How Henry Ford Stole Our Future

Banned Histories of Race in America

Square dance is the official State Folk Dance of 31 states. If you were to guess why, you might assume that it just kinda naturally happened. George Washington and the pilgrims taught the cowboys who then dazzled everybody in gym class and it just kinda inevitably took off after that, right? I mean, it’s either that or yet another part of Henry Ford’s decades-long, multifaceted campaign to achieve total nation-wide white supremacy… It’s that one. It’s white supremacy.

As you probably guessed, Henry did this because he didn’t like jazz. He figured he’d replace it with the whitest type of entertainment he could think of: square dancing! Of course, he left out the Black people historically involved in creating square dancing, which is at least consistent because he also left Black people out of jazz.

The thing is, Henry looked at Black people same way enslavers did. To him we were basically property with as much humanity as the average herd animal. He saw us as tools to be used by white men like him. And since herd animals are incapable of artistic creation, we couldn’t possibly have invented jazz. He actually thought jazz was the creation of Jewish people and that they used Black people to do it, somehow.

If you read my last few posts about how Henry created racist debt slavery colonies in Michigan, Georgia and Brazil, then you know he saw Black people as his stuff and Henry didn’t like people touching his stuff. He especially didn’t like Jewish people touching his stuff.

Henry wasn’t shy about his bigotry. Not only did he openly adore the KKK, he also published The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, which made Adolf Hitler Henry’s biggest fan. Henry loved him right back, too.

Now, if you’re a music fan, you may know that the jazz of that era was in such close proximity to blues that it would be impossible to imagine it was created by anyone other than Black people. But the thing you should know about Henry is that he was – to use the medical parlance of his era—a complete fucking idiot. I mean that. He was no more mentally or emotionally developed than a toddler proven by his behavior acting out of dark fantasy and tantrum.

I stumbled into writing about Henry Ford because I was researching CR Patterson, the first and only Black car manufacturer. Patterson was the only because Henry Ford popularized the assembly line and killed off his business along with every other mom and pop car maker, of which, believe it or not, there used to be many.

Because of this, Ford is looked at as a once-in-a-generation genius and prime example of American ingenuity. But the reality is that he eliminated entrepreneurism within an industry, destroying economic freedom and independence for broad sections of the United States.

Our history often misreports avarice as genius.

When we learn about something like the white supremacist roots of our preoccupation with square dancing, after the initial shock wears off, it can kind of feel innocuous. After all, it could’ve been worse, right? It could’ve been Playford’s Dances or something. But that’s the true malevolence of how this works. Because of Ford’s bigoted insistence, we don’t know the culture we’ve lost. Because of Ford’s racist debt colonies, the people of Inkster and Richmond Hill had their futures stolen right along with CR Patterson and countless others. Men like Ford steal our beauty and our potential and assure us that the cruel brutality birthed from their lesser minds is in fact a gift containing our greatest possible future.

For many of us it feels like that future is here and it’s nothing like what we were promised.

--

Most source here are linked. Everything else is from The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire by Elizabeth D. Esch