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I am acting by discussing the topics I have learned about thus far with my husband. We are trying to have reflecting conversations about this and share our viewpoints of race, politics, and culture based on the different ways we grew up.

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I have invited some of my friends to do the 21-Day Challenge as well. It is very eye-opening and allows for a lot of great self-reflection that we can all benefit from.

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I listened to “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race.” I feel that it is very important that we need to all get better about discussing race instead of avoiding it. We need to realize that we need to work together to fight through the barriers that are still clearly there. Conversation does not solve everything, but it allows us to work together and to respect each other.

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TEDxHampshireCollege - Jay Smooth - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race

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Over the course of 21 days, my eyes were opened. I see now the effects that status, culture, and race all have on minorities. I am ready to be more open-minded and advocate for the equal rights of everyone. I am also thankful to have had access to these resources so that I can now share this with others. I look forward to seeing how my mindset continues to progress in my personal and professional life.

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How White People Got Made, by Quinn Norton, exploring where the term "white people" comes from and which ethnic groups have and have not been able to become "white" through US history.

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack and other essays, Groundbreaking 1989 essay by Peggy McIntosh who lists the ways she's beginning to recognize the way white privilege operates in her life.

21 Racial Microaggressions You Hear on a Daily Basis, Using a series of photographs by photographer Kiyum Kim, Heben Nigatu, elaborates on the term "microagression." Note that Ibram X. Kendi, in his recent book How To Be An Anti Racist, calls us to consider using the term "racist abuse" as a more descriptive alternative.

Short, Coffee Break Length

The Disturbing History of the Suburbs, An Adam Ruins Everything episode that quickly and humorously educates how redlining came to be. (6 minutes)

What Would You Do?: Bicycle Thief EpisodeABC's popular show explores the impact of racial and gender bias and prejudice at a family friendly park. Before this video, would you have anticipated this differential treatment? https://youtu.be/ge7i60GuNRg

Medium, Lunch Break Length

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race, TEDx talk by Jay Smooth that suggests a new way to think about receiving feedback on our racial blindspots. (12 minutes)

How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them, TED Talk by Vernā Myers, encourages work vigorously to counter balance bias by connecting with and learning about and from the groups we fear. (19 minutes)

Long, Sit On the Couch Length

Slavery by Another Name, 90 minutes PBS documentary challenges the idea that slavery ended with the emancipation proclamation. (90 minutes)

Unnatural Causes, Seven part documentary by California Newsreel that explores the impact of racism on health and US healthcare. (4 hours total, episodes have variable lengths)

Birth of a White Nation, Keynote speech by legal scholar Jacqueline Battalora, offers a blow-by-blow description of the moment the idea of, and word for, "white" people entered U.S. legal code. (36 minutes)

Once people start to learn about white privilege and America's systems of oppression through history, they often ask, "Why didn't I see this sooner?" It's easy to overlook what we're not looking for. Once you understand the phenomenon of selective noticing, take yourself on a noticing adventure.

1) Start by watching the Test Your Awareness: Do The Test

2) Then...go out in the world and change up what you notice. Here's some of what you might look for:

Who is and is not represented in ads?

Who are your ten closest friends? What is the racial mix in this group?

As you move through the day, what's the racial composition of the people around you? On your commute? At the coffee shop you go to? At the gym? At your workplace? At the show you go on the weekend?

What percentage of the day are you able to be with people of your own racial identity?

Notice how much of your day you are speaking about racism. Who are you engaging with on these issues? Who are you not? Why do you think this is?

What are the last five books you read? What is the racial mix of the authors?

What is the racial mix of the main characters in your favorite TV shows? Movies?

What is the racial mix of people pictured in the photos and artwork in your home? In your friend, family, and colleagues' homes?

Who is filling what kinds of jobs/social roles in your world? (e.g. Who's the store manager and who's stocking the shelves? Who's waiting on tables and who's busing the food?) Can you correlate any of this to racial identity?

Who do you notice on magazine covers? What roles are people of color filling in these images?

If you're traveling by car, train, or air, do you notice housing patterns? How is housing arranged? Who lives near the downtown commerce area and who does not? Who lives near the waterfront and who does not? Who lives in industrial areas and who does not? What is the density of a given neighborhood? Can you correlate any of this to racial identity?

Follow Racial Justice activists, educators, and organizations on social media. Here are some ideas to get you started. A good way to widen your circle of who you follow is to check out who these organizations follow, quote, repost, and retweet.

Teaching Tolerance
Colours of Us
Anti-Defamation League
Define American
Privilege to Progress
Black Minds Matter
Teaching While White
White Nonsense Roundup
Conversations with White People: Talking about race (Facebook Group)
Race Forward
Racial Equity Tools
White Awake So many more you'll discover!

Google who's who in your area by typing in 'Racial Justice" or "Anti-Racist/m" + name of city/town, organization, or sector. A few website visits, emails, and phone calls later, you'll likely have an idea of how to get on the mailing of one or more organizations in your area who are addressing issues of power and privilege. Once you connect to one, it's easy to connect to many!

Join your Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) organization if there's one in your area.

Research racial justice speakers and see who might be coming to your local university, church, community center, or speaker series.

Take a course or workshop. Community Colleges and Adult Education Centers are a great place to find a course about social justice issues.

This can be the hardest part for people new to racial justice work. Engaging in racially mixed settings can trigger age-old power and privilege dynamics. The goal is to be a learner more than a knower, exactly the opposite of what dominant U.S. culture teaches us to be.

Here are some Engagement Tips to guide you:

Enter the process to learn and bridge knowledge gaps.

Enter the process to practice mindful social habits like the ones below.

Stay engaged even when your mind and body start sending you signals to shrink or walk away.

Ask clarifying questions.

Acknowledge what you don't know.

Validate others by listening closely and believing the truth and importance of what they are sharing.

Share airtime so that multiple perspectives are shared.

Step Up Step Back. If you are generally quiet, step up and practice speaking more. If you are generally a talker, practice stepping back and listening more.

Notice your biases and judgments as they arise. These are gold for you to excavate your subconscious!

Notice when you are uncomfortable. Reflect on why you're uncomfortable and think about what you can do to build more emotional stamina in this area.

Honor confidentiality. Though you can share what you are learning in general terms, do not repeat stories in a way that can be traced back to the person who shared it.

Find a mentor within your own racial group to support and guide your growth.

Though many people want to jump to action sooner instead of later, action without a vigorous self-education and self-reflection practice can unexpectedly reproduce the very power and privilege dynamics we seek to interrupt in this work. Here are a few actions that you might consider:

Invite friend(s), family, and/or colleagues to do the 21-Day Challenge with you.

Prepare yourself to interrupt racial jokes. Click HERE for some advice about how.

Interrupt the pattern of white silence by speaking openly with family, friends, and colleagues about what you're doing and learning in the 21-Day Challenge.

Invite friend(s), family, and/or colleagues to join you for one or more of your daily "to-do's" for a low-threshold invitation into the work and introduction to the 21-Day Challenge.

Find out if your school, workplace, or faith group has an Equity Committee. What can you learn from them? Are they open to new members? Join if you can. Support in other ways if you can't.

Find organizations such as The Privilege Institute, your local YWCA, and other non-profits doing racial justice work and support them through donating your time, money, and other resources.

When the status quo is racist, disrupt it. No matter how big or small put yourself out there to create change. No need to wait until you are comfortable disrupting; it may never get comfortable, though you will get better at managing discomfort! Examples from participants include:

Requiring administration to change the name of a dodgeball team from "The Cottonpickers"

Improving the representation of books in the library by raising funds and purchasing hundreds of new books

Conducting an equity audit within the organization

Creating learning communities to set goals, objectives, and action plans

Disrupting inappropriate language by offering alternative language you yourself are learning

Speaking, emailing, and posting about articles, blogs, movies, and this 21-Day Challenge that you find impactful. Let people know you are not neutral!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How White People Got Made , by Quinn Norton, exploring where the term "white people" comes from and which ethnic groups have and have not been able to become "white" through US history. White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack and other essays , Groundbreaking 1989 essay by Peggy McIntosh who lists the ways she's beginning to recognize the way white privilege operates in her life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Short, Coffee Break Length

The Disturbing History of the Suburbs, An Adam Ruins Everything episode that quickly and humorously educates how redlining came to be (6 minutes)

What Would You Do?: Bicycle Thief Episode ABC's popular show explores the impact of racial and gender bias and prejudice at a family friendly park. Before this video, would you have anticipated this differential treatment?

Medium, Lunch Break Length

Munroe Bergdorf on racism, trans activism and acceptance English activist and model Munroe Bergdorf, known for speaking her mind on trans issues, racism and misogyny, talks to Krishnan Guru-Murthy about her own transition, the controversy that led to her being dropped by L'Oreal and why tolerance is not enough (38 mins)

How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them, TED Talk by Vernā Myers, encourages work vigorously to counter balance bias by connecting with and learning about and from the groups we fear (19 minutes)

Long, Sit On the Couch Length

Race In America: Fighting for Justice Bryan Stevenson interview with Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart delves into the state of US racism and racial justice as of October 2020 and explores the role of hope in staying the course (1 hour)

Slavery by Another Name, 90 minutes PBS documentary challenges the idea that slavery ended with the emancipation proclamation. (90 minutes)

Unnatural Causes, Seven part documentary by California Newsreel that explores the impact of racism on health and US healthcare. (4 hours total, episodes have variable lengths)

Once people start to learn about white privilege and America's systems of oppression through history, they often ask, "Why didn't I see this sooner?" It's easy to overlook what we're not looking for. Once you understand the phenomenon of selective noticing, take yourself on a noticing adventure.

