“. . . so we get King Leopold masking his atrocities in the Congo in the discourse of anti-slavery, or British colonial figures in Ghana effectively saying, ‘Well, we saved you from the slave raider so you should be grateful.’ In both cases, it’s the same notion: ‘We’ve given you your freedom, so now you’re in our debt.’”
—Saidiya Hartman1
“. . . in what sort of account and under what conditions of forgetting does one in the present understand slaveowner and slave to have had the same absence of choice?”
—Christina Sharpe2
Eight months had passed since his inauguration yet President Trump was still on the campaign trail making speeches to his voting bloc. At the time, the 45th president of the United States found himself in a myriad of crises. Russia, prominent Democrats and Republicans claimed, interfered in the 2016 elections to secure Trump’s victory. When the media wasn’t discussing the unverified Trump-Russia connection, it was speculating on his failure to pass meaningful legislation in the areas of immigration and health care. It was this context that Trump decided to address a different set of detractors based in the National Football League (NFL).
No particular aspect of the game itself caught the president’s attention. Trump used his rally and his Twitter handle to condemn quarterback Colin Kaepernick and the players that followed his lead for protesting white supremacy and police brutality during the pregame national anthem. At the rally, Trump asked, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired.’” Later, Trump would elaborate on his comments in a Twitter post about how NFL players who make millions of dollars should not be allowed to “disrespect” the “great” American flag and keep their jobs. The president’s comments propelled the NFL anthem protests into the realm of “official” politics.
“Official” political discourse in the U.S. did not react kindly. NFL owners and many of Trump’s political detractors in Washington used the comments to wage a campaign for “national unity” with the anthem protests at the center. Political opposition denounced Trump for the racist connotations inherent in his comments and how they distracted from more pressing matters. NFL owners and entire teams began linking arms and kneeling during the anthem in protest of the president. In effect, Trump had successfully shifted the focus of the anthem protests away from racist policing. The American ruling class exploited his comments to make the protests center around Trump’s failure to respect the sacred values of American exceptionalism.
As is expected whenever a professional athlete decides to speak out against injustice, NFL players were accused of being “ungrateful,” presumably to the country that allows them to make millions of dollars to play with a ball. The veterans group The American Legion were quick to play this card, as was former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, who thought any NFL player who feels oppressed must be crazy.3 These players “need a therapist,” Gingrich said, “not a publicity stunt.” One Fox News commentator even stated that it was Donald Trump who needed to be thanked for starting this “national conversation” about race. But as comedian Samantha Bee quipped, “Hey, wow, and what a conversation we’re having.” “Talking about black people and their owners and how they should be grateful for the privilege of working on a field,” she added. “Who says Trump is taking us backward?”4
Trump’s comments had inadvertently placed American exceptionalism on trial and the NFL and its political partners came staunchly to its rescue. “National unity” and the “right” to stand up for what one believes became synonymous with the anthem protests. NFL owners, many of whom had opposed Kaepernick’s stand against police brutality and conspired to keep him unsigned because of it, began protesting with players. The American ruling class required that the U.S. be viewed as the arbiter of “national unity” and “democratic values.” This is in keeping with the dominant interpretation of American history which presumes that the U.S. is exceptional to all other past and present state formations.
What such a narrative fails to consider, however, is that Trump’s comments are rooted in the suppressed history of white supremacy in America. White supremacy is often narrowly promoted in the American mainstream as a symptom of individual hatred toward people who fit non-white racial categories. Acts of racial violence and discrimination are seen as individualized aberrations in a historical context characterized by progress toward the country’s founding ideals. American exceptionalism and innocence help to conceal the more subtle (and violent) manifestations of how white supremacy is built into American political economy.
Throughout the controversy that surrounded Trump’s “son of a bitch” moment, few observers pointed out that Trump’s and his supporters’ reference to ungratefulness is a relatively common theme in American history. American exceptionalism and innocence are inherently white supremacist ideologies. The former presumes that American national superiority should be appreciated by racially oppressed people regardless of their circumstances and the latter assumes that past racist crimes have been rectified by the benevolence of institutions dominated by white America. White Americans commonly react to the grievances of Black America with “a love it or leave it attitude” toward the U.S., which few if any acknowledge is rooted in the benevolence narrative often attached to the period of slavery.
White supremacy could not justify the enslavement of an entire people through violence alone. It needed to create a variety of narratives that reinforced the inferiority of the slave and the superiority of the slave master. During the antebellum period in the American South, Frederick Douglass described gratitude as one of the educational methods slave masters employed to push slaves toward subjugation and away from freedom. Brian Warnick describes the use of gratitude during slavery this way:
The slaveholders, for instance, highlighted the slaves’ dependency by linking rewards of position and comfort to faithful service. The will of the master and slave were linked by these offers of positions and rewards within the oppressive system [. . .] The overseer thus becomes the bestower of reward and office, the slave the grateful and dependent recipient. The slaves see all good things as contingent on pleasing the master.5
Warnick places the rhetoric of gratitude in the context of Frederick Douglass’s observations that slave masters would give certain privileges to slaves that showed gratefulness to and for their masters. Enslaved Blacks were taught that they were inferior to their white masters, meaning any benefits derived from the slave system could only be won from the generosity of their overseer. The assumption was not necessarily grounded in historical reality. From the beginning of the enterprise of African enslavement, the enslaved organized rebellions that changed the course of history many times over. The perceived gratitude of the slave master strips the enslaved of their independent strivings for freedom, making the slave master the sole maker of history.
