Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

The Introduction opens with the author recalling his homeschooling experience with his mother. She used homeschooling to provide her children with an alternative, more factual history of America and its relationship with Black people. This Black-centered history experience gave Harriot a unique understanding of American culture and history, a perspective that he later found was severely lacking in other educational spaces. He states that “American history is white history” (5), noting that even Black historical figures only entered the public record if white people deemed them worthy and their narratives were often twisted to fit an untrue myth of American moral exceptionalism.

Harriot notes that the different white nations that colonized America are often dealt with thoughtfully and even sympathetically in historical accounts. At the least, the colonizers are treated as human individuals, and their brutal actions are put into a thoughtful context. In contrast, enslaved and colonized people are “dehumanized by simply remaining anonymous” (8). Enslaved Africans are not identified by their nation or ethnicity; they are simply “slaves.” In that vein, Harriot explains, that in this book, enslavers are referred to simply as “white people,” generalizing their humanity in a similar way to the traditional treatment of colonized and enslaved peoples.