Black AF History
The Un-Whitewashed Story of America―The New York Times Bestselling Retelling of US History Through the Experiences of Black Americans
What's it about
Think the American history you learned in school was the whole story? Get ready to unlearn the whitewashed version and discover the America that was deliberately left out of your textbooks. This is the history of the United States, told entirely through the experiences of Black Americans. You'll go beyond the sanitized tales of a few famous figures to uncover the vibrant, complex, and often suppressed stories of rebellion, innovation, and resilience that truly shaped the nation. From the first arrivals to the present day, you'll finally understand the real, un-whitewashed story of America.
Meet the author
Michael Harriot is a New York Times bestselling author and one of America’s most influential columnists on race, culture, and politics, known for his work at The Grio. A descendant of formerly enslaved people and a graduate of a historically Black university, Harriot combines rigorous historical research with his lived experience. This unique perspective allows him to dismantle whitewashed narratives and present a powerful, unvarnished account of American history through the eyes of Black people, making the past accessible, relevant, and unforgettable.
The Script
The most powerful myths are not the ones we tell about gods and monsters, but the ones we tell about ourselves. They are quiet, foundational assumptions that function like gravity, holding our entire understanding of the world in place. They are the stories of quiet, orderly progress, of a nation founded on a singular, noble idea, of historical events as neat, settled chapters in a completed book. This version of history is comfortable, reassuring, and almost entirely wrong. It is a story told with strategic omissions, where the most important characters are relegated to the footnotes and the most pivotal events are glossed over as unfortunate exceptions. The real, unvarnished story is a structural demolition of the original.
This act of historical demolition is precisely what journalist and cultural critic Michael Harriot has been doing for years. After countless columns, articles, and viral threads spent correcting the same fundamental inaccuracies about American history, he realized he was essentially rewriting the same textbook over and over again in scattered pieces. The history taught in schools was a deliberately constructed narrative that required a deliberate, comprehensive, and unapologetic dismantling. "Black AF History" was born from that realization—a single, authoritative place to house the facts, context, and receipts that expose the comfortable myths and present a truer, more confrontational, and often funnier story of America.
Module 1: The Myth of the American Origin Story
The story most of us learned about America's founding is a blockbuster epic. It stars heroic, idealistic European settlers who bravely built a nation from scratch. Harriot dismantles this myth piece by piece. He argues the real story is one of incompetence, theft, and desperation.
The first hard truth is that the Jamestown colony was a catastrophic failure saved by theft and exploitation. The English settlers were aristocrats and laborers completely unprepared for the reality of the New World. They chose a swamp for their settlement. They drank contaminated water. They refused to farm. Within months, they were starving and dying. Their survival depended entirely on the aid of the Indigenous Powhatan people, who repeatedly gave them food out of pity. The colony's eventual success came from kidnapping Pocahontas, stealing land, and, most importantly, the arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619. These Africans brought the agricultural expertise, particularly in tobacco cultivation, that finally made the venture profitable.
This leads to a crucial re-evaluation. Indigenous societies were sophisticated and powerful civilizations, not savage obstacles. While the Jamestown settlers were fumbling, the Powhatan Confederacy, led by Wahunsenacah, was a complex, well-governed society. They had heated homes, managed food supplies, and a structured political system. Wahunsenacah was a powerful emperor who initially tried to manage the incompetent invaders with a mix of strategic aid and military pressure. The colonists' survival was a direct result of his calculated decisions.
So, where does this leave the official narrative? It forces us to see that American history has been deliberately "whitewashed" to create a heroic national identity. Harriot uses the analogy of a stolen jacket from his childhood. The thief, Freaky-D, crafted a convincing lie with friends who backed him up. The school principal believed the story, not the truth. America, Harriot argues, is Freaky-D. It has created a plausible, heroic-sounding story about its origins. It has gotten its powerful friends to co-sign it. This story—of brave Pilgrims and ingenious settlers—is a fable designed to make the nation feel good about itself. It intentionally erases the foundational crimes of land theft and human trafficking.
And here's the thing. This isn't just about the past. History is a story shaped by the powerful. Who gets to tell the story determines what is remembered and what is erased. The "middle room" of Harriot's childhood taught him a history where Blackness was the sun. Mainstream American history, in contrast, is a funhouse mirror that distorts everything to center whiteness. The book's goal is to break that mirror. It reframes the narrative by calling colonizers "invaders" and enslaved Africans "warriors" and "cultural founders." It insists on seeing historical figures in their full, complex humanity. By doing so, it challenges us to ask who wrote the history we know, and more importantly, who was left out.