Historians have contributed to the perception that slavery produced a relationship marked by paternalism between the master and the slave. Eugene Genovese is one such historian. His work argued, from a Marxist perspective, that slavery in the American South was a paternal relationship.6 Josh Cole, however, explains the limitations of Genovese’s work by emphasizing that while he understood slavery as a cruel institution,
he believed that extreme forms of mistreatment were very minor. Genovese introduced slave-owner “paternalism,” not a good, painless, or benign slavery, but a slavery in which masters took personal interest in the lives of their slaves. Genovese believes that paternalism “brought white and black together and welded them into one people with genuine elements of affection and intimacy.” It was a compromise between master and slave—the master would provide for the slave as long as the slave produced for him. Genovese fails to distinguish between paternalism as an ideology and as a way of life. This sense of paternalism that Genovese mentions was a self-justifying ideology and, with a few exceptions, not a very visible practice in the slaveholding South. The institution of slavery was meant to fully exploit the slaves, while the ideology allowed whites to exercise their “superior” status with relatively no guilty conscience.7
Cole contrasts Genovese’s assertions with the realities of slavery. He explains that slave masters “whipped slaves for various and often-insignificant reasons, branded them to reaffirm their domination over them and sometimes had their ears cut off if they disobeyed direct orders.” It was also customary, he writes, for slaveholders to find ways “to trim the costs of feeding their slaves and threatened to sell them if they did not produce enough for their masters.”8 Rather than a “fringe benefit” or a material privilege, the benevolence of slave masters was more often than not utilized as a weapon to further exploit and pacify the enslaved.
The social relations that dictated slavery in the American South exist today. These relations have changed in form, not substance. Trump’s comments expose how paternalism continues to shape the narrative of white supremacy in the context of American exceptionalism. Trump’s reaction to the NFL protests is indicative of the hegemonic view in the U.S. that Black athletes should appreciate the “privileges,” real or observed, at the expense of the community as a whole. It is an expectation of both the American power structure and many white Americans that Black Americans worship the nation that enslaved them.
Saidiya Hartman, in reference to slavery, asks “How do we mourn something that is still going on?”9 The assertion that Black Americans—and Black athletes in particular—should forget about slavery, “get over it,” “stop dwelling on the past,” and “appreciate” what the U.S. has given them reinforces the master and slave relationship, and at the same time sweeps the afterlives of slavery into the dustbin of history. But as Lisa Lowe writes, many “contemporary critics asks if one can even consider slavery a past condition.” Given “the continuing captivity, expropriation, disposability, and fungibility of black communities,” she argues, “they ask if slavery can be treated as a historical object that is completed or overcome, from which recovery would be possible.”10 Black resistance disrupts the comfort that paternalism affords. It reminds the American ruling class and those who benefit from white supremacy of the imminent danger posed by Black resistance to the continued existence of the system. This elicits many different responses from the contemporary slave masters of American society, one of which is the demand that the enslaved be grateful for the “freedom” bestowed upon them by the slave-owning power structure.
The NFL protests of the national anthem invoked this response. League rosters have become increasingly occupied by Black players. White America’s initial reaction to Kaepernick’s anthem protest largely mirrored that of the corporate media and later Donald Trump. Kaepernick was described as selfish, unpatriotic, and unappreciative of the glamour that his career provides. When other NFL players joined in, they too were painted in a manner similar to Kaepernick. Not even coach Mike Tomlin’s refusal to choose a side in the debate could satisfy White America. After Tomlin’s Steelers decided not to take the field during the anthem in an act of team “unity,” a local fire chief 20 miles outside of Pittsburgh named Paul Smith announced via Facebook that Tomlin had “added himself to [his] list of no-good niggers.”11 It’s curious that two other coaches who made their teams stay in the locker room for the national anthem—Pete Carroll of the Seattle Seahawks and Mike Mularkey of the Tennessee Titans—did not make the list. Or if they did, writes journalist Shaun King, “Smith simply forgot to write a Facebook status about it.” “We’re not quite clear on how exhaustive a list Smith has built over the years,” King added, but we do know that Mike Tomlin made the cut. And let us not forget “that Smith didn’t put Tomlin on his ‘list of no-good niggers’—instead, Tomlin put himself on that list.”12
In her cringe-worthy article, “I Used to Lead Tours at a Plantation. You Won’t Believe the Questions I Got About Slavery,” Margaret Biser reveals how common it is to find people like fire chief Paul Smith all across America.13 When her job required that she chronicle the brutality of slavery to the site’s visitors, many white people responded with the narrative of “appreciation” as a defensive posture. During a tour, for example, a visitor asked Biser whether “the slaves here appreciate the care they got from their mistress?” Many of the questions she would receive in her day-to-day work revolved around whether slave masters were benevolent or kind to their slaves. One visitor in particular demanded that she answer this question affirmatively. The visitor asked, “Were they loyal?” He elaborated on his question by claiming that slave masters “gave ’em food. Gave ’em a place to live.” Such logic insinuates that Black Americans had much to appreciate for their enslavement prior to formal emancipation. Furthermore, it reinforces the division of oppressed people into “deserving” and “undeserving” categories with the measure being one’s appreciation of their oppression. Much was at stake for these white visitors in getting the history right, or forgetting it altogether. As one guest reminded Biser, “Listen, I just wanted to say that dragging all this slavery stuff up again is bringing down America.” When Biser began to protest, he interrupted her. “You didn’t know,” he said. “You’re young. But America is the greatest country in the world, and these people out there, they’d do anything to make America less great.”14
The list of “no-good niggers” and the narrative of appreciation both stem from the social conditions that make American exceptionalism and American innocence such dominant ideologies. American exceptionalism reads from the lens of the American ruling class, which has a vested interest in telling the developmental story of the U.S. in the most positive light. This class owns the major media outlets, influences school curriculum through its control of the state, and enforces conditions of poverty and repression. The ruling class not only profits from these conditions but also establishes powerful material and ideological disincentives to those who may deviate from its false narratives. American exceptionalism thus becomes common sense in an environment where no other narrative is allowed to thrive.
