“If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.”
—Saidiya Hartman1
“A great deal of one’s energy is expended in reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see. This is utterly futile, of course, since they do see what they see. And what they see is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history, known all the world over.”
—James Baldwin2
The making of U.S. imperialism was dependent not only on the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Another and no less devastating policy characterized the formation of America’s national identity. That policy was the enslavement of African peoples. Slavery birthed the capitalist economy that still dominates the Western world. The historical development of England’s thirteen colonies at the backbone of the American republic was especially dependent on the practice. How can one speak of the exceptionalism or innocence of the United States when slavery was a driving force in the formation of the very nation-state itself? What stories have we been told that ignore, obscure, or minimize this great evil?
The U.S. is supported by an origins myth which is perhaps the most valuable narrative for the architects of American exceptionalism. It rests on the premise that the “American Revolution” was a positive step forward in the history of humanity. Free-market zealots and left-wing political thinkers alike have heralded the break from the British Empire as an “anti-colonial” rebellion. This rebellion has been deemed a breakthrough in democracy and a cornerstone in the progressive development of unfettered capitalism in the Western hemisphere. As historian Tisa Wenger writes,
Pundits, politicians, and some scholars have regularly denied that the United States, past or present, should be called an empire. But these denials, and the assurances of American benevolence that so often accompany them, are in no way distinctive to the United States. Rather, they have been part of the discursive mechanics of many empires around the world and help to sustain an exceptionalism that rationalizes the global exercise of U.S. military and economic power. In fact, the colonies that declared their independence from British rule in 1776 were founded in the crucible of empire, out of the mix of Europe’s competitions for empire in the Atlantic world. Thomas Jefferson famously described the new republic as a distinctive “Empire of Liberty,” and by the late nineteenth century it had joined in the European contest for imperial possessions around the globe.3
Despite the imperial ambitions of America’s founders, many people assign the purest and most benevolent of motives to their country’s first “revolutionaries.” America’s “revolution” has retained its progressive character even though the colonial elites leading the rebellion had grown rich from the trade of African slaves and the theft of Indigenous land for over a century prior to the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Still, the American nation-state has been upheld as a beacon of hope from which the principles of liberty, democracy, and freedom have flourished. Historians and scholars have largely accepted the premise that the “American Revolution” instituted these principles into law when the colonists severed ties with the British Crown. While it has been difficult to mask the horrors of slavery on subjugated Africans, it has been equally difficult to pierce through the narrative that the institution of slavery was a mere mistake or an aberration in an otherwise flawless American design. Thus, many Americans proudly look back at the “independence” movement forged by the colonists and call it a “revolution,” while offering little regret for the slave economy that was so crucial to the nation’s founding.
Constitutional law scholar Aziz Rana, commenting on his book, The Two Faces of American Freedom, explains how there are three fundamental problems with our country’s origins myth.4 The first is that it glorifies the so-called founding values of the nation, making institutions such as slavery appear as nothing more than a mere aberration in a larger, redemptive journey. Second, the narrative “reads American founding as an anti-imperial act and the republic as the first post-colonial society” when in fact colonialism and imperialism would remain crucial features of the nation’s development into the present day. Finally, the origins myth provides a framework for social change in America where the redemptive promise of the American nation-state is the ideal goal set for future reform projects. As a consequence, the narrative has us believe that social justice requires tweaking a system that is becoming more and more inclusive, rather than organizing to dismantle the system itself. American “revolutionaries” or the “Founding Fathers” are thus seen as the standard bearer representatives of “freedom” and “justice,” despite the subjugation and un-freedom they imposed on the colonized Native and the enslaved African.