1) Watch the Test Your Awareness: Do The Test

2) Go out in the world and change up what you notice. (Some of this will be influenced differently pre/during/post COVID. You may need to rely on memories until we are on the move again!) Here's some of what you might look for:

Who is and is not represented in ads?

Who are your ten closest friends? What is the racial mix in this group?

As you move through the day, what's the racial composition of the people around you? On your commute? At the coffee shop you go to? At the gym? At your workplace? At the show you go on the weekend?

What percentage of the day are you able to be with people of your own racial identity?

Notice how much of your day you are speaking about racism. Who are you engaging with on these issues? Who are you not? Why do you think this is?

What are the last five books you read? What is the racial mix of the authors?

What is the racial mix of the main characters in your favorite TV shows? Movies?

What is the racial mix of people pictured in the photos and artwork in your home? In your friend, family, and colleagues' homes?

Who is filling what kinds of jobs/social roles in your world? (e.g. Who's the store manager and who's stocking the shelves? Who's waiting on tables and who's busing the food?) Can you correlate any of this to racial identity?

Who do you notice on magazine covers? What roles are people of color filling in these images?

If you're traveling by car, train, or air, do you notice housing patterns? How is housing arranged? Who lives near the downtown commerce area and who does not? Who lives near the waterfront and who does not? Who lives in industrial areas and who does not? What is the density of a given neighborhood? Can you correlate any of this to racial identity?

3) Review the Continuum on Becoming an Anti-Racist, Multicultural Institution with a small group of people at your workplace, faith institution, club, or any organization you're a part of.

Where do you think the organization is right now? What's your evidence? Has the organization evolved in some ways? What caused/allowed for that? Has the organization articulated a desire to evolve towards being an anti-racist, multicultural organization? If not, do you have the power to influence that movement? Who are your in-organization and/or stakeholder allies? If yes, what steps is it taking? Could it be doing more? If so what? Who are your in-organization and/or stakeholder allies?

This can be the hardest part for people new to racial justice work. Engaging in racially mixed settings can trigger age-old power and privilege dynamics. The goal is to be a learner more than a knower, exactly the opposite of what dominant U.S. culture teaches us to be.

Here are some Engagement Tips to guide you:

Enter the process to learn and bridge knowledge gaps.

Enter the process to practice mindful social habits like the ones below.

Work to stay engaged even when your mind and body start sending you signals to shrink or walk away.

Ask clarifying questions.

Acknowledge what you don't know.

Validate others by listening closely and believing the truth and importance of what they are sharing.

Share airtime so that multiple perspectives are shared.

Step Up Step Back. If you are generally quiet, step up and practice speaking more. If you are generally a talker, practice stepping back and listening more.

Notice your biases and judgments as they arise. These are gold for you to excavate your subconscious!

Notice when you are uncomfortable. Reflect on why you're uncomfortable and think about what you can do to build more emotional stamina in this area.

Honor confidentiality. Though you can share what you are learning in general terms, do not repeat stories in a way that can be traced back to the person who shared it.

Find a mentor within your own racial group to support and guide your growth.

If you are white, join a Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) chapter in your area.

Google who's who in your area by typing in 'Racial Justice" or "Anti-Racist/m" + name of city/town, organization, or sector. A few website visits, emails, and phone calls later, you'll likely have an idea of how to get on the mailing of one or more organizations in your area who are addressing issues of power and privilege. Once you connect to one, it's easy to connect to many!

Research racial justice speakers and see who might be coming to your local university, church, community center, or speaker series.

Take a course or workshop. Community Colleges and Adult Education Centers are a great place to find a course about social justice issues.

Though many people want to jump to action sooner instead of later, action without a vigorous self-education, self-reflection, and multiracial coalition can unexpectedly reproduce the very power and privilege dynamics we seek to interrupt. That said, sometimes acting immediately is called for. Welcome to the messy, imperfect world of challenging the status quo! Here are a few actions that you might consider:

Invite friend(s), family, and/or colleagues to do the 21-Day Challenge with you.

Prepare yourself to interrupt racial jokes. Click HERE for some advice about how.

Interrupt the pattern of white silence by speaking openly with family, friends, and colleagues about what you're doing and learning in the 21-Day Challenge.

Invite friend(s), family, and/or colleagues to join you for one or more of your daily "to-do's" for a low-threshold invitation into the work and introduction to the 21-Day Challenge.

Find out if your school, workplace, or faith group has an Equity Committee. What can you learn from them? Are they open to new members? Join if you can. Support in other ways if you can't.

Find organizations such as The Privilege Institute, your local YWCA, and other non-profits doing racial justice work and support them through donating your time, money, and other resources.

Find a 21-Day Challenge group in your region or sector and reach out to connect with, and perhaps co-create a region or sector specific 21-Day Challenge in the future. Google "21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge + your state, region, or sector"

When the status quo is blatantly racist, disrupt it. No matter how big or small put yourself out there to create change. No need to wait until you are comfortable disrupting; it may never get comfortable, though you will get better at managing discomfort. These actions are generally more successful when done in multiracial coalition. Examples from past participants include:

Demanding administration change the name of a dodgeball team from "The Cottonpickers"

Improving the representation of books in the library by raising funds and purchasing hundreds of new books

Conducting an equity audit within the organization

Creating learning communities to set goals, objectives, and action plans

Disrupting inappropriate language by offering alternative language you yourself are learning

Speaking, emailing, and posting about articles, blogs, movies, and this 21-Day Challenge that you find impactful.

Let people know you are not neutral!

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21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge©

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Short, Coffee Break Length The Disturbing History of the Suburbs , An Adam Ruins Everything episode that quickly and humorously educates how redlining came to be (6 minutes) What Would You Do?: Bicycle Thief Episode ABC's popular show explores the impact of racial and gender bias and prejudice at a family friendly park.

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My engagement process is currently in the entering phase. I am engaging through self-reflection, social media, and educating myself on the current issues at hand.

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Today I took some time to notice when I was uncomfortable in certain situations in public. I can be uneasy when I am alone, and I realize that I typically do not make much eye contact with individuals because it makes me uncomfortable to draw attention when alone. There are certain places that make me uncomfortable when I am the minority, but it is not everywhere.

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I have begun to notice biases I have simply from the ways that I have grown up. I realize things that may get me frustrated about the topic, but I reflect on the reasoning that they do, and try to work through them.

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I read Overcoming Implicit Bias and Racial Anxiety. The article pointed out many ways that we can turn negative thoughts/biases into positive ones. It was great information about how we can begin to change our thought process about other races for the better and share it with others.

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This is the fourth of a four-part series exploring how racial bias and prejudice continue to have a negative impact in America, despite Americans' widespread rejection of racist ideologies. It draws extensively from our volume, The Science of Equality: Addressing Implicit Bias, Racial Anxiety, and Stereotype Threat in Education and Healthcare. This part explores how individuals and institutions can reduce bias and mitigate implicit racism.
So far, we've examined how implicit cognitive processes can unintentionally end up reproducing racially unequal outcomes, even in such "helping" fields as education and healthcare (let alone professions such as law enforcement, which can be more contentious or adversarial). The question now is what, if anything, we can do to reduce or eliminate these patterns. Fortunately, there is an emerging body of psychological research on this topic. This work provides some well-founded ideas about how to reduce bias, calm racial anxieties, decrease the effects of the stereotype threat, and improve overall interracial interactions.

Social scientists seeking to address the effects of racial bias look to two broad categories of intervention: efforts to reduce bias and efforts to mitigate the effects of any remaining bias. Simply making people aware that they have the potential to be biased is not enough; people require specific and tailored forms of intervention.

The nature and pervasiveness of implicit bias is now well-established, so social scientists are focusing increasingly on efforts to reduce it. Several practices have emerged that have shown promise-and researchers now are trying to combine these into a set of practices to "break the prejudice habit," as Patricia Devine and her colleagues have called it. These practices include:

Exposing people to counter-stereotypic examples of group members. In one experiment, for example, people showed measurably less implicit bias toward Asian Americans after they watched The Joy Luck Club, a movie about Asian immigrants to the United States.

Consciously contrasting negative stereotypes with specific counter-examples. For example, suppose you hear or think of a negative stereotype about African Americans. You can compare that stereotype to what you know about a friend or famous person such as Oprah Winfrey or President Obama.

Rather than aim to be colorblind, the goal should be to "individuate" by seeking specific information about members of other racial groups. This individuation allows you to recognize people based upon their own personal attributes rather than stereotypes about their racial or ethnic group.

Another tactic is to assume the perspective of an outgroup member. By asking yourself what your perspective might be if you were in the other's situation you can develop a better appreciation for what their concerns are.

Making more of an effort to encounter and engage in positive interactions with members of other racial and ethnic groups. Put simply, the more time spent enjoying the company of members of other racial groups, the more that racial anxiety and stereotyping seem to dissipate.

