THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD: READ, UNDERSTAND, ACT

It is Theoretical Monday and I have to tell you that I have been reading Edward Baptist's THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD. I find it to be an important and horrifying book dealing with slavery up close and personal and detailing its relationship to capitalism not as exceptional but as "normal," while also overturning the old argument that slave labor was inefficient labor.  

I have been "reminded"  by various friends that the central importance of slavery to the capitalist system has long been understood by Marxists.  Maybe, maybe not.  To me it seems there is far more to Baptist's analysis than that provided by Marx and Engels.  In fact, Engels wrote,

Slavery in the United States of America was based far less on force than on the English cotton industry; in those districts where no cotton was grown or which, unlike the borders states, did not breed slaves for the cotton-growing states, it died out of itself without any force being used, simply because it did not pay.

While this may be true to some extent (though not, I think to the extent Engels makes it sound), it seems irrelevant since cotton WAS king as slavery moved west (as slaves were force marched), and since not just border states, but Virginia, the Carolinas etc DID breed slaves.  Further, as Baptist makes clear, there were "petty capitalists" or "entrepreneurs" (as Baptist describes them)  who made fortunes transporting and selling African American  human beings and that a whole finance system developed around all this, while the "whip" in the cotton states did act as a new productive device and increased productivity and the like. Baptist, to me, makes clear the point that not only did slavery help lay the groundwork for capitalism to develop (as part of primitive accumulation and the like), it was capitalism in action (in its USA form).  There is a sad, bizarre and insightful section of the book where one finds an unsettling correspondence between banking, credit, finance, bubbles, and the like in slavery and in late 20th and early 21st century capitalism.  Did you realize slaves were sometimes mortgaged, sometimes the subject of foreclosures?  The speculation that we saw recently in the housing markets was not unlike the speculation we saw in slave markets.  Incredible.

I would be remiss if I failed to point out here that Baptist also makes very plain the connection between capitalism and slavery, and the theft of American Indian lands and the genocide committed against them.  It is so obvious that this country is built on the triad of slavery, theft, and genocide (all rolled up into an ideology of white supremacy) that one cannot help but be overwhelmed with disgust while reading of it in the historical and personal terms with which it is related in this book.

Anyway, there is much more to the book, to the history and analysis Baptist presents than I can relate here.  I think that Baptist's analysis is much more thorough and documented then that of Marxists with which I am familiar.  Of course, Marx's analysis was really a part of his overall analysis of capitalism, while Baptist is concentrating on slavery itself (and then on capital).  Maybe apples and oranges.

Screw it, just read the book.  The stories, the personal stories themselves make the read more than worthwhile.  I am going to post a review of the book from CounterPunch and an interview with the author from Salon below.

Here I would like to end with something Chauncey DeVega says in his own discussion of the book.  He writes:

At the conclusion of the interview, Baptist offers up a beautiful and direct observation about the relationship between whiteness, white supremacy, and America's original sin of black chattel slavery.

He observes:

As a historian, do you feel that slavery is an original sin that the United States will never be able to overcome? Or is there some seed of hope in what you’re writing?

Let’s think about original sin. Original sin is something that, theologically, we can never escape, because we’re not angels, right? We can’t stop being human beings and start being angels. But we can stop being white. By that I mean, not that we can change our pigmentation, but that we can stop consciously and unconsciously demanding the privileges of whiteness, and we can act in affirmative ways to undermine the privileges of whiteness. And that’s the way that the country will get past it, by abandoning white supremacy as a constitutive way in which our politics and our economics and our culture were ordered.

This is not something that’s going to happen tomorrow; it’s not going to happen, obviously, because we elected Barack Obama, or something like that. It’s a far, far deeper set of transformations. That’s how we can move to the point where we can see that the country has redeemed itself in some ways from this legacy.