It is important, then, to place into proper context the phenomena such as the list of “no-good niggers” and the expectation that the oppressed “appreciate” the nation that oppresses them. In light of the fire chief’s “list” of who is “good” and who is “no good,” along with the questions Margaret Biser received during her time as a tour guide, one can’t help but think of Thavolia Glymph’s groundbreaking work on black women’s domestic labor in the plantation household.15 Ideologies of making “good,” “better,” and “decent” girls played a fundamental role in slavery and its many afterlives. “The tight market for household help did not dissuade former mistresses from their mission to find the kind of black servant they imagined they had once owned,” Glymph observes of the racial and gendered economics of domestic labor in the postbellum period. “They wanted a ‘good one,’ a black woman who would stand in awe of them, and wash, cook, and clean for them with a smile and a grateful attitude, a black woman who would understand that black women were best constituted for the kind of work they were expected to do.”16
American exceptionalism demands that Black Americans remain silent about injustice and appreciate what the American nation-state has “given” them. Consider how most Americans are taught about the history of social change. For example, it was Lincoln who freed the slaves to move us toward a more perfect union.17 It was Brad Pitt’s character who “freed” Solomon Northup in the film 12 Years a Slave. Civil Rights legislation, the argument goes, was granted to Black Americans because the U.S. government repudiated the excesses of racial segregation. In short, Americans are consistently taught that social justice comes as a result of a benevolent CEO, president, senator, supreme court justice, or white abolitionist. But as Calvin Warren points out about the irony of “giving” freedom to a population already damned to social death: “What philosophy of becoming sustains this romantic narrative? What type of life, given by the master, can transform the dead thing?”18
Overlooked are the movements, organizations, and rebellions that Black America has led over the course of American history that forced change from below. This applies to workers movements and other social insurgencies that sought to dismantle U.S. racial domination and imperialism. For the oppressed and exploited, gratitude is a vow of silence. It means acceptance of the conditions that lead to abject poverty in the face of plenty, racist police murders amid a system incapable of stopping them, and endless war in the face of a system that disdains peace. Connie Wun, in her research on the policing of black girls in American schools, examines one of the most violent ways that the state expects gratitude from its most vulnerable groups. “The girl of color can be perceived as too angry, defiant, despondent, and critical,” Wun writes. “She is also imagined as a subject that illegitimately takes from society, its institutions, and good people. At the same time as she extracts resources from society, she is ungrateful for its generosity.”19
The reality is that the American nation-state’s “no good niggers list” is a rather long one. It includes the over 2.3 million people in prison, the millions of people that have perished from its endless wars, poor women of color who are left uninsured or underinsured by the corporate health sector, and the wide number of political prisoners in danger of dying behind bars. Colin Kaepernick has been told many times to appreciate what the NFL—and the U.S. by extension—has given him, namely, a large income compared to most. Yet Kaepernick has been exiled from the NFL for his actions with a high likelihood that he will never be able to play another game. As Dave Zirin notes, NFL executives “hate the idea of a freethinking, openly anti-racist player more than they love the idea of winning a Super Bowl.” The NFL’s decision to tank its season rather than give Kaepernick a job leads Zirin to conclude that “the league’s moral compass points in one direction: It’s not toward money and it’s not toward winning.” Instead, he writes, “It’s toward remaking this country in their political image: An image where billionaires make the decisions and the rest of us just shut up, work, and salute on demand.”20
The message is clear: no job is safe, and no status is too comfortable if one fails to appreciate the United States’ exceptional character. American exceptionalism has only been truly exceptional for a minority. The ideology relies on the fear imposed by the system and the comfort gained from adhering to it. However, if we are to truly dismantle American exceptionalism and develop a social movement strong enough to force transformative change, it will require more “no-good niggers” and ungrateful “sons of bitches” to emerge in the weeks, months, and years to come.