So far, we've talked about approaches to "de-biasing," ways of undoing those subconscious stereotypes and feelings we may harbor about others. Another main approach to counteracting bias is to incorporate anti-bias ideas and procedures into our decision-making. There's some evidence, for example, that the more convinced we are of our own objectivity, the more likely bias is to creep in. (Think of those senior law-firm attorneys who no doubt imagined they were objectively rating the associates' work-and yet gave the exact same memorandum significantly different evaluations based on the author's presumed race.) Developing a little humility about how much we know can be a good step toward real impartiality.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the best ways of reducing racial anxiety is by having friends or colleagues of another racial group. Mere contact between group members isn't enough; what's important is meaningful, ongoing relations. Places where members of different racial groups interact cooperatively and meet as equals-such as in sports teams and the military-are particularly good at breaking down implicit racism. Trust and rapport between racial groups are harder to build in racially homogenous environments. This is a particular challenge in educational settings, given the continued (and growing) prevalence of racial segregation in K-12 education.

All of us who share an underlying belief in political and social equality should try to become more aware of-and hopefully overcome-our own biases. But it's particularly important for institutions to watch out for ways in which these biases play out. Many of the most important decisions affecting individual lives take place within our schools, hospitals, and companies. It's within these environments that many of the inequalities that still trouble us as a nation continue to persevere. Yet it can be difficult to spot instances of racism because of the number of variables at work in any given individual situation. Using aggregate data to demonstrate the prevalence of racially biased decision-making is often more effective than trying to demonstrate bias on a case-by-case basis. It's easier to demonstrate that blacks aren't being promoted proportionately in a given environment than it is to prove that this particular individual was held back because of racial bias.

Increasingly, public institutions are beginning to implement some of the policies outlined above. We believe that when it comes to racial bias, most people really do want to do "the right thing." The challenge lies in recognizing what holds us back and developing the right tools to do it.
Linda R. Tropp is Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Director of the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Rachel D. Godsil is Director of Research at the Perception Institute and Eleanor Bontecou Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law.

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Overcoming Implicit Bias and Racial Anxiety

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This is the fourth of a four-part series exploring how racial bias and prejudice continue to have a negative impact in America, despite Americans' widespread rejection of racist ideologies. It draws extensively from our volume, The Science of Equality: Addressing Implicit Bias, Racial Anxiety, and Stereotype Threat in Education and Healthcare.

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I watched, “You Love Black Culture, but do You Love Me?” This was a very interesting take on how we view different parts of African American culture and love it, but we do not love the people in front of us. We must challenge ourselves to not love just parts, but the whole.

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lilbaby @beatsbydre You love Black culture, but do you love me? #BeatsPartner 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥💪🏿

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Vargas discusses how we cannot discuss race without discussing how it is connected to immigration. It challenged me to think about what it truly means to be a U.S. Citizen and how we view others who are either “legal” or not.

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NOEL KING, HOST:

Immigration policy is polarizing - travel bans, family separation, defining who qualifies for asylum. But one thing a lot of people agree on - the U.S. immigration system is broken. Last month, the senior editor of the Atlantic, David Frum, wrote a cover story proposing that the U.S. cut legal immigration by half. He talked about the story with our co-host Rachel Martin.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

DAVID FRUM: I don't think most Americans understand how small the benefits of immigration are, the economic benefits, to the legal residents of the United States.

KING: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas is an undocumented immigrant. He wrote the book "Dear America: Notes Of An Undocumented Citizen." He responded to Frum's argument in a lecture at the University of Chicago last night. Rachel talked to Vargas earlier this week, and he told her that a conversation about immigration must also be a conversation about race.

JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS: A cursory reading of U.S. history will tell you that you cannot divorce race from immigration and from who gets to be a citizen. So when they asked me to give this lecture in Chicago, how do I take, you know, advantage of the opportunity that we have to have this conversation that connects race and immigration and talk about how you cannot discuss immigration policy - who gets to go in, who we bar from coming in and then who gets to be, quote, unquote, "a citizen" - until you connect those two things together. This idea that, you know, how much immigration is too much, well, that's a question that we've been asking since the beginning of this country. And to not talk about race and how that is connected to the issue of immigration, to me, is journalistically irresponsible.

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Do you agree that there are, though, real problems with the overall immigration system? I mean...

VARGAS: Oh, my God. Yes.

MARTIN: ...The immigration courts overflowing, huge backlog.

VARGAS: Absolutely. To me, not only is it broken, but this seems deliberate. You know, both parties have had opportunities to actually act and actually insist on some sort of policy change, but that has not happened. Meanwhile, David in this piece and a lot of news sources, you know, whenever they talk about immigrant labor, they leave out significant facts. According to the Social Security Administration, undocumented workers in the past decade have contributed $100 billion into the Social Security fund. I mean, that fact did not make it into David Frum's Atlantic cover story.

MARTIN: This is such a multilayered conversation and issue. But so much of what prevents a change in the immigration laws is the inability to focus on the specific laws and rules. And so to that end, I mean, do you think that the asylum laws need to be stricter?

VARGAS: I think the asylum laws need to be re-examined. I think the immigration system, as I said, is not only broken, I think it's - I don't think that's an accident, right? I think that needs to be really figured out. Like, who should we let in? For me, part of the reason why I came out was to actually help to force these questions, right? Like, for example, I don't know why I haven't gotten deported. I have no idea. I don't understand how other immigrants can get deported, and I can't.

I actually - during part of my reporting on this issue, I actually called ICE myself back in 2012. And I asked them, you know, hey, I came out as undocumented a few months ago. I haven't heard from you. And this was when Obama was president. And in that year, in 2011, he deported 400,000 people. And I wasn't one of them.

MARTIN: David Frum, who is a vocal Trump critic, agrees with President Trump on this idea of getting rid of a rule that says one member of the family who immigrates to the U.S. can then bring other relatives in. Critics of this policy call it chain migration. Proponents call it family reunification. I mean, Frum says that should stop.

VARGAS: What I find interesting - you know, you made that point, that Frum is a vocal Trump critic - this kind of opinion-oriented punditry. You know, I want facts. I want context. I want opinions to be based from facts and context. His story actually asked some hard questions that we have to grapple with - right? - but not using the kind of context and not reporting the kind of facts that we need to grapple with those questions.

MARTIN: It sounds like - I mean, they're very fundamental disagreements with Frum on a variety of levels. But the main problem, as you see it, is just you don't believe his data.

VARGAS: The data, the - then the arguments. Like, I remember when I was reading the piece, you know, the - one of the things that stood out to me was this argument that, in many ways, immigrants are to be blamed for what employers are doing. There's a line that says immigrants are enabling employers to behave badly. So we are now blaming the people that employers hire so they can have labor. Are we then blaming the people who actually don't have power to set the policies and redefine what the laws even are and who they're for?

MARTIN: The title of your book is "Dear America: Notes Of An Undocumented Citizen," though. The word citizen is important.

VARGAS: I actually think it's the unifying conversation that unites all Americans of all backgrounds. Like, what does it mean to be a citizen in this country? So for the people listening who are, you know, U.S. citizens because they were born here, you know, congratulations, right? The accident of birth (laughter). Then what? How do we realize that our equalities are tied to one another? I've been traveling all across the country in the past eight years, talking to everybody who wants to talk to me, including people who want me detained and deported. And one of the things I ask most of the time is, where are you from?

(Laughter) I remember I was at this event at the University of Georgia in Athens. This was, like, in 2012. And I asked this to a young man - because, you know, people of color always get asked where we're from. Like, where are you from from? And so I have this habit now of asking white people where they're from. So I asked him. And he said, well, you know, I'm American. I said, yes, I know. And then he goes, I'm white. Well, white is not a country. You know, like, where are you from?

And then how did your, you know, ancestors get here? What papers did they have? Was there a visa process we don't know about? Was there a multi-billion-dollar enforcement agency like ICE, you know, trying to lock people up because they didn't have papers? And he said, I don't know. You know, what a privilege not to have to know. What a privilege to have to say, oh, I'm a citizen because I'm born here. But all these other people, you know, they got to go earn it. What does that mean exactly?

MARTIN: Jose, thank you so much for talking with us.

VARGAS: Thank you so much for having me.

(SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "ELLI")

KING: That was Jose Antonio Vargas. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and activist.

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You Cannot Divorce Race From Immigration, Jose Antonio Vargas Says

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NOEL KING, HOST: Immigration policy is polarizing - travel bans, family separation, defining who qualifies for asylum. But one thing a lot of people agree on - the U.S. immigration system is broken. Last month, the senior editor of the Atlantic, David Frum, wrote a cover story proposing that the U.S.

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I noticed the racial mix in the television shows that I watch. Most of the main characters in the shows are almost always white, but the supporting characters are typically of other races. This is something I never realized before. They even make jokes within the shows about each other’s races from time to time.

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I connected with Colorlines on Instagram. I enjoy seeing the news information that they post. It is a good way to be able to stay informed and see different views.

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"We realized many writers and readers would be facing weeks and possibly months of social distancing and isolation. We wanted to use our art to help and connect with people around the world."

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"We realized many writers and readers would be facing weeks and possibly months of social distancing and isolation. We wanted to use our art to help and connect with people around the world."

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This article gave many eye-opening points as to how slavery and equal rights were thought of. There were many things that were never discussed in the history classes I attended throughout my schooling, and much of it because it has not been recorded with all accuracy or taught thoroughly.

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"When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no 'white' people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years." - Theodore W. Allen

"There's nothing that a white man with a penny hates more than a nigger with a nickel!" - Chris Rock

There's a perception that whiteness is working for white people. It's not. Whiteness is one of the biggest and most long-running scams ever perpetrated.

