you. And so you were technically her enslaver, even though you weren’t a slave master.
Michael Harriot [00:04:08] So most of the Black people who were listed as slave owners were people who had bought their family members, their loved ones, out of freedom. They were people who technically owned themselves because they purchased their own freedom. And you have to also remember that because Black people had no rights, they couldn’t go up to the courthouse and just say, “take my name off the slave owners list.” So that dismantles that thing about Black people participating in slavery. And the other thing, you know, white version of slavery is that they went to Africa and the Africans offered those slaves. You have to wonder, right? How come all of these Africans who were participating in the slave trade, unprompted by white people, didn’t do it before white people got there? How come they didn’t get on ships and just bring some slaves to Africa? How come the slave trade was not an intergenerational international form of human trafficking until white people came to Africa? You have to ask yourself that if you’re not paying attention to the white people’s version of slavery.
Michael Harriot [00:05:09] Or how about this? Slavery was a long time ago. Was it? I learned how to make candied yams from my grandmother. And when she told me how to make them, she said she likes more nutmeg than cinnamon. But her grandmother, who taught her how to make candied yams, likes more cinnamon than nutmeg. Well, I’m like my great great grandmother. I like more cinnamon, and so the recipe that I use to make candied yams is my grandmother’s grandmother’s recipe. Well, my grandmother’s grandmother was a slave. If you think that we could still be using the recipes for candied yams, but not the ideology and the mindset that we can subject human beings to the most inhuman form of enslavement and torture and oppression in the history of the world then you’re kind of wrong. It wasn’t that long ago. It was just a blink of the eye in the long arc of human history. And the other thing is, in the white people’s version of slavery, there were happy slaves. If all these slaves were happy, like, why didn’t they object when they were emancipated? Like, why didn’t you ever hear about any enslaved person who said, “Hey, you know what? I know technically slavery is illegal, but I want to stay on this plantation and work for free and be whipped and treated in the same way that I was before the 13th Amendment.” You never hear about that, right? But in white people’s version, in slavery, you know, slavery was all good.
Michael Harriot [00:06:43] The other thing that you think about, you hear about when you talk about slavery through the lens of whiteness is that it was a form, even if it was brutal, even if it was wrong, what they were doing is extracting labor from the enslaved people. And they don’t think about– like white people didn’t know how to grow rice until they went to Africa, to the specific place called the Gold Coast or the Rice Coast, and got people who were horticulturalists and agricultural experts who knew how to adapt to the soil and adapt to the environment and grow rice in America. Virginia’s biggest export before the Civil War was iron work, because they specifically went to Africa to places where there was a tradition of Blacksmithing and metallurgy and got the Africans who taught them how to do this kind of iron work in Blacksmithing. So it was not just labor, it was the intellectual property. Vaccines came from enslaved Africans. So much of what we know. First of all, seasoning. Like white people didn’t use seasonings. Fried chicken. Right. All of that is the intellectual property of Africans. It wasn’t just the labor. It wasn’t just like strong backs and big muscles that they were going to steal. They wanted the intellectual property. But in white people’s version of slavery, they just got a bunch of dumb, strong Black folks to come over here and lift things and pick cotton.
Michael Harriot [00:08:09] And finally, in white people’s version of slavery, it ended when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation or when Congress passed the 13th Amendment or whatever. But it never ended, really, because there is that loophole that involuntary servitude is unconstitutional, except as punishment for a crime in which the offender has been duly convicted. So you can enslave people. They just gave it another name, the criminal justice system, mass incarceration. And that’s why you have to learn more than white people’s version of slavery. That’s why you have to read your history books. That’s why you have to read a book like Black AF History. And that’s why you have to tell a friend about this podcast. Download that Grio. Subscribe. And that’s why we always leave you with a saying. And today saying is, “white people be lying and their history books do too.” If you liked what you heard, please give us a five-star review, download theGrio app, subscribe to the show, and to share it with everyone you know. Please email all questions, suggestions, and compliments to the podcast at theGrio dot com.
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