Black and brown folks possess an almost preternatural understanding of whiteness and the dynamics of white racial identity because those are required skills for successfully negotiating life in a society structured around the maintenance and furthering of white supremacy. However, our truth-telling is usually ignored by most white folks because the bubble of Whiteness, by definition, is almost wholly immune to interventions made by those outside of it.

Ultimately, as I told Janice Graham on Our Common Grounds, I am of the belief that white Americans need to clean up their own house of white privilege and white supremacy from within. It is white people who need to do some truth-telling to their white brothers and sisters about the social evils of white supremacy and white privilege if those forces are ever to be fully purged from American life, culture, and society. 

While black and brown people may suffer from and under white racism and white supremacy, it is White America that possesses the philosophical and moral problem that is white racism.

In thinking about the existential conundrum that is the color line's relationship to black Americans, the brilliant W.E.B. Du Bois asked, "how does it feel to be a problem?" 

White folks are rarely asked, "what does it feel like to be The problem?"

Baptist's closing observations in his interview at Salon about American slavery and whiteness are a good start from which to formulate an answer to that question. Noel Ignatiev's incisive claim that "treason to Whiteness is loyalty to humanity" is more than a slogan. Rather, it is a life mantra. 

Perhaps Baptist's soft, yet piercing like a dagger comments should be a footnote or auxiliary guide to helping white folks come to terms with their relationship to how the past lives in the present in an American society that is still structured around maintaining white supremacy.

From Counterpunch. 

Edward E. Baptist’s "The Half Has Never Been Told"

Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

by CHARLES R. LARSON

During the 1930s, the WPA sent out workers to interview men and women who had been slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation. It was 72 years after slavery had been abolished and the interviewees were old but their memories were still vivid. When probed by an interviewee, Lorenzo Ivy responded, “Truly, son, the half has never been told.” After the Civil War, black life during slavery was sanitized, deodorized and, above all, reported by Caucasians—not by the people who had toiled under the murderous system. To a certain extent, that one-sided view has persisted. Historians of the South—largely while men—continued the subterfuge. And even recent attempts to set the record straight have followed in the steps of their predecessors: a chapter on families, one on women, etc., looking at groups instead of individuals.

Hence, the need for Edward E. Baptist’s monumental examination of slavery, presented in an entirely new way, extensively through the voices of the slaves themselves.  Baptist has not simply read the WPA interviews but, apparently, every other account of what happened, particularly the many slave narratives published before and after the end of slavery. And, then—what is most original here—he has organized his own account by using parts of the body; for slavery was, above all, an affront to the basic dignity of the corporal body. These are the chapter titles: “Feet,” “Heads,” “Right Hand,” “Left Hand,” “Tongues,” “Breath,” “Seed,” “Blood,” “Backs,” and “Arms”—largely parts of the body. The Introduction (“The Heart”) and the Afterword (“The Corpse”) complete the picture.

The first chapter (“Feet”) begins,

“Not long after they heard the first clink of iron, the boys and girls in the cornfield would have been able to smell the grownups’ bodies, perhaps even before they saw the double line coming around the bend. Hurrying in locked step, the thirty-old men came down the dirt road like a giant machine. Each hauled twenty pounds of iron, chains that draped from neck to neck and wrist-to-wrist, binding them all together. Ragged strips flapped stiffly from their clothes like dead-air pennants. On the men’s heads, hair stood out in growing dreads or lay in dust-caked mats. As they moved, some looked down like catatonics. Others stared at something a thousand yards ahead. And now, behind the clanking men, followed a marching crowd of women loosely roped, the same vacancy in their expressions, endurance standing out in the rigid strings of muscle that had replaced their calves in the weeks since they left Maryland. Behind them all swayed a white man on a gray walking horse.”