It started in the late 1600s in America, but like so many scams, it spiraled out of control until it had a life of its own.

Not long after Europeans started arriving on the east coast of North America and the Caribbean Islands they found themselves rich in land but desperate for labor to work the land. The answer they struck upon was importation of bond labor, initially mostly Irish. The Irish had not been considered fully human under English law for centuries, and they ended up in plantations and working sugar under the Caribbean sun. The easy part of importing Irish (and Scottish) slave labor was that they were right next to England. The downside is there wasn't enough of them for the amazing amounts of land laid before the eager English settlers, and thus the Atlantic slave trade with Africa was born. This is the story we hear in school, but the abridged version we get, intentionally or not, hides the scam of it. Initially the bond terms of convict, Scotch-Irish, and African labor was a set period of time, at the end of which they received bond money and their freedom in this new land. In fact, not that many bondsmen and women lived to be free, but some did, and established themselves as a mixed-race, free peasantry of the new world. If you've ever wondered where the free blacks of so many stories of early America came from, a large number were the families of freed African bond laborers.

As time went on, the labor needs of the land holders continued to grow, and desperate to cultivate the land, they were loathe to let go of their bond servants and the bondsmen and bondswomen's children (whom they kept in bondage for a legally defined time as well). In the mean time, a growing American peasantry was proving as difficult to govern as the European peasantry back home, periodically rising up in riot and rebellion, light skinned and dark skinned together. The political leaders of the Virginia colony struck upon an answer to all these problems, an answer which plagues us to this day.

The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America.

As of the 18th century whites could not be permanently enslaved as they sometimes had been before, and black slaves could never work their way to freedom. The whites were told this was because God had made the blacks inferior to the whites, just as the whites were inferior to the superior classes that owned property. It's worthwhile to remember that they didn't give whites political rights, they didn't give whites the vote - that would not happen then nor at the revolution and independence. Whites didn't get the vote until the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Property owners, both of land and slaves, were the only ones who could vote. That included black land and slave owners until various states passed laws in the early 18th century to take their franchise away.

This plan worked gorgeously. It broke all efforts of the majority of people, African or European, to fight for civil and political rights in America against a landed class that ruled everything. It reduced a portion of the people to the status of the negro slave, and gave the poor but now white people a precious and entitled inch to stand above the permanently enslaved on the social ladder. The next thing the politicians did sealed the deal: they paid poor whites a bounty for runaway slaves, and often made them overseers for slaves, turning every poor white in America into a prison guard against the people who had once been their neighbors and allies.

If this seems like a crazy way for people to behave, it's important to think about what was believed about the natural order of things back in the 1600s. Nowadays, we don't really think about class as a thing that often, and certainly not a natural thing. But when white and black people were conceived, the idea of class was literally believed to be handed down from God. Aristocracy flowed from the divine right of kings, and by their blood or elevation. The poor were poor because God so wished it. Keeping peasants in line and using them to their fullest was what the aristocracy was for, and the tactics that accomplished this were considered wise stewardship. Sometimes that meant concessions, and sometimes divide and conquer, but as long as you didn't have peasant rebellions, you were doing a good job. This view of the world, never universal but powerful and prevalent, held on in one form or another for a very long time. It infected the views of British, Spanish, Dutch, and French imperial masters all over. The powerful were those God had chosen, and those in their power were chosen by God to be of use. While fainter, this idea is so strong it still leaks into the modern era in places like the atheological ideas of Prosperity Christianity. In the frame of mind of aristocracy and a divinely ordained ruling class, such a plan to reorder people and make them pliant was understood to be a move of genius blessed by god and king, if it worked.

This plan worked, in fact it worked so well it became the blueprint for the next few centuries of colonization, revised and spread all over the world, even beyond the conception of white and black.

As the aristocrats and their successors traveled around the world through the colonial age, Europeans all over would find or define a group within the colonial territory and elevate it above the other groups, give it some privileges, though never enough to challenge the intruding rulers. In exchange for this slightly elevated status, the rulers would make those people do the colonial dirty work, and usually keep them slightly more well off than their fellows. Over time, these slightly elevated people often tried to keep their European masters in power even after the people realized how evil colonialism was, maintaining the system both to keep above their fellows and out of fear of retaliation for the dirty work they'd done. The most familiar contemporary case of this practice people will recognize is the Belgian categorization of Tutsis and Hutus, and the tragedy that still hangs over that arrangement over a century later. But really, the idea started in Virginia.

The invented category of white people is still the largest case of this colonial strategy in the world. Whiteness was not always invented in opposition to chattel slavery, even in America. As the newly invented whites pushed West, they were reinvented in opposition to the existence of other people inconveniently on the land the newcomers believed God had ordained to them as their destiny. Elsewhere, they were reinvented as the able administrators, the teachers and ministers, and God's own technocrats, both bettering and properly using the non-white world. Each invention of whiteness was a new permutation, but each one also harkened back to the ur-form of Virginia: God made the whites to serve kings, and everyone else to serve whites. Today, corporations and the remains of colonial systems have reduced the vast majority of those in the arbitrary category of white people to drafted screws for a global forced-labor prison camp.

The great thing about the divide-and-conquer of creating white-skin privilege is that you don't have to give people thusly bought off anything more, and American power structures didn't. In places with black slavery, the whites suffered terribly.

There is a simple truth to American history for the majority of people who have ever been American: the worse the black experience, the worse everyone else's experience, including whites. Driving down (or eliminating) black wages, while always agreeable to whites, drove white pay lower than their European counterparts for most of our history. The labor movement that got its start in America took longer to make progress here, especially in terms of hours and working conditions, largely because employers pitted whites against black or immigrant labor, splitting the movement. Civil and political rights in America only ever had to be better for whites than they were for blacks, preserving that furious inch of superiority that was the defining quality of whites. To this day poor whites are the most intransigent racists - left by an exploitative and violent system without education, access to food and medical care, or even the basic necessities of life in the developed world. In this state their only precious possession is the idea of whiteness Virginian aristocracy blessed them with hundreds of years ago.

So privilege doesn't really work for the people who have it, or at least not the way many people imagine it does. Some white privileges are basic human rights, like the right to live where you wish in safety from your neighbors and the local police. Others shouldn't be privileges for anyone at all, like preferred medical treatment based on race. White privilege is sold to whites, but it is the socio-political equivalent of putting "Contains No Arsenic!" on a breakfast cereal box. White folk have bought into that message tremendously. I mean, who wants a breakfast cereal with arsenic in it? Of course, the problem is there's no reason cereal should ever have arsenic in it in the first place.

Just to keep things plausible, the political arsenic keeps getting introduced into the metaphorical food supply. Perpetual bondage as chattel slaves, Jim Crow, and the current drug war are things terrible enough that white people are happy to accept getting out of them, and into a failed health insurance system, outrageous levels of military spending, failing schools for their children, and even actual arsenic in their food supply. The idea that people should be denied rights because of an organizing principle of 17th century aristocratic control baffles conception, even as it shapes our practical and political lives on a daily basis. It is to the political benefit of the existing system to keep whites, especially poor whites with little more than their whiteness to be proud of. It makes for a predictable political group. Whites thus managed will vote and flock to issues as reliably as tides.

The situation is deeply miserable, even for those living slightly higher up on the shit pile. The biggest two indicators that someone will commit suicide in America are the two boxes they check on the census that are supposed to confer the most safety from misery, and the most advantage one could have in our society: white, and male. What could accuse privilege of failure more than seeking one's own violent end?

"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression."
- W.E.B. DuBois

The very happiest white men I know are those actively working towards ending racism and sexism, not necessarily professionally, but in all the small ways they learn to. Like people who work on space programs or meditate on rejoining the wonder of their conception of God, I believe an enduring and deep form of happiness arises from imagining a future that is better than the present, and feeling like you have the power to move the world towards it. Hope for the future is not only a good way to be happy, it is the best form of happiness, the most enduring, the most resistant. White people have been told they have it the best it can be had, they are told by power structures, the media, and the people disadvantaged by a global system where overwhelmingly the poorest are not considered white. Thankfully, this pernicious and alienating thought is untrue - a world without our present power structures is one of amazing possibilities, with art and play and dreams of space and life made wondrous beyond imagining.

It's hard to want anything to change when you're comfortable, and it is the particular quality of humans, both wonderful and terrible, to get as comfortable as they can where they are. Contentment doesn't really depend on how much stuff you have, or even how safe you are. Whites in terrible circumstances have often looked at blacks and decided their lives were fine. But there is so much more we all could have.

Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery to become a statesman. He spoke out for the human rights of all blacks, advised President Lincoln, lectured in Europe, and worked in support of the vote for women. He was also devilishly handsome, and authored several books after teaching himself to read as a slave. He is one of the great badasses of human history. It is too much to ask that every black person be Frederick Frickin' Douglass in order to be heard.

We've spent the last few hundred years throwing out every Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk or Tim Berners-Lee who didn't happen to be white, and didn't happen to be a man. That's a terrible thing to have done to those brilliant and now lost people. It's a much worse thing to have done to the rest of humanity, including our white selves. When I think, "why don't I have a jet car and live in Alpha Centuri by now?" I think this is because the people that would have invented sky cars and interstellar travel were born black in Detroit, or in rural India or in the medina in Algiers in the 1950s, and spent too much time figuring out how to eat and not get killed to invent my damned skycar.