The dominant narrative of the “American Revolution” is the first attempt to interpret the American story as one of freedom overcoming slavery rather than freedom rooted in slavery.5 Lisa Lowe argues that this narrative “at once denies colonial slavery, erases the seizure of lands from Native peoples, and develops freedoms for man in modern Europe and North America, while relegating others to geographical and temporal spaces that are constituted as backward, uncivilized, and unfree.”6 Yet the continued relevance of American exceptionalism and American innocence depends on this myth. Whether it’s the “American Revolution,” the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth amendment (supposedly) abolishing slavery, the civil rights struggle, or the election of the first Black president, the American story is characterized as a progressive journey toward “a more perfect union.” This trope is even reinforced in popular culture, as Salamishah Tillet notes in her analysis of the film “Race,” which chronicles Jesse Owens and the 1936 Olympics. Contesting the idea that one person or even one movement can triumph over something as powerful as American anti-blackness, Tillet places Owens’s legacy in historical context. “That the Holocaust and World War II were right on the horizon, while Jim Crow legally reigned for almost 30 more years after Owens’s Olympic victories,” she writes, “proves that one man or one moving image could not stop the tide of history.”7
This is perhaps why George Shulman invites us to tell the American story in a different way. “Better to begin with American slavery and tell a story not of progress against failures,” he writes, “but of continuing domination and struggles (partly effective) against it.”8 Rejection of the origins myth means centering the resistance of the enslaved in the development of the U.S. and taking seriously what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlives of slavery.” To be sure, it is a lot more convenient to believe that America has become more and more free and that only a little more time is needed to establish our “perfect union.” It is not easy to reject America’s claim to racial progress, nor to admit that the state has consistently found new, creative ways of deriving power, pleasure, and profit from the domination of Black people. To do so would mean to lose faith in the promise of mere reforms or tweaks of the system and instead imagine a different world altogether. As Hartman writes in her book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route:
I knew that no matter how far from home I traveled, I would never be able to leave my past behind. I would never be able to imagine being the kind of person who had not been made and marked by slavery. I was black and a history of terror had produced that identity. Terror was “captivity without the possibility of flight,” inescapable violence, precarious life. There was no going back to a time or place before slavery, and going beyond it no doubt would entail nothing less momentous than yet another revolution.9
Whether the “American Revolution” can be labeled a revolution at all is a question that brings to light the connection between American exceptionalism and historical memory. American educational institutions at all levels often present the formation of the U.S. as a glorious event completely detached from historical context. The fact that many of the “Founding Fathers” such as George Washington owned African slaves is explained away as a small deviation from the democratic order of the American republic rather than a troubling contradiction.10 Yet narratives such as these have always played a critical role in positioning the U.S. as different than and superior to other nations. “A main component of early Americans’ self-perception,” writes K. J. Holsti, “was that they were uniquely free and that in their constitution they had created historically progressive political institutions and practices. America was free, virtuous, and peaceful. Europe was in contrast fallen, corrupt, and warlike.”11
The American colonizer has historically assumed the identity of a freedom fighter who heroically frees its subjects after it secures freedom for itself. This identity has been ascribed to historical icons such as Abraham Lincoln. Stories of Lincoln often conclude that it was he who freed African slaves during the Civil War period. But as Joy James notes, these stories indicate that “Emancipation is given by the dominant, it being a legal, contractual, and social agreement.” “Freedom,” on the other hand, “is taken and created. It exists as a right against the captor and/or enslaver and a practice shared in community by the subordinate captives [. . .] Freedom is an ontological status—only the individual or collective—and perhaps a god—can create freedom.”12 In other words, neither Washington nor Lincoln, as heads of the oppressive state itself, have ever been in a position to “grant” freedom to those they oppress.
