Five Lies about Slavery You're Likely to Hear this Juneteenth

Banned Histories of Race in America

Juneteenth is next week and you know what that means! That’s right, the racists are about to get real loud! Every year around this time dipshit bigots flood social media feeds trying to lie a false history of slavery into existence. So, this year before they ooze into view, allow me to correct the five lies about slavery you’re likely to hear this Juneteenth!

1: “The Party of Lincoln”

This all usually starts with the claim that the current Republican party is the “Party of Lincoln”. The implication is that the right wing of this country is fair and honest and on the right side of history. Their only problem is that they’re clearly none of those things. Without even getting into their policies, their claim is entirely and obviously undone simply by their own undying allegiance to confederate flags and statues.

Republicans often make similar claims about Democrats being pro-slavery and the founders of the KKK. The implication is that “Democrat” has the same meaning it did a century or two ago. Learning about the Whigs and Know Nothings and the Southern Strategies reveal that political parties are a little more fluid than they’d have us believe. Also, Thomas Jefferson was a member of something called the Democrat-Republican Party, so, you know, things change.

2: “Blacks owned slaves, too!”

These goddamn fools love this one. They’ll point at some old records and gleefully proclaim that Black Americans also “owned slaves”. That word “owned” is the lie there. The implication is that free Black people treated enslaved Black people with the same cruelty and sadism as white enslavers. The truth is, as historian James Oakes puts it, "The evidence is overwhelming that the vast majority of black slaveholders were free men who purchased members of their families or who acted out of benevolence."

So, through necessary ingenuity, Black people of the era used the enslavers’ own systems to free themselves? Yes, and that is the opposite of owning.

3: “Everyone was a slave!”

Elon Musk recently said in an interview, “If you study history broadly, everyone was a slave.” Aside from being dismissive, reductive and condescending, that statement is also not at all true. Most versions of “slavery” throughout history were similar to prison sentences. These “slaves” often had rights and the length of enslavement was usually finite and designed for the purposes of repaying social or financial debts. These versions of “slavery” more closely resembled what we now call indentured servitude and absolutely incomparable to what the good ol’ US of A did to Black folks.

In 1662, Virginia passed the Hereditary Slavery Law proclaiming, “that all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” Back then, most other types of inheritance came through the father. Name, title, wealth, etc. were all protected for those white men by previous law, but that previous law created a potential future cost for white enslavers raping enslaved Black women. The Hereditary Slavery Law fixed that for white enslavers rapists by doing three things. The first was making sure that any Black male child of enslaver rape would be kept far away from any white man’s inheritance. The second was guaranteeing that Black people and only Black people would be perpetually born into slavery. And third, the law enshrined the enduring white supremacist concept of race, including the idea that a person’s station, sexual desires, character, intent, thoughts and very soul could be known by the color of a person’s skin from whatever distance that skin color could be noticed.

Along with the wholesale slaughter of its indigenous peoples, the entire country was built according to this premise. Hundreds of years of status and wealth and government and culture and markets and media – the country’s entire self-perpetuating identity – were all dependent not on some general, neutral form of slavery that “everyone” had to “broadly” suffer, but on the brutal and deliberate dehumanization, commodification and subjugation specifically of Black people. And, again, not to put too fine a point on this, but according to the law, Black people alone were meant to bear this vicious and crushing burden solely for the reason of having been born.

4: “The Civil War was about states’ rights!”

This is an all-time classic! It’s honestly super weird that this idea sticks around because in their articles of secession, Confederate states were very explicit that the entire thing was about slavery. No one was keeping it secret. It’s only when racists began to think they needed to appeal to everyone else that they started lying about it. And honestly, I’m a little scared for whenever they collectively realize that they don’t have to lie anymore, but that’s for a different post.

Anyway, I wrote a short form letter explaining just how much the Civil War was about slavery right here if you want to copy, paste and send to whomever needs to know.

5: “Why don’t white people get to have their own holiday?”

Holy shit, they have so many! They’ve got St. Patrick’s Day and Columbus Day and according to a lot of their paintings, Christmas, too! Thanksgiving is probably the whitest holiday imaginable, if you think about it. How many do they really need? Unless it’s not actually about that after all and all their arguments are actually disingenuous attempts to justify hate…?