Transcription
The whole history of America is the history of rich white men telling not-rich white people that their enemies are black and brown. It starts in the colonies of what would become the United States. Let's remember, during the colonial period, mid-1600s, there was no such thing as white people. I know some people who are now called white find that shocking, right? Because they think whiteness is real, right? But whiteness was created. Europeans didn't call themselves white. We didn't call ourselves white. We weren't all members of one big happy family. Are you kidding? Have you studied the history of Europe? The history of Europe was about killing each other. That's what we did in Europe. We just killed each other before we figured out there were other people to kill. We just killed each other, right? I mean, that was the history of Europe. The English hated the Irish, right? Northern Italians didn't even think that southern Italians were Italians. The Germans hated everybody and everybody hated their ass right back. Right? There was no team called white. No race called white. But all of a sudden, in the middle of the 1600s, there was. Why? Why was it suddenly necessary to create this thing called the white race? Well, because rich people can count. That's why.
And so rich folks looked around, the ones that owned all the land, you know, in the colonies, the colonial elite looked around and they realized something: that they were heavily outnumbered by African enslaved folks, by European indentured servants who were just one level above a slave, or other Europeans who weren't technically indentured servants, but they were still peasants, didn't have any money, didn't have any land, and they could do the math. They added it up and they were like, "Damn, we got to figure out a way to split these folks apart from one another or they're going to rise up and take our stuff." Right? Because after a while, these black folks who were enslaved Africans and these quote-unquote white folks who were poor Europeans are going to figure out they're all getting played by these rich people, right? So ultimately, the rich figure out they got to come up with some way to get somebody in that group on their team. The easiest thing is to get the poor Europeans, right? 'Cause at least they look like you. They sort of share some of the customs and the culture. So they all of a sudden create this thing called whiteness and they say, "Now you're part of the club. Now, we're going to let you testify in court, enter into contracts, vote, at least if you're a man, own a little bit of land, at least if you're a man. Right? And we're going to get rid of indentured servitude. No more of that because you're too good for that. And we're going to take the white men, now called white men, and put them on the slave patrol to keep black people in line. Give them a horse and a gun and a badge and make them feel big and powerful. Right? They're still poor. They still don't have anything. They didn't pay the slave patrol well, right? Just exploited them, used them as a buffer between the elite and the other poor folks, particularly poor folks of color. And pretty soon, the rebellions that occasionally happened where black and white got together to overthrow the elite, those stopped because the divide and conquer had begun to work, right? You could turn people against each other by telling those poor white folks, they got to keep these black people in line. And so that divide and conquer gets initiated in the colonies: rich white men telling not-rich white people that their enemies are black and brown.
Fast forward to the Civil War era. And you have, I'm from the South, right? My people, the elite in, in, in my part of the country, right, actually announced that the reason they wanted to break away from the Union and possibly go to war with their brothers and sisters to the north was in order to maintain slavery and white supremacy. They said that at the time. We lie about it now. And we say it had nothing to do with that. But of course, at the time, they didn't have any shame about it. So they just said it openly, right? The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stevens, said that the cornerstone of the new government was the great truth that the negro was not the equal of the white man. So that's the reason the Confederacy was formed and existed. But here's the trick: If I'm rich and I want to go to war to protect my ownership in other human beings, my property, but you're poor and you don't own any enslaved people, why the hell would you go fight to protect my stuff? 'Cause I'm a rich person. I'm not going to fight. Rich people don't go to war, right? Rich people get poor people to go to war for them, whether it's in 1860, or whether it's during the 1960s, or whether it's today. Right? Rich folks get doctors to write notes for them that say that they have heel spurs and that's why they can't go to Vietnam. And if you don't know who I'm talking about, you can Google that 'cause he's sitting in the White House right now. Right. "Oh, I can't go fight. I have heel spurs." Send some poor kids to do that for me, please. Right. So, that's been a long-standing tradition. So, the rich have to figure out a way to convince the poor to go fight for them. But that's a hard thing. That's like a hard sell, right? Like, how the hell, why would you do that? Why would you go fight to protect my property rights when you don't own anything? Only way you would do it is if that rich person comes to you and says, "Hey, listen. You got to, you got to go fight because we got to maintain our way of life." Because if these people get free, they're going to take your jobs. No, fool. They already got your job. That's how it works, right? 'Cause if I'm white and I got to charge you a dollar a day to work on the farm, but you can get a black person to do it for nothing because you own them. Guess who got the job? Free got the job. Right? So, in a sense, poor white folks would have been better off joining with black folks to overthrow the slave system. That would have raised the wage floor of all working people, but they got took. They got tricked by rich white men telling them that their enemies were black and brown.