Presuming the “American Revolution” and its leaders as agents of liberty and freedom erases the role of the oppressed in the making of history. History is not a series of singular, disconnected events. Nor is history determined by the whims of the dominant class alone. American exceptionalism relies heavily on the notion that the roots of the nation’s ruling elites directly sprout from the democratic struggle against the British Crown. This effectively minimizes the role the enslavement of Africans played in the making of the U.S. and severs the ties between this history and the continued oppression of Black Americans under present day U.S. imperialism. In today’s fights for social justice, then, we must not forget that “Western notions of freedom, liberty, individual rights, and property are all profoundly bound up with the enslavement of the racialized Other.”13
American exceptionalism and its origins myth protect the racist American power structure by diffusing a special character to the U.S. As a republic, the story goes, America was not constrained by the interests of a monarchy or held down by familial inheritance to state power. Yet this same republic that claimed to bestow freedom upon all citizens had to contend with the contradiction between the founding values of the nation-state and the interests of the class which led its drive to “independence.” That contradiction has not become any less relevant in the present day. As Angela Davis and others have pointed out, the Thirteenth Amendment made slavery a crime except as punishment for criminal charges.14 That penal servitude remained legal after the institution of the Thirteenth Amendment had severe consequences for Black life, whether in the Black Codes that sanctioned slave labor in the penal systems in the post–Civil War period or the present day incarceration regime that many activists have deemed “The New Jim Crow” or centers of “prison slavery.”15
The afterlives of slavery so foundational to the current structure of U.S. empire cannot be truly understood without analyzing the framework of American exceptionalism and innocence. American virtues of liberty and freedom are bound together with the origins myth to help center attention to the malleability of the American settler colonial project. Even when the interests of white supremacy and private property are attributed to the roots of the project, rarely are they questioned. David Oshinsky’s account of the backlash to Reconstruction in Mississippi shows that while emancipation protected Black freedmen from enslavement and forced labor, it by no means guaranteed equality on a social and political basis.16 Black “freed” people continued to experience slavery’s afterlives. The institution of Jim Crow laws and Black Codes kept the majority of Blacks in a state of bondage both within and outside of the American penal system through the proliferation of white vigilante terror.
Conditions for Black Americans remain precarious in the 21st century. Race relations and white privilege are consistent themes of discussion on many college campuses. The Black Lives Matter movement has nationalized this conversation. An opportunity exists for a mass movement to place slavery’s afterlives in their proper context. That context bursts asunder the origins myth of the U.S. and should be widely discussed so more activists and scholars find the clarity necessary to envision a new, more just social order. The exceptional and innocent American nation-state would have us believe that slavery is a past event, one for which we deeply regret. But slavery—if viewed not just as an economic arrangement but as a form of domination—is not of the past; it lives on today. And slavery is also not an event; it is a structure that forms the very core of what the U.S. is as a country. Even after so-called “emancipation,” Calvin Warren writes, “the form of terror might change, but the necessity and manifestation of terror remains.” “A change in terroristic tactics and strategies is not progress or freedom,” he adds, drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon and Hortense Spillers. Instead, “it is the metaphysical holocaust ‘showing itself in endless disguises.’”17
The origins myth of the U.S. is especially pernicious because it masks the true motivations that spurred the settler drive to independence from London. These motivations, when coupled with the historical context that shaped world politics at the time, indicate that the settler revolt was a not a revolution but a counterrevolution to the tide of abolition. As Gerald Horne explains, the roots of the “American Revolution” lay in the desire for settlers of the thirteen colonies to preserve slavery:
London had created an inherently unstable colonial project, based on mass enslavement of Africans—who could then be appealed to by Spanish neighbors and wreak havoc—and an inability to hedge against the fiasco . . . by building a buffer class of free Negros and mulattoes [. . .] That is to say, before 1763, mainland settlers were huddling in fear of Negro insurrection combined with foreign invasion, particularly from Spanish Florida or, possibly from French Canada; afterward, it appeared to a number of colonists—particularly as abolitionist sentiment grew in London—that Negro insurrection would be coupled with the throttling of the colonies by redcoats, many of them bearing an ebony hue.18