The men (often with a thousand pounds of iron connecting them) were part of a coffle, enslaved migrants walking seven or eight hundred miles, chattel property, being moved from the north to the south because the profits when they were sold to their new owners were one hundred percent. The slave trade in Africa no longer mattered because slaves in the more northern states (Virginia, especially, but also Maryland) were reproducing so quickly that they created an entire new source of labor. Baptist gives the year as 1805, and states that eventually a million slaves were herded this way to the South. Tobacco farming in the North was less profitable than cotton farming in the South. “The coffle chained the early American republic together.” Slaves walked and walked for five or six weeks, performing their ablutions as they moved. There wasn’t an iota of dignity for the men. Baptist refers to the entire procedure as a “pattern of political compromise” between the North and the South and notes that eight of the first twelve Presidents of the United States were slave owners.

The movement of such huge numbers of slaves to the part of the country that could more productively use them was a “forced migration” grounded on “forced separations, violence, and new kinds of labor.” Equally disturbing—and this is the thesis of Baptist’s magnificent book—“all northern whites had benefited from the deepened exploitation of enslaved people.” Thus, there are no chapters on the African slave trade or the Middle Passage here, but a focus instead on what might be called the second stage of slavery in America. The movement to the deep South would continue for years because of increased productivity of the slaves themselves. In the North, one hand usually sufficed for their work (the dominant hand) but cotton picking required the complicated dexterity of both hands working together.

Moreover, as the country expanded, Southerners made certain that many of the new states further west became slave states where cotton production could continue. So Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia were soon augmented by Texas, Arkansas, and eventually Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona, Union territories permitting slavery. It was a nasty balance but it permitted the growth of cotton plantations across the country as well as the steadily increasing cotton industry throughout the entire world (“massive profits from textile manufacturing”—not just in the United States.) Cotton became the “global economy’s most important raw material.”

The plantation owners developed something known as the “pushing system,” forcing the cotton pickers to increase productivity. There were quotas and severe punishments for those who failed, and if a slave had a day when he (or she) picked more than any other day, that became his (or her) new daily quota. Torture for failed quotas was endemic.  All white people in the country benefitted, even though some northerners insisted they were no part of it.

Baptist is not afraid to refer to the entire system as “stealing.”  “If you want to rule a person, steal the person. Steal him from his people and steal him from his own right hand, from everything he has grown up knowing. Take her to a place where you can steal everything else from her: her future, her creativity, her womb.” In such a system there can be no good slave owners, only bad ones. “Stealing can never be an orderly system undergirded by property rights, cushioned by family-like relationships. There is no balance between contradictory elements. There is only chaos and violence.”

Fortunately, by the 1820s, there were increasing pronouncements from white Americans that slavery had to end. And there were increasing narratives published by slaves who had escaped that showed their limited number of readers just how appalling the entire system was.  As I said earlier, Baptist relies on these accounts extensively, plus the isolated reports of a number of attempted revolts such as Nat Turner’s. Christianity was also added to the fray, both as a justification of slavery, by some, and hope for many slaves who had been converted.

In spite of the enormous profits from cotton, it was not an uninterrupted trajectory of economic stability. Banks often lent out more money than they should have, using slaves as collateral. There was often economic turmoil. By the late 1830s, “In response to these clear incentives, enslavers created still more ways to leverage slaves into still more leverage. They mortgaged the same collateral from multiple lenders. They used slaves bought with long-term mortgages to bluff lenders into granting unsecured commercial loans. Above all, they kept buying more slaves on credit. Even if they ran into problems, they figured they would still win, because they could sell their assets. For the slave prices were still rising.”

Inevitably there were panics, collapses, including one that began in Texas, in 1837. Then things bounced back again. Half of the country’s economic activity was related to slavery. By 1850, there were three million slaves in the country. There were years of bitter arguments in Congress about the viability of the entire system. The Compromise of 1850 (another further balancing of slave areas with non-slave areas) simply continued the precarious holding pattern. There were major compromises over runaway slaves, the famous Lincoln/Douglas Debates, John Brown’s execution—dark days for the country. Then in 1860, Lincoln won the election and southern states began to secede. Baptist remarks, “The South did not believe that the North would fight.”

