Michael Harriot, a South Carolina native and columnist at thegrio.com, writes about race, politics and culture. Occasionally, you can find him on MSNBC or CNN commenting on political matters.
Harriot developed a college course, “Race: An Economic Construct,” that has been referenced by university economics departments across the country as a model for teaching the combination of history, economics, politics and class structures.
His new book is called “Black AF History,” in which Harriot refuses to beat around the bush.
Q: You are deeply rooted in South Carolina. Tell me about your family connections (and your emotional connections) to this place.
Michael Harriot talks with The Post and Courier about his new book, “Black AF History.” Harper/Provided
A: I was born and raised in Hartsville, only a few miles from Lee County, from where both of my maternal grandparents were enslaved. Growing up, I spent time in one of Charleston’s oldest Black neighborhoods, where my paternal grandmother Ida Williams lived. Both my grandfathers passed away before I was born but my family was always intentional about us knowing our history, so I spent a lot of time with cousins, aunts, uncles and my extended family.
My family was heavily involved in South Carolina’s fight for equal rights. My grandfather was an NAACP member in the 1940s, and my uncle Ike Williams was the longtime field director. He and his twin sister, Rebecca, were the youngest protesters arrested in the 1961 protest that resulted in the Edwards v. South Carolina decision, which guaranteed the right to protest. My aunt Jannie Harriot founded the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission, which was created to preserve the state’s Black history.
I didn’t realize how much of South Carolina’s history I had absorbed simply by hearing them tell the same stories year after year and trying to figure out what my grandmother was saying in her heavy Geechee accent.
This book (“Black AF History”) is, in part, a love letter to my family and the Black people of South Carolina.
Q: You are among the people on X (formerly Twitter) who have figured out how to engage followers productively. Your threads are informative, enlightening and sometimes challenging. What sort of reactions do you get?
A: Depending on the subject matter, the reactions range from virulent hate to thankful appreciation. After years of writing about race, culture and politics, I’ve learned that the people who think I’m the greatest writer who ever graced the planet are as believable as the people who send DMs calling me the n-word. I don’t know a single Black person who’s ever worked in the public sphere and speaks their truth who wasn’t the target of racism, hate and insults. But I also know a flat-earther, so I also understand that a lot of people genuinely believe they know what they’re talking about, even when they’re dead wrong.
Black people often suffer microaggressions and macro-racism silently because they don’t know if anyone can identify with their experience and the way the world interacts with them. Sometimes, I’ll write a tweet or a thread that encapsulates or explains something that many Black people are reluctant or hesitant to say. That’s when the payoff is worth it.
Q: Your mission seems to be to offer a corrective to versions of history that have been skewed by the biases of White people. In your view, what is the greatest problem with our understanding of American history?
A: I think part of the problem is that our understanding of America’s past has always been filtered through the lens of whiteness. My middle school U.S. History teacher was a Civil War reenactor. My AP History teacher was a Confederate enthusiast. And because groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy and Moms for Liberty have been able to control the narrative, we perpetuate this misinformation. It’s hard to unlearn that the Civil War was about state’s rights if you learned that consistent narrative from elementary, middle and high school social studies teachers who learned it the same way.
And, because most people learned a mythologized version of American history, that majority can collectively dismiss the voices of truth simply by drowning them out.
Q: Thus your new book! “Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America” is history from an African American perspective (to say the least). What were the big challenges in writing the book? What were the greatest satisfactions?
A: The biggest challenge was deciding which subjects would be included, which ones would be left out, and then researching them using primary sources. Part of what I wanted to do was use the perspectives of Black people who lived during the eras covered in the book, which meant using Black newspapers, journals and archives. Too many times, I ran across two sentences that revealed what happened to those historical sources: “Burned by a white mob. No surviving copies exist.”
The greatest satisfaction was holding the final version of the book in my hand. It is as if I manifested a dream into reality.
Q: What do you think Charleston — specifically Charleston — should do to address our long history of anti-Black racism and exploitation?
A: One of my beliefs is that we can’t get past these systemic and historical obstacles without first acknowledging them. When it comes to Charleston, we have to acknowledge that the buildings, monuments and much of the wealth of the city exists because Charleston was the world headquarters for an international, race-based human trafficking system that benefitted every White person who set foot in the state — even if they didn’t enslave anyone. Even after emancipation, South Carolina’s majority-Black tax base had their wealth stolen to build schools, colleges and public facilities that they couldn’t attend.
The buildings constructed with Black labor are still there. The schools that created opportunities for Whites, built by siphoning money from Black taxpayers, still exist. The monuments to white supremacy are still standing. The wealth built by extorting labor through violence, or the threat of violence, has been passed down for generations. It is remarkable that the city still benefits from the intellectual and physical labor of Black people.
But, apparently, the racism, exploitation and attitudes that created all of this have disappeared into the ether…
Once they realize that, the rest will be history.
Editor’s note: This Q&A has been lightly edited for style.