A host of historical events thus gave rise to the drive toward American “independence.” The revolt against British rule was ultimately an effort to maintain the slave trade in opposition to London’s incipient trend toward abolition. Africans stolen from their homeland and enslaved in both the mainland colonies and the Caribbean were prone to insurrection. Spain and France took advantage by arming Africans and Indigenous peoples against London’s rule. This created a crisis of an internal enemy and an external foe that had the potential of sending London’s mainland colonies into political and economic crisis. As London responded by arming Africans and seeking gradual abolition of chattel slavery in the mid to late 18th century, the planter and merchant capitalist class of the mainland colonies began to see London as a threat to its existence. The “Founding Fathers” sought to eliminate this threat by creating a perfect “whiteness” in the form of a republican state. It would do this by granting rights and privileges to European migrants of all classes (now deemed “white”) to protect the slave-owning class from the rapidly growing African population, which by the year 1776 outnumbered white settlers in important colonies such as South Carolina.19
The Somerset case of 1772 solidified settler resentment toward London. James Somerset, originally a Virginia slave, was given freedom by English courts after escaping to London by sea. The ruling effectively outlawed slavery in the mother country. Settlers already fearing the possibility of seeing their 1600, sometimes 1700 percent, profit margins stripped from them by London’s abolitionism saw no other option but to secede from the Union Jack.20 England’s need to arm Africans to preserve colonial possessions in the Caribbean decades prior to 1776 had cemented the notion in the colonies that to stay under the banner of the Crown was to submit to the same kind of slavery that mainland settlers forced upon Africans. White supremacy, which had already been institutionalized for decades as a key weapon for settlers in their unending struggle to subdue rebellious Africans, is at the very core of why the “American Revolution” was fought in the first place.
If no revolution occurred in 1776 or any point thereafter, then the roots of the American colonial project remain firmly intact. As Saidiya Hartman explains, “the seizing hold of the past is a way of lamenting current circumstance and countering the regular disqualification of claims for redress as complaint, envy, and a barrier to social advancement.”21 History possesses lessons that are critical toward forging successful movements to transform the conditions of slavery that have, historically, been critical to the development of U.S. imperialism. American exceptionalism and innocence, with their rhetoric of progress, makes it easier to dismiss or refute what Hartman calls “slavery’s enduring legacy.” And “by doing so,” she continues, “[it] establishes the remoteness and irrelevance of the past. As a consequence of this posture, claims for redress based on this history and its enduring legacy are disqualified and belittled as ridiculous or unintelligible, with some conservative critics going so far as to denigrate these claims as racist acts themselves.”22 Indeed, claims that the American way of life is the most superior form of social organization, or that slavery is of a bygone era, ignore the “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” which have plagued the Black condition in America since the nation’s inception.23
The story of Erica Garner is an example of slavery’s legacy on the Black condition in America. In 2014, Erica’s father Eric was strangled to death by the NYPD. His cry “I can’t breathe” in his last moments of life propelled masses of Black Americans into the street in protest, including his daughter. Erica Garner would become an advocate against racist policing, a system rooted in the nation’s slave patrols of the 17th and 18th centuries. Her life, however, was cut short in 2017 when the 27-year-old suffered a heart attack on Christmas Eve, passing away six days later. Prior to her death, Erica reported to the media that “the system beats you down.” Her statement amplified the real world consequences of the afterlife of slavery. Slavery’s legacy wore down, beat down, and killed Erica Garner. Today, not only are Black Americans more likely to be murdered by police forces, mired in poverty, and incarcerated disproportionately, but the stress from these conditions has led to the lowest life expectancy rate among racialized groups in the country. For these reasons, Christina Sharpe invites us to “think anew what it means to be a (black) post-slavery subject positioned within everyday intimate brutalities who is said to have survived or to be surviving the past of slavery, that is not yet past, bearing something like freedom.”24
Erica Garner also reminds us that it is not possible to fully comprehend slavery and its continued relation to Black America under modern day U.S. imperialism without acknowledging the centrality of African resistance in the making of history. The counter revolution to abolitionism was sparked by the resistance of the enslaved in all corners of the world where systems of slavery existed. Rebellions led by slaves in the English colonies of both the Caribbean and North American mainland ultimately created the conditions for London’s slow retreat toward abolition. Despite popular discourse about how British politicians were swayed by compelling moral arguments to abolish slavery, Lisa Lowe argues otherwise in her book The Intimacies of Four Continents. These “liberal abolitionist arguments were less important to the passage of the Slave Trade Act and the Slavery Abolition Act,” she shows, “than were the dramatic revolts and everyday practices of enslaved peoples themselves.”25 Thus, the colonial powers did not terminate the slave trade out of the benevolence of their hearts. They did so out of the necessity to protect colonial possessions in the face of unending resistance from those they so brutally chained and forced into wageless labor.