Most of the rest of the story is familiar, as grim as what happened before the end of the Civil War. Black soldiers had pushed the balance. “Their service in battle had saved the nation,” though not necessarily to the benefit they had anticipated. It wasn’t long before the South began imposing major restrictions on black people, the insidious “Jim Crow” laws. Other than a brief period immediately after the war, almost all black people were “shut out of the political system.” Baptist observes, “Slavery and its expansion had built enduring patterns of poverty and exploitation. This legacy was certainly crystal clear in [the] early twentieth-century South. African-American households had virtually no wealth, for instance, while a substantial portion of the wealth held by white households, even after emancipation, could be traced to revenue generated by enslaved labor and financing leveraged out of their bodies before 1861.”

When you consider the long-term effects of slavery, reaching into our world today, it is possible to say that the lives of African-Americans are substantially better than they have ever been before, but when you examine the actual economics impacting black people’s lives, you see a much different picture. Numerous articles in the press during the past few years provide a bleak picture of black people’s living situations. The gap among races widened during the recent economic recession. According to an article in The New York Times in August of this year, “The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid.” That’s as damning an indictment of the long-term results of slavery in America as possible and something to consider when reflecting on the half-assed analyses of the recent riots in Ferguson, Missouri.

Edward E. Baptist’s brilliant book, The Half Has Never Been Told, soars because of the author’s decision to root his analysis in the human dimension. The book transcends anything that has previously been written about slavery. Dozens of individual slaves are named in the study and their lives successfully worked into the lengthy narration of the legacy of slavery in our country. In short, Baptist has humanized the lives of American slaves, liberated them from one of the most inhumane systems mankind ever devised.  The entire country needs to do the same.

=====

From Salon:

“It’s symbolic annihilation of history, and it’s done for a purpose. It really enforces white supremacy”: Edward Baptist on the lies we tell about slavery

Edward Baptist on horrifying truth that we memorialize Confederate soldiers and not Americans who died enslaved

MICHAEL SCHULSON

It’s impolite to talk about money. Perhaps that’s why, when we discuss the history of slavery in this country, we tend to talk about racism, and paternalism, and the way that awful social institutions just stick around, those pesky buggers — talk about anything, that is, except for the profits.

But there were profits, of course, and large ones. Slavery, after all, is a cost-efficient way to extract labor from human beings. It’s an exceptionally brutal flavor of capitalism. And it worked: In 1860, the U.S.’s four wealthiest states were all in the deep South. After the Civil War, though, white Americans found ways to downplay the profit motive. “Above all, the historians of a reunified nation insisted that slavery was a premodern institution that was not committed to profit seeking,” writes Edward Baptist in his new history of slavery, “The Half Has Never Been Told.” (Read the Salon excerpt from the book here.)

Baptist, a professor of history at Cornell, has spent much of his career helping to undo this narrative. In “The Half Has Never Been Told,” he lays out a sweeping economic history of slavery. Baptist traces the flow of human capital from the Atlantic seaboard to the cotton fields of the deep South. He describes how slavers used whippings to extract more work from their property. He details how slave labor and loans secured with human collateral helped drive the industrial revolution.

These observations aren’t new. Baptist’s real achievement is to ground these financial abstractions in the lives of ordinary people. In vivid passages, he describes the sights, smells and suffering of slavery. He writes about individual families torn apart by global markets. Above all, Baptist sets out to show how America’s rise to power is inextricable from the suffering of black slaves.

Naturally, this makes some people rather uncomfortable. Reviewing Baptist’s book last month, the Economist huffed that “all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.” A few days later, the magazine took the rare step of withdrawing the review, pointing out that slavery was “an evil system.” The message was clear, though: Even today, many are uncomfortable acknowledging the full brutality of an institution that helped build the modern world.

I reached Baptist at his home on the Cornell campus. Over the phone, we spoke about capitalism, the historical vision of Steve McQueen, and why it’s easier to find a memorial for a Confederate soldier than for an American who died enslaved.

How did slavery drive the economy of the 19th century United States?

