Black AF History

The version of American history most people learn in school is not just incomplete—it is largely fictional. In Black AF History, Michael Harriot dismantles the patriotic fairy tale of brave settlers, noble founders, and inevitable progress. What replaces it is a far more chaotic, embarrassing, and violent origin story—one where the so-called architects of America frequently failed upward, relying on stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen knowledge to survive.

The first English colonists were not rugged pioneers. Many were wealthy elites who had never planted crops, built shelters, or cared for themselves without servants. When they arrived in places like Jamestown, they quickly demonstrated their inability to adapt. They lacked agricultural expertise, ignored local ecosystems, and were overwhelmed by disease and hunger. Entire settlements nearly collapsed under the weight of their incompetence.

Rather than learning from Indigenous nations who had thrived on the land for centuries, the colonists claimed ownership through force and legal fiction. Leaders like Wahunsenacah of the Powhatan Confederacy were treated not as sovereign rulers but as obstacles. Treaties were ignored, boundaries were invented, and theft was reframed as “discovery.” The American origin myth depends on erasing the fact that complex societies already existed—and that Europeans survived only by exploiting them.

When colonial projects continued to fail, salvation arrived not through innovation but through kidnapping. Enslaved Africans brought agricultural mastery, engineering skills, and physical labor that transformed dying colonies into profitable ventures. Tobacco, rice, and cotton did not build themselves. The wealth that followed was never the result of colonial genius; it was extracted from people whose freedom was stolen so the colonies could exist at all.

Racial Slavery Was Designed, Legalized, and Made Permanent

Slavery in the United States was not an inherited tradition or unfortunate accident—it was deliberately constructed. Unlike many labor systems across history, American slavery was explicitly tied to race and engineered to last forever. This system ensured that Blackness itself became a permanent mark of bondage.

Colonial lawmakers codified rules that made freedom nearly impossible. A child’s legal status followed the mother, guaranteeing that slavery reproduced itself automatically. Laws denied enslaved people recognition as human beings, reducing them to commodities that could be bought, sold, insured, and inherited. This was not vague oppression—it was precise legal architecture.

The nation’s founding documents protected this structure. Compromises enshrined enslavement into federal law, inflating the political power of slaveholders while denying rights to the very people generating the wealth. Slavery was not just tolerated—it was foundational to American governance and economic growth.

This racialized system created a hierarchy that rewarded whiteness regardless of class. Even poor white people benefited from laws that placed them above enslaved Africans. White supremacy was not simply cultural prejudice; it was a financial and political strategy designed to protect profit and prevent solidarity among the exploited.

Stolen Black Knowledge Created American Prosperity

The agricultural success of early America was not accidental. Enslaved Africans arrived with generations of expertise—particularly in rice cultivation, irrigation, metallurgy, and land management. Colonists did not invent these techniques; they appropriated them.

In places like South Carolina, African ...