Malcolm to Nikole
Mark McCormick

Here, in the pretend innocence of middle America, we could not expect much truth about anything historical. Here, on land seized from people who’d been seized from the American Southeast, the dominant culture yet prefers nostalgia to history.

So, in school, teachers told of slave traders and slave owners, while hiding perhaps slavery’s most brutal aspect – slave making. Ishmael Reed called them “nigger breakers.” I learned of this in my early 20s from a slight book of 80-some-odd pages, five pages of which roared with more terror than I’d ever confronted.

“They used to take a Black woman who would be pregnant,” Malcolm wrote, “and tie her up by her toes, let her be hanging head down, and they would take a knife and cut her stomach open, let that Black, unborn child fall out, and then stomp it’s head in the ground.”

This was done, he said, in front of the husband/father, to breed fear into the captives so that no thought of rebellion would bloom in even the recesses of their minds.

“I’ll show you the books where they write about this,” Malcolm said. “Slave Trade” by Spears, “From Slavery to Freedom,” by John Hope Franklin, “Negro Family in the U.S.” by Frazier…. “Anti-Slavery,” by Dwight Lowell Drummond.”

Pathfinder published the book in 1967, the year I was born.

Just two years ago, I met Nikole Hannah-Jones, to whom Malcolm the firebrand passed his torch that lit the path forward but also kindled 400-plus years of tortured anger, resolve and hope.

Her fires — ignited by her 1619 Project — have threatened the fragile nostalgia that gauzes our ears and eyelids. Senators have taken to a kind of aerial firefighting, blanketing the culture in folklore and retardant appeals to whiteness to prevent lies from being burned away.

White Supremacy/Racism predates our national origin. We developed sharp-pencil accounting driving the life and productivity out of enslaved human beings. George Washington didn’t have wooden teeth. His teeth were not even his. They were ripped from the mouths of the unwilling.

“It’s actually simple,” Hannah-Jones said of the nostalgia-loving majority, “If you can feel pride in things you didn’t personally take part in, you can feel shame in things you didn’t personally take part in. Some of you are motivated to make this hard, but it’s only hard because you want the glory of our history but not the burden.”

1776 doesn’t explain January 6th, she said.
But 1619 does.
But 1619 does.