It drives it in some obvious ways and some less obvious ways. The obvious way is the absolutely central role of cotton to the functioning of the economy. Cotton ends up supplying about 50 percent of all the value of exports in the U.S. for most of the period from the early 1800s to the Civil War.

That income doesn’t just stay in the South. Certainly a lot of it is going to enslavers, but a lot of it is also going to bankers and merchants, and later to insurers and shippers. Ultimately, the U.S. starts up its own cotton textile industry.

The U.S. is a developing economy. It’s also a capital-importing economy. It needs credit. Lending to the slaver sector is secure and it’s profitable. Secure, because there’s a reliable liquid market for human collateral. And profitable, because enslaved human beings are making cotton, the world’s most widely traded commodity.

When you start to look at slavery in this larger, global context, places like Europe and New England, which we tend to separate from the slave system, end up seeming implicated.

Absolutely, and not just because of the direct and indirect investment of Northern savers and lenders in the Southern system. The South — and especially enslavers — are really the first reliable market for Northern industrial products. In fact, U.S. policy sets that up. Congress creates a tariff which protects the U.S. market for cotton textiles of low quality. So this allows U.S. textile mills in New England, which are not capable of making the same quality of cloth on a mass scale as British mills are, this gives them a protected market. And that protected market is basically the South, and it’s basically the cloth that’s bought by slave owners every year and given out to the slaves.

You write that few people realize “how crucial systemized torture was to the industrial revolution.”

In 1800, when cotton expansion started, workers could generally plant and cultivate about twice as much cotton as they could pick. Slave owners decide that they want to increase the amount that is picked, so what they start doing is weighing the amount each slave picks per day and establishing that as an individual daily picking quota. People were given quotas. If they didn’t meet the quota, they would be whipped. Over time, the quotas are increased.

And over time, the amount that people pick increases dramatically. There are people who say, “Oh, it’s because of the seeds [of easier-to-pick cotton cultivars],” and I’m sure that makes it possible to pick more, but enslaved people actually have to figure out how to move their hands and their bodies fast enough, and do that all day long, in order to meet their quotas. They still have to do that, and they are threatened by torture if they don’t make it. I say torture deliberately. We have, over time, sort of bowdlerized, we’ve used euphemisms. But if this was happening to U.S. POWs, we’d have no trouble calling it torture.

The average enslaved person picked cotton four times as quickly in 1860 as in 1800.

Reading your book, I felt as if you were telling the story of capitalism taken to its absolute extreme, in which the right to personal property trumps all other rights, and in which human lives become tradable commodities. Can we read your book as a cautionary tale of capitalism run amok?

Absolutely. An economist I know wrote a review of my book on Amazon. Basically, he said that this book shouldn’t have been written, because it’s going to tell countries around the world that slavery can be more profitable than free labor.

But you have to tell the truth about things. And I think that the truth is that if you allow people who have wealth and have private property to put profitability, to put efficiency, to put productivity and economic growth, to put those above other considerations — to put them above human rights, to put them above democracy, to put those things above morality — if we let people put those things first, and we have been doing it far too often since the early 1970s, then we are going to have disastrous, unsustainable results.

You don’t use the word “plantation” in the book. Instead, you use the term “slave labor camp.” How did you make that choice?

There’s a story that was started by a pro-slavery advocate in the 1840s and 1850s, and that really went national after about 1890. And the story was that the plantation was not really an economic space, it was a space of a very traditional feudal society in which slave owners had been sort of born into the system, they had inherited slaves who were dependent on them and, yeah, sure, they had to have some discipline so that the crops could be made, but, essentially, these were not spaces that were focused on profit or on exploitation. I think “plantation” obscures what actually happened.

When you hear about someone having plantation weddings, or you see these plantation bed and breakfasts, how do you respond?