White exceptionalism runs to both negatives and positives. Whether whites are seen as intellectually and spiritually superior or morally abhorrent, the argument that whites are intrinsically different from the rest of humanity has all the same flaws as any such argument. There are no intrinsically innocent and wise peoples of the earth, we are all the same wonderful and terrible creatures. Every community produces gentle geniuses and violent monsters. If we accept the normality of white people-and this proposition has in its favor overwhelming evidence: circumstance, (the arbitrariness of whiteness) history, (the universality of both human crimes and genius) and physiology (the genetic difference among "white" is pretty much the same as any group of white and non-whites)-this leaves us looking to social systems and systems of power for the sources of our social problems, which seems pretty sensible, when you think about it.

Just as American exceptionalism has been used to prevent sensible change-"Americans have the best healthcare in the world! We must retain the present system to keep that!" (Hint: America does not, in fact, have the best healthcare in the world)-white exceptionalism has been used to keep whites and non-whites from asking why society doesn't work in obviously more sensible ways.

We can't undo hundreds of years of cultural programing in a stroke, but the principles of black liberation begin to point a way out of all this for everyone, not just blacks. There are many great lessons to pick up from movements against the status quo across the 20th century and even before, but none in my study so singularly covers the issues that plague both white people and even the existence of our speck of a planet so much as black liberation. Black liberation is comprehensive - it touches on economics, social values, mutual care, environmental systems and problems of pollution, and even the availability and quality of food.

White exceptionalism, and even the elitism of old, finds their end in this age of global troubles. There is no sanity in maintaining these standards of difference. All our children share one destiny - to live their lives at the bottom of the same polluted gravity well, trying, and usually failing, to get their needs met as the acid seas encroach the land and the great variety of life dies before us.

Hubert Harrison, a key figure in the early 20th century Harlem Renaissance, whose thoughts lead off this series.

Hubert Harrison was right to say that the black experience tests and proves the modern democratic idea, but he didn't go far enough for the current age. In the system that created white supremacy and black persecution, nearly all of our causes lie trapped in the swamp of white mythology, all our hopeful futures slowly drowning in it. No one living is responsible for creating this system, and no one living is really at fault for being caught in its workings. But there is no deus ex machina that will descend from the heavens and set it right. We will have to reach across this chasm ourselves. White people must join the world in fighting the pernicious ideas that created their category. Not because it is merely moral, but because without arriving at the principles contained in black liberation, humanity as we know it will surely pass from this earth.

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"When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no 'white' people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years." - Theodore W. Allen It...

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I have begun to discuss the issue of race and racism with others around me. We are able to have deep and civil conversations about the history of races and what is happening around us now even still. It is a great start to be able to have these conversations with others.

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I noticed when going out to eat throughout the week that the majority of people I was surrounded by was of a white race. The few people who were not, stood out more to me. It makes me think about how they must feel being a minority. Typically, we are a majority, and we do not feel uncomfortable or judged. We must remember that and take those feelings into account.

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I noticed today that 10 of my closest friends are all of the same race, white. I have had friends in the past of other races and I do have acquaintances of other races, but they are not in my core group. Noticing this makes me realize that where I live is not very diverse, and I clearly gravitate towards people of the same race.

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I connected on Instagram with Define American. It is a wonderful platform that should be spread that tells stories of immigrants. They discuss news and how American is defined by each of them. It is very interesting and eye-opening to see their point of view.

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Define American is a culture change organization that uses the power of narrative to humanize conversations about immigrants. Our advocacy within news, entertainment, and digital media is creating an America where everyone belongs.

We've been recognized by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies in the world for causing a stir by leveraging the power of television networks to make the world more equitable and for reshaping American public opinion. We humanize the conversation on immigration through television consulting, original content development and production, media advocacy, and live events. Define American has consulted on more than 45 films and television projects, such as Grey's Anatomy and Superstore, spanning networks like ABC and NBC and streaming platforms such as Netflix and Hulu.

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Define American is a culture change organization that uses the power of narrative to humanize conversations about immigrants. Our advocacy within news, entertainment, and digital media is creating an America where everyone belongs.

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I read the article, “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person.” It was a very interesting view that I had not considered before. I have always thought how the author did about growing up in poverty does not make you privileged, but I see and understand the side that was presented. We do have the ability to not be harassed or judged the majority of the time. We are also typically able to buy, rent, or work somewhere easier. It is not based on money.

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Explaining White Privilege To A Broke White Person

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I, maybe more than most people, can completely understand why broke white folks get pissed when the word “privilege” is thrown around. As a child I was constantly discriminated against because of my poverty, and those wounds still run deep. But luckily my college education introduced me to a more nu…

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I connected on Instagram with a few people who are fighting for social justice and equality such as: Showing up for Racial Justice and The Conscious Kid. I really like The Conscious Kid because the account shares information which are great resources to use in my classroom for my younger elementary-aged students.

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The Conscious Kid is an education, research and policy organization that supports families and educators in taking action to disrupt racism, inequity and bias

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I watched Racism is Real today. The video shows proven facts about how racism is still alive today. It is saddening to me to see how the black community is treated versus the white community on so many different levels.

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If systemic racism isn't real, why are black people nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than their white counterparts despite using and selling drugs at similar rates, about twice as likely to be pulled over while driving, or half as likely to get a call back after they mail their resume to an employer?

The video above, by Brave New Films, breaks down these stats and more in a takedown of the idea that systemic racism isn't a real problem in America.

When looking at racial disparities in police shootings, the focus typically falls on cops and the criminal justice system as a whole. And while racial disparities in the criminal justice system and police use of force exist, this Brave New Films video demonstrates that the problem goes much deeper - affecting black Americans even when they're applying for jobs, purchasing a car, or trying to buy a house.

Behind these disparities isn't necessarily explicit racism. Instead, researchers are increasingly focused on what's known as "implicit bias": subconscious biases that shape how nearly everyone perceives people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Most people are at least a little racist, even if they don't know it

As part of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2014, researchers studied 176 mostly white, male police officers, and tested them to see if they held an unconscious "dehumanization bias" against black people by having them match photos of people with photos of big cats or apes. Researchers found that officers commonly dehumanized black people, and those who did were most likely to be the ones with a history of using force on black children in custody.

In the same study, researchers interviewed 264 mostly white, female college students and found that they tended to perceive black children ages 10 and older as "significantly less innocent" than their white counterparts.

"Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection," Phillip Goff, a UCLA researcher and author of the study, said in a statement. "Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent."
"I'VE NEVER BEEN SO DISGUSTED BY MY OWN DATA"
Other research suggests there can be superhumanization bias at work, as well, with white people more likely to associate paranormal or magical powers with black people than with other white people. And the more they associate magical powers with black people, the less likely they are to believe black people feel pain.

Another study found people tend to associate what the authors call "black-sounding names," like DeShawn and Jamal, with larger, more violent people than they do "white-sounding names," like Connor and Garrett.

"I've never been so disgusted by my own data," Colin Holbrook, the lead author of the study, said in a statement. "The amount that our study participants assumed based only on a name was remarkable. A character with a black-sounding name was assumed to be physically larger, more prone to aggression, and lower in status than a character with a white-sounding name."

These biases can seriously impact people's lives

As one can imagine, subconscious racial biases can have real effects on people's lives - such as their job prospects. In one study, researchers sent out almost entirely identical résumés - except some had stereotypically white names, while others had stereotypically black names. The white names were 50 percent more likely to be called back for interviews.

These biases also may contribute to greater use of force by police. Studies show, for example, that officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations. Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor who conducted the research, said it's possible the bias could lead to even more skewed outcomes in the field. "In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training," he said, "we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them."

Knowing about implicit bias and its consequences is important, researchers say, not just to prove how terrible the world is but because awareness is one of the ways to combat such biases. Police departments have, for example, taken steps to train their police officers to resist their biases.

But if people deny that these biases exist, then it's always going to be hard to solve them.

Watch: Race is a social construct

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Next time someone says racism isn't real, show them this 3-minute video

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Vox is a general interest news site for the 21st century. Its mission: to help everyone understand our complicated world, so that we can all help shape it. In text, video and audio, our reporters explain politics, policy, world affairs, technology, culture, science, the climate crisis, money, health and everything else that matters.

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I listened to, “The Half That Has Never Been Told.” It was very eye-opening about how slavery was at the root of the growth of the Early American and British colonies. It was very intriguing to hear the processes and efficiency led to economic change. I reflected though on how slaves were treated only for the benefit of economic success. It is difficult to process to see that the success today was brought on by the slavery of the past.

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During the middle of the 1800s, cotton became the world's largest commodity. The cheapest and best cotton came from the southern United States.

Edward Baptist argues in his new book, " The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism," that the forced migration and subsequent harsh treatment of slaves in the cotton fields was integral to establishing the United States as a world economic power.

"Slavery continues to have an impact on America in the most basic economic sense," Baptist told Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson. "We don't want to hear that at its root, the economic growth depends to a large extent on slavery."

By Edward E. Baptist
Introduction: The Heart
1937
A beautiful late April day, seventy-two years after slavery ended in the United States. Claude Anderson parks his car on the side of Holbrook Street in Danville. On the porch of number 513, he rearranges the notepads under his arm. Releasing his breath in a rush of decision, he steps up to the door of the handmade house and knocks.