Fast forward to the 1930s. And you have white labor leaders. They're not even the elite, right? The labor leaders are not the elite elite, but they're the elite within the labor movement. And even they had fallen for it at this point. So, they didn't want to integrate their unions. And they would say things like, "Well, we can't have black people and Mexicans and Chinese folks in our unions because if we do that, it's going to reduce the professionalism of our craft. We have to maintain the integrity of our profession." No, fool. You need more people in the damn union is what you need. And if you don't let those folks in, guess what happens when you go out on strike? Who is the boss going to use to replace you? They're going to, they're going to replace you with the very same black and brown folks that you didn't want to work next to, right? And so at the end of the day, and then you're going to blame them for taking your job rather than the white rich dude for giving it to them, right? Divide and conquer, telling not-rich white folks that their enemies are black and brown.
And now we fast forward to the president. And we got the president of the United States becoming president on the basis of that same rhetoric. So if the data says, and it does, that white folks on average have 15 times the net worth of black folks, 13 times the net worth of Latino folks, right? We just assume we must have worked harder. Is that right? That's interesting because actually, the black folks and brown folks have done some of the hardest work in this country ever since the country was founded. Were it not for the labor of African-descended peoples, there would be no country at all. In fact, it was my family, it was my family, white slave-owning family in the South that got black folks to do all the hard work 'cause we were lazy asses and didn't want to work at all. White folks in the South on the plantation used to want to sit on the porch and drink mint juleps and have carriage rides rather than work while black folks did all the real labor. And yet we decided that black folks are lazy, which I find fascinating, right? And then people write to me and say, "Well, these black people, they're just taking all the jobs." Okay, which is it, Precious? 'Cause it can't be both. People of color can't take all the jobs and be lazy. I don't ask much of racists [applause] because I expect very little. But you cannot be lazy and take all the jobs. Are we at least clear on that? Like, if you took all the jobs, you were like the opposite of lazy. If you are indeed lazy, you probably did not even take one job, let alone all of them. So, I just need racists to get their damn story straight. That's all I ask. I just don't like moving targets. That's all. Right.
But if I don't tell my daughter the truth, she defaults to the position of the culture. And then she can't understand what the problem is. The same is true with policing. You can't understand the Black Lives Matter movement and the importance of it if you don't know the history and the relationship between law enforcement and black and brown peoples. If you understood that history, you wouldn't ask one question about why this movement is necessary and why it's righteous if you knew that history, but you don't know it. And it's not your fault. You weren't supposed to know it and nobody taught it to you. Right? So, you don't have to know that modern policing traces back to slave patrols. That black folks' first experience with law enforcement was having, you know, who working-ass and poor white folks on horseback going around keeping black folks in line on behalf of the rich master that owned all the property. That sounds a lot like modern policing 'cause they know rich people policing, right? It's working-class folks who are out there protecting the property of rich people against the depredations of poor people. That's what modern policing is. And it traces back and we know that's what modern policing is, by the way, because we will lock you up for 10 years for $100 worth of food stamp fraud. But if you take 12.5 trillion dollars on Wall Street, 20% of the net worth of this country, you will not do one day in jail. So, we know that law enforcement has got nothing to do with enforcing the law. It's got nothing to do with good people and bad people, lawbreakers and the law-abiding. It only has to do with controlling certain people. And black and brown folks know it was cops who were involved in race riots and racial terrorism against black communities for the first 50 years of the 20th century. You didn't learn about that in class either. And that's not your fault. It wasn't taught. But in fact, every single year, just about from 1900 all the way to the 1930s, 1940s at least, there were race riots where white folks would just go into black communities, burn them to the ground, bomb them from the air like in Tulsa, Oklahoma, rip people out of their homes, beat them in the street, and police sat by, watched it happen, and participated. That doesn't mean that every cop in the modern era is like that, but it means that black folks can be excused for being not so clear on the decency of police in their communities because there's a history there. It was police who dragged black folks and white allies off of those sit-in stools at lunch