There’s a great study that was done 10 or 12 years ago by a couple of British scholars, a black man and a white woman, who would go to these historical plantations and observe what they said on the tours. Were enslaved people described as slaves, or were they described as servants, or in some cases even workers? If they were described as workers, the investigator would ask, “Do you have records of the payroll?” They went to about 180 of them. Many of them simply didn’t discuss the reality of what happened at all, even though enslaved people were the vast majority of human beings who lived in those places. It’s symbolic annihilation of history, and it’s done for a purpose. It really enforces white supremacy, and it hides facts from us.

How does that narrative translate to history textbooks?

Well, I think history textbooks are very different from what they were 50 years, 60 years ago, when the plantation myth really did reign unchallenged. But at the same time, they still do things that symbolically annihilate the lives of enslaved people and the influence of slavery in American history. We’ll now see some acknowledgment that plantations were profitable enterprises rather than things that were run as kind of a charity. But we take this history and put it in one chapter that says, “Here’s the downside of the main narrative of expansion and industrial development, cultural transformation, the rise of American nationalism, and the history of American politics that ultimately leads to the Civil War.” And it puts slavery outside of that story.

How do you think this presentation affects how descendants of enslaved Americans think about their own history and their place in society?

When I speak to mostly African-American audiences, I do not have to spend any time convincing them that the exploitation that occurred in slavery moments is a) horrific and b) essential to the rise of the United States and its development. I think the fact that mainstream history is still struggling with that, I think that means mainstream history loses credibility with the African-American audiences. They always know there are things that mainstream history is trying to cover up. It is essentially, on some level, not a completely honest history, and it’s a history that is having to, on some level, placate whites.

I have to ask you about that Economist review, which implied that some enslavers weren’t that bad, and that some black people were culpable in this system. Were you surprised to read that kind of response in such a prominent publication? What makes it possible for an editor or a reviewer to think that’s appropriate?

Well, for the latter question, I have no idea. But I wasn’t shocked. The resistance to reckoning with the role of slavery in the trajectory that makes the U.S. the most powerful nation on earth, that’s real; that’s very, very deep. White Americans, many of them still do not want to see the U.S. as anything other than a savior nation, and whatever we say about the role of the U.S. in global history, it’s absolutely clear to me that slavery is essential to the rise of U.S. power. Again, maybe there’s some alternate history in which it doesn’t go that way, but that’s not the history that we live in.

I’ve heard lots of things like what the Economist said before. I meet people who don’t know about the book, and they can say, “What do you do? And I say that I write about the history of slavery. And they will give me what the Economist said.

What do you say when you’re able to respond? When the person’s sitting right next to you?

It’s not that these people don’t know that there’s another argument out there, but it’s important to them to say that slavery wasn’t profitable, or that lots of blacks were slave owners, which is not really true. So then I have to say, well, let me explain to you the historical facts as I understand them. And then things are awkward. But what can you do?

How has Hollywood shaped perceptions of slavery? There are obvious examples like “Gone With the Wind,” which is a classic soft-pedaling of slavery and glorification of plantation life. But how does a revenge film like “Django Unchained” fit into these conversations, or something that’s hailed as a realist masterpiece, like “12 Years a Slave”?

I don’t think you can underestimate the cultural impact of “Gone With the Wind.” “Gone With the Wind” builds on all this rethinking of history that goes along with Reconstruction.

Something like “Django,” you know, it’s a peek inside of Tarantino’s brain, I guess. I don’t know quite what to say about that. Not all historians agree with me, but I thought “12 Years a Slave” was great. Steve McQueen just went into the text and said, “OK, here’s what it says. We’re gonna depict it.” Historians have had a lot of trouble doing that.

Your own approach to historiography is rather unusual. In some sections of the book, you write from the imagined perspective of enslaved people. In one scene, you described the 50 billion neurons shutting down in the brain of a dying man, and you frame one section through a discussion of the etymology of the word “fuck.” What’s the thinking behind this visceral historiography?