Danville is on the western edge of the Virginia Piedmont. Back in 1865, it had been the last capital of the Confederacy. Or so Jefferson Davis had proclaimed on April 3, after he fled Richmond. Davis stayed a week, but then he had to keep running. The blue-coated soldiers of the Army of the Potomac were hot on his trail. When they got to Danville, they didn't find the fugitive rebel. But they did discover hundreds of Union prisoners of war locked in the tobacco warehouses downtown. The bluecoats, rescuers and rescued, formed up and paraded through town. Pouring into the streets around them, dancing and singing, came thousands of African Americans. They had been prisoners for far longer.

In the decades after the jubilee year of 1865, Danville, like many other southern villages, had become a cotton factory town. Anderson, an African-American master's student from Hampton University, would not have been able to work at the segregated mill. But the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a bureau of the federal government created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, would hire him. To put people back to work after they had lost their jobs in the Great Depression, the WPA organized thousands of projects, hiring construction workers to build schools and artists to paint murals. And many writers and students were hired to interview older Americans-like Lorenzo Ivy, the man painfully shuffling across the pine board floor to answer Anderson's knock.

Anderson had found Ivy's name in the Hampton University archives, two hundred miles east of Danville. Back in 1850, when Lorenzo had been born in Danville, there was neither a university nor a city called Hampton-just an American fort named after a slaveholder president. Fortress Monroe stood on Old Point Comfort, a narrow triangle of land that divided the Chesapeake Bay from the James River. Long before the fort was built, in April 1607, the Susan Constant had sailed past the point with a boatload of English settlers. Anchoring a few miles upriver, they had founded Jamestown, the first perma- nent English-speaking settlement in North America. Twelve years later, the crews of two storm-damaged English privateers also passed, seeking shelter and a place to sell the twenty-odd enslaved Africans (captured from a Portuguese slaver) lying shackled in their holds.

After that first 1619 shipload, some 100,000 more enslaved Africans would sail upriver past Old Point Comfort. Lying in chains in the holds of slave ships, they could not see the land until they were brought up on deck to be sold. After the legal Atlantic slave trade to the United States ended in 1807, hundreds of thousands more enslaved people passed the point. Now they were going the other way, boarding ships at Richmond, the biggest eastern center of the internal slave trade, to go by sea to the Mississippi Valley.

By the time a dark night came in late May 1861, the moon had waxed and waned three thousand times over slavery in the South. To protect slavery, Virginia had just seceded from the United States, choosing a side at last after six months of indecision in the wake of South Carolina's rude exit from the Union. Fortress Monroe, built to protect the James River from ocean-borne invaders, became the Union's last toehold in eastern Virginia. Rebel troops entrenched themselves athwart the fort's landward approaches. Local planters, including one Charles Mallory, detailed enslaved men to build berms to shelter the besiegers' cannon. But late this night, Union sentries on the fort's seaward side saw a small skiff emerging slowly from the darkness. Frank Baker and Townshend rowed with muffled oars. Sheppard Mallory held the tiller. They were setting themselves free.

A few days later, Charles Mallory showed up at the gates of the Union fort. He demanded that the commanding federal officer, Benjamin Butler, return his property. Butler, a politician from Massachusetts, was an incompetent battlefield commander, but a clever lawyer. He replied that if the men were Mallory's property, and he was using them to wage war against the US government, then logically the men were therefore contraband of war.

Those first three "contrabands" struck a crack in slavery's centuries-old wall. Over the next four years, hundreds of thousands more enslaved people widened the crack into a gaping breach by escaping to Union lines. Their movement weakened the Confederate war effort and made it easier for the United States and its president to avow mass emancipation as a tool of war. Eventually the Union Army began to welcome formerly enslaved men into its ranks, turning refugee camps into recruiting stations-and those African-American soldiers would make the difference between victory and defeat for the North, which by late 1863 was exhausted and uncertain.

After the war, Union officer Samuel Armstrong organized literacy programs that had sprung up in the refugee camp at Old Point Comfort to form Hampton Institute. In 1875, Lorenzo Ivy traveled down to study there, on the ground zero of African-American history. At Hampton, he acquired an education that enabled him to return to Danville as a trained schoolteacher. He educated generations of African-American children. He built the house on Holbrook Street with his own Hampton-trained hands, and there he sheltered his father, his brother, his sister-in-law, and his nieces and nephews. In April 1937, Ivy opened the door he'd made with hands and saw and plane, and it swung clear for Claude Anderson without rubbing the frame.1

Anderson's notepads, however, were accumulating evidence of two very different stories of the American past-halves that did not fit together neatly. And he was about to hear more. Somewhere in the midst of the notepads was a typed list of questions supplied by the WPA. Questions often reveal the desired answer. By the 1930s, most white Americans had been demanding for decades that they hear only a sanitized version of the past into which Lorenzo Ivy had been born. This might seem strange. In the middle of the nineteenth century, white Americans had gone to war with each other over the future of slavery in their country, and slavery had lost. Indeed, for a few years after 1865, many white northerners celebrated emancipation as one of their collective triumphs. Yet whites' belief in the emancipation made permanent by the Thirteenth Amendment, much less in the race-neutral citizenship that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had written into the Constitution, was never that deep. Many northerners had only supported Benjamin Butler and Abraham Lincoln's moves against slavery because they hated the arrogance of slaveholders like Charles Mallory. And after 1876, northern allies abandoned southern black voters.

Within half a century after Butler sent Charles Mallory away from Fortress Monroe empty-handed, the children of white Union and Confederate soldiers united against African-American political and civil equality. This compact of white supremacy enabled southern whites to impose Jim Crow segregation on public space, disfranchise African-American citizens by barring them from the polls, and use the lynch-mob noose to enforce black compliance. White Americans imposed increased white supremacy outside the South, too. In non-Confederate states, many restaurants wouldn't serve black customers. Stores and factories refused to hire African Americans. Hundreds of midwestern communities forcibly evicted African-American residents and became "sundown towns" ("Don't let the sun set on you in this town"). Most whites, meanwhile, believed that science proved that there were biologically distinct human races, and that Europeans were members of the superior one. Anglo-Americans even believed that they were distinct from and superior to the Jews from Russia, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, and others who flooded Ellis Island and changed the culture of northern urban centers.

By the early twentieth century, America's first generation of professional historians were justifying the exclusions of Jim Crow and disfranchisement by telling a story about the nation's past of slavery and civil war that seemed to confirm, for many white Americans, that white supremacy was just and necessary. Above all, the historians of a reunified white nation insisted that slavery was a premodern institution that was not committed to profit-seeking. In so doing, historians were to some extent only repeating pre-Civil War debates: abolitionists had depicted slavery not only as a psychopathic realm of whipping, rape, and family separation, but also as a flawed economic system that was inherently less efficient than the free-labor capitalism developing in the North. Proslavery writers disagreed about the psychopathy, but by the 1850s they agreed that enslavers were first and foremost not profit-seekers. For them, planters were caring masters who considered their slaves to be inferior family members. So although anti- and proslavery conclusions about slavery's morality were different, their premises about slavery-as-a-business-model matched. Both agreed that slavery was inherently unprofitable. It was an old, static system that belonged to an earlier time. Slave labor was inefficient to begin with, slave productivity did not increase to keep pace with industrialization, and enslavers did not act like modern profit-seeking businessmen. As a system, slavery had never adapted or changed to thrive in the new industrial economy-let alone to play a premier role as a driver of economic expansion-and had been little more than a drag on the explosive growth that had built the modern United States. In fact, during the Civil War, northerners were so convinced of these points that they believed that shifting from slave labor to free labor would dramatically increase cotton productivity.

It didn't. But even though the data of declining productivity over the ensuing three score and ten years suggested that slavery might have been the most efficient way to produce the world's most important crop, no one let empirical tests change their minds. Instead, historians of Woodrow Wilson's generation imprinted the stamp of academic research on the idea that slavery was separate from the great economic and social transformations of the Western world during the nineteenth century. After all, it did not rely upon ever-more efficient machine labor. Its unprofitable economic structures supposedly produced antique social arrangements, and the industrializing, urbanizing world looked back toward them with contempt-or, increasingly, nostalgia. Many whites, now proclaiming that science proved that people of African descent were intellectually inferior and congenitally prone to criminal behavior, looked wistfully to a past when African Americans had been governed with whips and chains. Granted, slavery as an economic system was not modern, they said, and had neither changed to adapt to the modern economy nor contributed to economic expansion. But to an openly racist historical profession-and a white history-reading, history-thinking public obsessed with all kinds of race control-the white South's desire to white-wash slavery in the past, and maintain segregation now and forever, served the purpose of validating control over supposedly premodern, semi-savage black people.

Such stories about slavery shaped the questions Claude Anderson was to ask in the 1930s, because you could find openly racist versions of it baked into the recipe of every American textbook. You could find it in popular novels, politicians' speeches, plantation-nostalgia advertising, and even the first blockbuster American film: B irth of a Nation. As president, Woodrow Wilson-a southern-born history professor- called this paean to white supremacy "history written with lightning," and screened it at the White House. Such ideas became soaked into the way America publicly depicted slavery. Even many of those who believed that they rejected overt racism depicted the era before emancipation as a plantation idyll of happy slaves and paternalist masters. Abolitionists were snakes in the garden, responsible for a Civil War in which hundreds of thousands of white people died. Maybe the end of slavery had to come for the South to achieve economic modernity, but it didn't have to come that way, they said.