counters in the South to enforce segregation. See, when your job is to enforce the law, and for most of American history, the law was against you as a people, then enforcing the law means you are the first line of oppression. People of color know that history and need to be excused when they don't just get over it because that continues. How do we know it continues? Very easy. We know from the data on racial profiling that black folks are twice as likely as white folks to be stopped and searched for drugs. Even though white folks are more likely to have drugs on us on the occasions that were searched, white folks use drugs and sell drugs at the same or higher rate than black folks and Latinos. And yet it is black folks and Latinos who in any given year make up 85 to 90% of the people who get arrested and incarcerated for a drug offense. See, people of color know that. And if we don't, we don't understand when black folks rise up and say, "Black Lives Matter." Well, what do you mean, black? "All Lives Matter." YES, SWEETHEART. I know they do. Yes, they do. And that is a totally irrelevant and unnecessary point to make. You see, you don't have to say all lives matter. We take that for granted. What we've never accepted in this country is that black and brown life mattered. You have to proclaim that which is ignored. You see, that's why we have Black History Month right now and not White History Month. We don't have to have the White History Month 'cause we got May and June and July and August [applause] and every other month where we learn about white folks. We don't have to call it that. See how slick that is? That's how white supremacy operates. You don't have to call it white history month. You just call it history and literature and theater and poetry and art. You don't have to racialize where it came from. Right? That's what Malefio Sante at Temple calls universalizing the particular, which is the hallmark of Eurocentric thought, right? Not everybody's experience is the same. And so when certain people have been left out of all, you have to call that out by name. 'Cause see, we've always said "all," then we didn't mean it. We said "all men are created equal," and we didn't mean that, right? We didn't mean women, but we didn't even mean all men. We said "all," and it was a lie when we said it, right? And so in a sense, when you say "Black Lives Matter," to respond with "All Lives Matter" would be like going in a time machine back to 1971. Y'all won't remember this. Those who were students, those who were older will remember around 1970, '71, '72, the big phrase was "Black is Beautiful." Right? There was this desire to take back the beauty narrative from a beauty industry, fashion industry, glamour industry that had hijacked and denigrated black physicality and beauty. Right? So folks were saying "Black is Beautiful" to reclaim a sense of beauty for themselves. It'd be like getting in a time machine, going back to 1971, hearing somebody say "Black is Beautiful" and tapping them on the shoulder and going, "But we're all beautiful in our own way." Yes, shut up. We know. Not the point. It'd be like going back to the early '80s when the HIV/AIDS crisis started. And it took several years for the president of the United States to even utter the word. Ronald Reagan didn't want to even utter the word, let alone cut loose with funding to deal with the problem until his buddy Rock Hudson died of it. And then all of a sudden, he was willing to talk about it a little bit. Right? So for the first several years, what you had, you had activists out in the street, you had ACT UP, Gay Men's Health Crisis out in the street demanding research and funding for HIV/AIDS. Right? And what they were saying in effect was, "People with AIDS lives matter." That wasn't the actual phrase, and we didn't have hashtags, but that was essentially what they were saying, right? "People with AIDS lives matter, and we need to pay attention because right now, we're not paying attention to that and we don't seem to believe it as a society, so we need to start believing it." It would be like getting in a time machine, going back to 1983, '82, in the middle of an ACT UP event or a Gay Men's Health Crisis event and shutting down the protest by saying, "Yeah, but what about pancreatic cancer? People die of all kinds of things." H right? Sort of not the point. You have to proclaim that which is ignored. And if we know the history, we understand that, right? 'Cause if we know the history, we know that it is indeed black life, and I would suggest brown life, of color generally, indigenous life, that is usually denigrated, demeaned, ignored. On a sexual level, it's trans lives that are demeaned, ignored. Right? It's women as women. So sometimes you got to proclaim that which is not in the obvious frame of reference. There's nothing pernicious about it. It's not about saying black lives are worth more than other lives. It's about, damn it, these lives actually do matter. And even though the history says they don't, we're here to tell you that they do. And there's nothing wrong about that at all. But if you don't know the history, it might seem untoward. And I get it. And again, it's not your fault that you don't know the history, but it is our responsibility to learn it and then apply it to what we see.