The larger project in the book was to put enslaved African-Americans where they actually were in history, which is at the center of U.S. history from the Revolution to the Civil War. So much of our historical understanding is still devoted to writing them out of that role. I think you have to really try to get the reader to make them the protagonist.

I actually don’t think what I do is so unusual, if you’re writing about white historical actors. I mean, there is book after book devoted to what was actually going on in Thomas Jefferson’s head, or what was actually going on in Abraham Lincoln’s head. It’s speculation. We take every piece of context we can and we try to construct a sort of picture of what was going on in their minds at any given point. And there’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s also nothing wrong with it when I do it. But the difference is then I’m doing it from the perspective of enslaved people. We’re not used to it. We’re used to seeing them as historical objects, rather than as historical subjects. As acted upon, rather than actors.

There are Confederate monuments — and monuments for Union soldiers, as well — scattered across the South. But finding a monument to enslaved people is difficult. How do you think our society should memorialize this brutal chapter in American history, and the enslaved people who suffered through it?

You’re bringing up an issue which is absolutely central. And you’re right that memorialization of an enslaved people is really scarce, almost nonexistent.

In Richmond, there’s a lot of discussion about how to memorialize the enslaved past of the city. In fact they just blocked the building of a big baseball stadium, about half of which I think would have been set on a major historic site that was part of the slave-trade infrastructure of Richmond. And then the other place that I see it happening is entirely led by one guy in Natchez, Mississippi. And he essentially forced the National Park Service and the city of Natchez to memorialize a spot just north of the center of town called the Forks of the Road, which was the second-biggest slave trade center in the cotton South.

There’s nothing on the New Orleans levee, there’s nothing like the Trail of Tears memorializations — the mappings and the road signs and the document of the paths taken by native peoples who were expelled from the deep South and sent up to Oklahoma. There’s nothing like that to map out the routes that hundreds of thousands of people walked. It’s not there, and it needs to be there. It needs to be done.

There’s also a small movement underway to remove the names of slave owners from buildings on college campuses. Is it desirable — or possible — to excise these names from positions of honor? Is slave owning so entangled with white history in the United States that those efforts are futile?

If you were to really give a full and fair good look at complicity, and you were going to excise the people that were complicit, you’d have to take the names off most buildings. But more seriously, I think what’s probably more important is to think carefully about what we have done and what we are doing. If we’re going to keep a name, we need also to tell the truth about that person’s complicity.

Does accounting for this past include the federal government paying reparations to the descendants of slaves?

That’s the question that always comes up, and when it’s a mostly African-American audience, it comes up pretty soon, because it’s not like this is a new issue in African-American understandings of their history. I’ll put it this way: I think the fact that we’re having a discussion about reparations is great, and I give [writer] Ta-Nehisi Coates, in particular, a great deal of credit for getting this discussion going again.

The possibility of reparations is one major reason why, as a culture, we have become so angry and worked up about the issue of the history of slavery. There are inequities that, to anyone who’s not blind, start with slavery. And the fact that we’ve never done anything about them, that they’re still live issues, that’s why we get upset about the issue of slavery, in general.

One really healthy thing to do would be to start by bringing the funding of the endowments of historically black colleges and universities up to the level of historically white universities.

As a historian, do you feel that slavery is an original sin that the United States will never be able to overcome? Or is there some seed of hope in what you’re writing?

Let’s think about original sin. Original sin is something that, theologically, we can never escape, because we’re not angels, right? We can’t stop being human beings and start being angels. But we can stop being white. By that I mean, not that we can change our pigmentation, but that we can stop consciously and unconsciously demanding the privileges of whiteness, and we can act in affirmative ways to undermine the privileges of whiteness. And that’s the way that the country will get past it, by abandoning white supremacy as a constitutive way in which our politics and our economics and our culture were ordered.

This is not something that’s going to happen tomorrow; it’s not going to happen, obviously, because we elected Barack Obama, or something like that. It’s a far, far deeper set of transformations. That’s how we can move to the point where we can see that the country has redeemed itself in some ways from this legacy.