Michael Herriot: Maybe America Is Racist [View all]

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.theroot.com/maybe-america-is-racist-1846667213

A few years ago, while covering a story on Republican New Hampshire legislator Werner Horn, I summoned the best and brightest scholars that America had to offer. Horn, who represents his 95.9 percent white hometown in his state’s House of Representatives, confounded people who actually know things by stating that “owning slaves doesn’t make you racist.” During an interview with The Root, Horn doubled down by insisting that the Founding Fathers were not racist.

In an attempt to disprove the premise of Horn’s statement, I called on Dr. Henry Louis Gates, perhaps the most well-known historian in America (and co-founder of The Root). Gates began with an explanation of America’s history of racism by citing David Hume’s racist footnote to his essay Of National Characters, in which he claimed that in all of Africa, there were no arts, no sciences. He noted that Immanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime also expounded on the racial differences between white and Black people. He explained that Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, which was written the same year as the Constitution, was classical racism defined.

But Gates was just a world-famous historian and Werner Horn was a white man. So, to make sure that I had all the bases covered, I called professor, historian, and widely recognized super-genius, Dr. Greg Carr, who heads the Howard University Afro-American Studies Department, teaches at Howard University School of Law and instructs the largest Africana Studies classroom in the world. Before launching into a history of racism, Carr swatted down Horn’s thesis with one request:

“Show me the white slaves.”

*snip*