Same is true with immigration. This immigration drama that we have right now is only possible because we don't understand our own history as a country, and particularly those of us of European descent. We have lied to ourselves about how we got here and for what reason. See, black folks know why they're here. Native peoples know why they're here and how they got here. A lot of Asian folks know, particularly if they're Chinese American, they know they got here because their ancestors were brought over to work on the railroads by the railroad barons who didn't care if thousands of them died laying track 19, 20 hours a day. But for those of us who are from Europe, we have this fiction that we've told and we believe it, even though there's no truth to it. You know what the fiction is? It's two parts. Number one, we say things like, with regard to Mexicans coming over the border, with regard to immigrants coming over, but only that border. That's the only one we care about, right? The southern border. I find that interesting. We're not flipping out about Canada, right? We don't have any of the Minutemen or the anti-immigrant group sitting off the coast of Nova Scotia with a gun and a scope trying to like pick off the sneaky Canadians that are trying to sneak in here for our superior healthcare system, which after all would be pretty stupid thing to do. But in any event, we only care about that one border, forgetting for a minute that that border was created at the end of a war that was started on false pretense by this country, after which we jacked half of their country. And you weren't taught that in school either, because our history books aren't interested in telling the truth until this very patriotic history that has no relationship to the fact. So that border is artificial. Mexican folks who are coming here, documented or not, let's be clear, are coming home. Their families were here before our families were here in almost every instance. But we forget that and then we say things like, "Well, I don't mind them coming. I just want them to come legally like my people did." [laughter] The hell is that even mean? Come legally. There was no law to break when our people came. The fact that we didn't break a law that didn't even exist, you don't get cookies for that. You don't get like a pat on the back and a gold star because your great-great-whatever was law-abiding when there was no law that he could have violated even if he wanted to. But we've told this lie that we came for these upstanding principles. So we'll say things like, well, [clears throat] you know, our people came for liberty and freedom, democracy. These people are just coming for stuff. They're just coming for jobs. They're just coming for healthcare. They're just coming for stuff. We came for high-minded principle, right? Because we believe that. What kind of third-grade version of American history is that? Right? Like when Donald Trump says, "Well, Mexico is not sending their best." What the hell? You think Europe sent their best? Europe? No. Our people were the losers of Europe. I'm not trying to be an I'm just telling you the truth. Like, our people were the losers of Europe. The winners didn't get on the boat. You understand what I'm saying? The winners didn't leave. Why the hell would you leave if you were winning? Only the losers left because they had no choice. They were dying. They were starving. They couldn't support their families. A lot of them were convicts who were sold into indentured servitude to rich to work for rich European people. They were barely above the level of a slave themselves. The idea that we had these high, we didn't believe in liberty and freedom. And we know that because once we got to the colonies, we set up the opposite of liberty and freedom. And I don't just mean that for like black folks and native folks. I mean even for other white folks. Like we spent most of the time in the early colonies trying to figure out who the witch was, right? It was like, "Well, you're not a Christian. Well, no, you're not a Christian. WELL, NO, YOU'RE NOT A CHRISTIAN. I'm going to hang you from a tree. Really? Well, I'm going to drown you in the stream. Well, I'm going to set you on fire." Like, that wasn't liberty. The colonies were some of the least free places in the history of the cosmos. But we act like we came for liberty. And they're just here to take advantage. Let's be clear, our people didn't come for liberty. They came for stuff.