Black resistance to the afterlives of slavery has been an enduring theme in the history of U.S. imperialism as well. In fact, as Sylvia Frey shows, Pan-Africanism and international solidarity between Black communities in the U.S. and other nations began as early as America’s founding.26 “African Americans of the American Revolutionary era played a significant part in the foundational wave of pan-Africanism,” Frey writes. Not only did they help “create and spread a diasporic consciousness unified by a collective memory of a lost homeland;” they “implicitly invoked the inalienable right of revolution espoused by white revolutionaries and so established two distinct processes of racial construction, one nonviolent and the other revolutionary.”27 Social movements from Reconstruction to Black Liberation also fought tirelessly to break the chains of white supremacy and class oppression after formal emancipation. We must ask ourselves why so many former Black Panthers like Herman Bell remain behind prison walls. These movements and their leaders faced backlash from the U.S. imperialist state similar to the colonial backlash against the British Crown that produced the “American Revolution.” The preservation of anti-Black racism and private property has consistently undergirded the suppression of Black resistance. Dominant narratives of America’s exceptional democracy and commitment to freedom have put a national blinder on the undemocratic regime that regulates Black life.
When the Black Lives Matter movement emerged in 2014 to challenge the near daily killings of Black Americans by law enforcement, activists and community members challenged the enduring strength of American exceptionalism and innocence head on. The SWAT teams and militarized police forces deployed to occupy the streets of Ferguson to put down the resistance only amplified the rage caused by acquitting the police officer who murdered Michael Brown. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration called for “law and order” and condemned the “violence” of protesters. Black Lives Matter movement activists and organizers learned quickly that the maintenance of America’s exceptional image took precedence over their demands for justice. U.S. imperialism’s response to the legal lynchings committed by police officers signaled that it was in fact Black American resistance that so disturbed the system, not the lynchings themselves.
The afterlives of slavery are in fact the afterlives of a counter revolution to preserve the system that produced slavery. That counter revolution created a special nation, the American nation. None other like it had existed before—but not for the reasons outlined in American exceptionalist discourse. The foundations of U.S. imperialism rest in the genocide of Indigenous Peoples and the enslavement of Africans. This has made U.S. imperialism not only a uniquely prosperous system but also a uniquely dangerous system to the lives of oppressed people both in the mainland and outside of it. The colonists that forged independence from enslavement did not stop at independence in their quest to expand far and wide under the banner of white superiority and capital accumulation. Their thirst for profit made the expansion of the capitalist enterprise of settler colonialism a permanent necessity. All corners of the planet and their inhabitants were plundered with these interests in mind. Black resistance in the post-emancipation period thus relied on global alliances with movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to strengthen Black freedom efforts in the American mainland. This is reminiscent of the alliances the enslaved made with the Spanish and French colonial powers in resistance to the colonial enterprise in the North American mainland, a resistance the English colonists wanted so desperately to stop by separating from the British Crown. International alliances hinted at throughout history, and emerging present-day solidarity efforts like the one between Black Lives Matter and Palestine, may serve as roadmaps to the graveyard where the afterlives of slavery (more on this later), and the American exceptionalist ideology that protects them, are buried once and for all.