The way that Americans remember slavery has changed dramatically since then. In tandem with widespread desegregation of public spaces and the assertion of black cultural power in the years between World War II and the

1990s came a new understanding of the experience of slavery. No longer did academic historians describe slavery as a school in which patient masters and mistresses trained irresponsible savages for futures of perpetual servitude.

Slavery's denial of rights now prefigured Jim Crow, while enslaved people's resistance predicted the collective self-assertion that developed into first the civil rights movement and later, Black Power.

But perhaps the changes were not so great as they seemed on the surface. The focus on showing African Americans as assertive rebels, for instance, implied an uncomfortable corollary. If one should be impressed by those who rebelled, because they resisted, one should not be proud of those who did not. And there were very few rebellions in the history of slavery in the United States. Some scholars tried to backfill against this quandary by arguing that all African Americans together created a culture of resistance, especially in slave quarters and other spaces outside of white observation. Yet the insistence that assertive resistance undermined enslavers' power, and a focus on the development of an independent black culture, led some to believe that enslaved people actually managed to prevent whites from successfully exploiting their labor. This idea, in turn, created a quasi-symmetry with post- Civil War plantation memoirs that portrayed gentle masters, who maintained slavery as a nonprofit endeavor aimed at civilizing Africans.

Thus, even after historians of the civil rights, Black Power, and multicultural eras rewrote segregationists' stories about gentlemen and belles and grateful darkies, historians were still telling the half that has ever been told. For some fundamental assumptions about the history of slavery and the history of the United States remain strangely unchanged. The first major assumption is that, as an economic system-a way of producing and trading commodities-American slavery was fundamentally different from the rest of the modern economy and separate from it. Stories about industrialization emphasize white immigrants and clever inventors, but they leave out cotton fields and slave labor. This perspective implies not only that slavery didn't change, but that slavery and enslaved African Americans had little long-term influence on the rise of the United States during the nineteenth century, a period in which the nation went from being a minor European trading partner to becoming the world's largest economy-one of the central stories of American history.

The second major assumption is that slavery in the United States was fundamentally in contradiction with the political and economic systems of the liberal republic, and that inevitably that contradiction would be resolved in favor of the free-labor North. Sooner or later, slavery would have ended by the operation of historical forces; thus, slavery is a story without suspense. And a story with a predetermined outcome isn't a story at all.

Third, the worst thing about slavery as an experience, one is told, was that it denied enslaved African Americans the liberal rights and liberal subjectivity of modern citizens. It did those things as a matter of course, and as injustice, that denial ranks with the greatest in modern history. But slavery also killed people, in large numbers. From those who survived, it stole everything. Yet the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire-this vanished in the story of a slavery that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power. And once the violence of slavery was minimized, another voice could whisper, saying that African Americans, both before and after emancipation, were denied the rights of citizens because they would not fight for them.

All these assumptions lead to still more implications, ones that shape attitudes, identities, and debates about policy. If slavery was outside of US history, for instance-if indeed it was a drag and not a rocket booster to American economic growth-then slavery was not implicated in US growth, success, power, and wealth. Therefore none of the massive quantities of wealth and treasure piled by that economic growth is owed to African Americans. Ideas about slavery's history determine the ways in which Americans hope to resolve the long contradiction between the claims of the United States to be a nation of freedom and opportunity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unfreedom, the unequal treatment, and the opportunity denied that for most of American history have been the reality faced by people of African descent. Surely, if the worst thing about slavery was that it denied African Americans the liberal rights of the citizen, one must merely offer them the title of citizen-even elect one of them president-to make amends. Then the issue will be put to rest forever.

Slavery's story gets told in ways that reinforce all these assumptions. Textbooks segregate twenty-five decades of enslavement into one chapter, painting a static picture. Millions of people each year visit plantation homes where guides blather on about furniture and silverware. As sites, such homes hide the real purpose of these places, which was to make African Americans toil under the hot sun for the profit of the rest of the world. All this is the "symbolic annihilation" of enslaved people, as two scholars of those weird places put it.2 Meanwhile, at other points we tell slavery's story by heaping praise on those who escaped it through flight or death in rebellion, leaving the listener to wonder if those who didn't flee or die somehow "accepted" slavery. And everyone who teaches about slavery knows a little dirty secret that reveals historians' collective failure: many African-American students struggle with a sense of shame that most of their ancestors could not escape the suffering they experienced.

The truth can set us free, if we can find the right questions. But back in the little house in Danville, Anderson was reading from a list of leading ones, designed by white officials-some well-meaning, some not so well-meaning. He surely felt how the gravity of the questions pulled him toward the planet of plantation nostalgia. "Did slaves mind being called 'nigger'?" "What did slaves call master or mistress?" "Have you been happier in slavery or free?" "Was the mansion house pretty?" Escaping from chains is very difficult, however, so Anderson dutifully asked the prescribed questions and poised his pencil to take notes.

Ivy listened politely. He sat still. Then he began to speak: "My mother's master was named William Tunstall. He was a mean man. There was only one good thing he did, and I don't reckon he intended to do that. He sold our family to my father's master George H. Gilman."

Perhaps the wind blowing through the window changed as a cloud moved across the spring sun: "Old Tunstall caught the 'cotton fever.' There was a fever going round, leastways it was like a fever. Everyone was dying to get down south and grow cotton to sell. So old Tunstall separated families right and left. He took two of my aunts and left their husbands up here, and he separated altogether seven husbands and wives. One woman had twelve children. Yessir. Took 'em all down south with him to Georgia and Alabama."

Pervasive separations. Tears carving lines on faces. Lorenzo remembered his relief at dodging the worst, but he also remembered knowing that it was just a lucky break. Next time it could've been his mother. No white person was reliable, because money drove their decisions. No, this wasn't the story the books told.

So Anderson moved to the next question. Did Ivy know if any slaves had been sold here? Now, perhaps, the room grew darker.

For more than a century, white people in the United States had been singling out slave traders as an exception: unscrupulous lower-class outsiders who pried apart paternalist bonds. Scapegoaters had a noble precedent. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson tried to blame King George III for using the Atlantic slave trade to impose slavery on the colonies. In historians' tellings, the 1808 abolition of the Atlantic trade brought stability to slavery, ringing in the "Old South," as it has been called since before the Civil War. Of course, one might wonder how something that was brand new, created after a revolution, and growing more rapidly than any other commodity-producing economy in history before then could be considered "old." But never mind. Historians depicted slave trading after 1808 as irrelevant to what slavery was in the "Old South," and to how America as a whole was shaped. America's modernization was about entrepreneurs, creativity, invention, markets, movement, and change. Slavery was not about any of these things-not about slave trading, or moving people away from everyone they knew in order to make them make cotton. Therefore, modern America and slavery had nothing to do with each other.

But Ivy spilled out a rush of very different words. "They sold slaves here and everywhere. I've seen droves of Negroes brought in here on foot going South to be sold. Each one of them had an old tow sack on his back with everything he's got in it. Over the hills they came in lines reaching as far as the eye can see. They walked in double lines chained together by twos. They walk 'em here to the railroad and shipped 'em south like cattle."

Then Lorenzo Ivy said this: "Truly, son, the half has never been told."

To this, day, it still has not. For the other half is the story of how slavery changed and moved and grew over time: Lorenzo Ivy's time, and that of his parents and grandparents. In the span of a single lifetime after the 1780s, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out plantations to a sub-continental empire. Entrepreneurial enslavers moved more than 1 million enslaved people, by force, from the communities that survivors of the slave trade from Africa had built in the South and in the West to vast territories that were seized-also by force-from their Native American inhabitants. From

1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people. Their practices rapidly transformed the southern states into the dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the world's most widely traded commodity at the time, as it was the key raw material during the first century of the industrial revolution. The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery's expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation-not only increasing its power and size, but also, eventually, dividing US politics, differentiating regional identities and interests, and helping to make civil war possible.

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth. And that truth was the half of the story that survived mostly in the custodianship of those who survived slavery's expansion-whether they had been taken over the hill, or left behind. Forced migration had shaped their lives, and also had shaped what they thought about their lives and the wider history in which they were enmeshed. Even as they struggled to stay alive in the midst of disruption, they created ways to talk about this half untold. But what survivors experienced, analyzed, and named was a slavery that didn't fit the comfortable boxes into which other Americans have been trying to fit it ever since it ended.

I read Lorenzo Ivy's words, and they left me uneasy. I sensed that the true narrative had been left out of history-not only American history in general, but even the history of slavery. I began to look actively for the other half of the story, the one about how slavery constantly grew, changed, and reshaped the modern world. Of how it was both modernizing and modern, and what that meant for the people who lived through its incredible expansion. Once I began to look, I discovered that the traces of the other half were everywhere. The debris of cotton fevers that infected white entrepreneurs and separated man and woman, parent and child, right and left, dusted every set of pre-Civil War letters, newspapers, and court documents. Most of all, the half not told ran like a layer of iridium left by a dinosaur-killing asteroid through every piece of testimony that ex-slaves, such as Lorenzo Ivy, left on the historical record: thousands of stanzas of an epic of forced separations, violence, and new kinds of labor.

For a long time I wasn't sure how to tell the story of this muscular, dynamic process in a single book. The most difficult challenge was simply the fact that the expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the story of everything in the pre-Civil War United States. Enslavers' surviving papers showed calculations of returns from slave sales and purchases as well as the costs of establishing new slave labor camps in the cotton states. Newspapers dripped with speculations in land and people and the commodities they produced; dramatic changes in how people made money and how much they made; and the dramatic violence that accompanied these practices. The accounts of northern merchants and bankers and factory owners showed that they invested in slavery, bought from and sold to slaveholders, and took slices of profit out of slavery's expansion. Scholars and students talked about politics as a battle about states' rights or republican principles, but viewed in a different light the fights can be seen as a struggle between regions about how the rewards of slavery's expansion would be allocated and whether that expansion could continue.

The story seemed too big to fit into one framework. Even Ivy had no idea how to count the chained lines he saw going southwest toward the mountains on the horizon and the vast open spaces beyond. From the 1790s to the 1860s, enslavers moved 1 million people from the old slave states to the new. They went from making no cotton to speak of in 1790 to making almost 2 billion pounds of it in 1860. Stretching out beyond the slave South, the story encompassed not only Washington politicians and voters across the United States but also Connecticut factories, London banks, opium addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa. And could one book do Lorenzo Ivy's insight justice? It would have to avoid the old platitudes, such as the easy temptation to tell the story as a collection of topics-here a chapter on slave resistance, there one on women and slavery, and so on. That kind of abstraction cuts the beating heart out of the story. For the half untold was a narrative, a process of movement and change and suspense. Things happened because of what had been done before them-and what people chose to do in response.

No, this had to be a story, and one couldn't tell it solely from the perspective of powerful actors. True, politicians and planters and bankers shaped policies, the movement of people, and the growing and selling of cotton, and even remade the land itself. But when one takes Lorenzo Ivy's words as a starting point, the whole history of the United States comes walking over the hill behind a line of people in chains. Changes that reshaped the entire world began on the auction block where enslaved migrants stood or in the frontier cotton fields where they toiled. Their individual drama was a struggle to survive. Their reward was to endure a brutal transition to new ways of labor that made them reinvent themselves every day. Enslaved people's creativity enabled their survival, but, stolen from them in the form of ever-growing cotton productivity, their creativity also expanded the slaveholding South at an unprecedented rate. Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.

One day I found a metaphor that helped. It came from the great African-American author Ralph Ellison. You might know his novel Invisible Man. But in the 1950s, Ellison also produced incredible essays. In one of them he wrote, "On the moral level I propose we view the whole of American life as a drama enacted on the body of a Negro giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds."3

The image fit the story that Ivy's words raised above the watery surface of buried years. The only problem was that Ellison's image implied a stationary giant. In the old myth, the stationary, quintessentially unchanging plantation was the site and the story of African-American life from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. But Lorenzo Ivy had described a world in motion. After the American Revolution-which seemed at the time to portend slavery's imminent demise-a metastatic transformation and growth of slavery's giant body had begun instead. From the exploitation, commodification, and torture of enslaved people's bodies, enslavers and other free people gained new kinds of modern power. The sweat and blood of the growing system, a network of individuals and families and labor camps that grew bigger with each passing year, fueled massive economic change. Enslaved people, meanwhile, transported and tortured, had to find ways to survive, resist, or endure. And over time the question of their freedom or bondage came to occupy the center of US politics.

This trussed-up giant, stretched out on the rack of America's torture zone, actually grew, like a person passing through ordeals to new maturity. I have divided the chapters of this book with Ellison's imagined giant in mind, a structure that has allowed the story to take as its center point the experience of enslaved African Americans themselves. Before we pass through the door that Lorenzo Ivy opened, here are the chapters' names. The first is "Feet," for the story begins with unfree movement on paths to enslaved frontiers that were laid down between the end of the American Revolution in 1783 and the early 1800s. "Heads" is the title of the second chapter, which covers America's acquisition of the key points of the Mississippi Valley by violence, a gain that also consolidated the enslavers' hold on the frontier. Then come the "Right Hand" and the "Left Hand" (Chapters 3 and 4). They reveal the inner secrets of enslavers' power, secrets which made the entire world of white people wealthy.

"Tongues" (Chapter 5) and "Breath" (Chapter 6) follow. They describe how, by the mid-1820s, enslavers had not only found ways to silence the tongues of their critics, but had built a system of slave trading that served as expansion's lungs. Most forms of resistance were impossible to carry out successfully. So a question hung in the air. Would the spirit in the tied-down body die, leaving enslaved people to live on like undead zombies serving their captors? Or would the body live, and rise? Every transported soul, finding his or her old life killed off, faced this question on the individual level as well: whether to work with fellow captives or scrabble against them in a quest for individualistic subsistence. Enslaved African Americans chose many things. But perhaps most importantly, they chose survival, and true survival in such circumstances required solidarity. Solidarity allowed them to see their common experience, to light their own way by building a critique of enslavers' power that was an alternative story about what things were and what they meant.

This story draws on thousands of personal narratives like the one that Lorenzo Ivy told Claude Anderson. Slavery has existed in many societies, but no other population of formerly enslaved people has been able to record the testimonies of its members like those who survived slavery in the United States. The narratives began with those who escaped slavery's expansion in the nineteenth century as fugitives. Over one hundred of those survivors published their autobiographies during the nineteenth century. As time went on, such memoirs found a market, in no small part because escapees from southern captivity were changing the minds of some of the northern whites about what the expansion of slavery meant for them. Then, during the 1930s, people like Claude Anderson conducted about 2,300 interviews with the ex-slaves who had lived into that decade. Because the interviews often allowed old people to tell about the things they had seen for themselves and the things they heard from their elders in the years before the Civil War, they take us back into the world of explanation and storytelling that grew up around fires and on porches and between cotton rows. No one autobiography or interview is pure and objective as an account of all that the history books left untold. But read them all, and each one adds to a more detailed, clearer picture of the whole. One story fills in gaps left by another, allowing one to read between the lines.4

Understanding something of what it felt like to suffer, and what it cost to endure that suffering, is crucial to understanding the course of US history. For what enslaved people made together-new ties to each other, new ways of understanding their world-had the potential to help them survive in mind and body. And ultimately, their spirit and their speaking would enable them to call new allies into being in the form of an abolitionist movement that helped to destabilize the mighty enslavers who held millions captive. But the road on which enslaved people were being driven was long. It led through the hell described by "Seed" (Chapter 7), which tells of the horrific near-decade from 1829 to 1837. In these years entrepreneurs ran wild on slavery's frontier. Their acts created the political and economic dynamics that carried enslavers to their greatest height of power. Facing challenges from other white men who wanted to assert their masculine equality through political democracy, clever entrepreneurs found ways to leverage not just that desire, but other desires as well. With the creation of innovative financial tools, more and more of the Western world was able to invest directly in slavery's expansion. Such creativity multiplied the incredible productivity and profitability of enslaved people's labor and allowed enslavers to turn bodies into commodities with which they changed the financial history of the Western world.

Enslavers, along with common white voters, investors, and the enslaved, made the 1830s the hinge of US history. On one side lay the world of the industrial revolution and the initial innovations that launched the modern world. On the other lay modern America. For in 1837, enslavers' exuberant success led to a massive economic crash. This self-inflicted devastation, covered in Chapter 8, "Blood," posed new challenges to slaveholders' power, led to human destruction for the enslaved, and created confusion and discord in white families. When southern political actors tried to use war with Mexico to restart their expansion, they encountered new opposition on the part of increasingly assertive northerners. As Chapter 9, "Backs," explains, by the 1840s the North had built a complex, industrialized economy on the backs of enslaved people and their highly profitable cotton labor. Yet, although all northern whites had benefited from the deepened exploitation of enslaved people, many northern whites were now willing to use politics to oppose further expansions of slavery. The words that the survivors of slavery's expansion had carried out from the belly of the nation's hungriest beast had, in fact, become important tools for galvanizing that opposition.

Of course, in return for the benefits they received from slavery's expansion, plenty of northerners were still willing to enable enslavers' disproportionate power. With the help of such allies, as "Arms" (Chapter 10) details, slavery continued to expand in the decade after the Compromise of 1850. For now, however, it had to do so within potentially closed borders. That is why southern whites now launched an aggressive campaign of advocacy, insisting on policies and constitutional interpretations that would commit the entire United States to the further geographic expansion of slavery. The entire country would become slavery's next frontier. And as they pressed, they generated greater resistance, pushed too hard, and tried to make their allies submit-like slaves, the allies complained. And that is how, at last, whites came to take up arms against each other.

Yet even as southern whites seceded, claiming that they would set up an independent nation, shelling Fort Sumter, and provoking the Union's president, Abraham Lincoln, to call out 100,000 militia, many white Americans wanted to keep the stakes of this dispute as limited as possible. A majority of northern Unionists opposed emancipation. Perhaps white Americans' battles with each other were, on one level, not driven by a contest over ideals, but over the best way to keep the stream of cotton and financial revenues flowing: keep slavery within its current borders, or allow it to consume still more geographic frontiers. But the growing roar of cannon promised others a chance to force a more dramatic decision: slavery forever, or nevermore. So it was that as Frank Baker, Townshend, and Sheppard Mallory crept across the dark James River waters that had washed so many hulls bearing human bodies, the future stood poised, uncertain between alternative paths. Yet those three men carried something powerful: the same half of the story that Lorenzo Ivy could tell. All they had learned from it would help to push the future onto a path that led to freedom. Their story can do so for us as well. To hear it, we must stand as Lorenzo Ivy had stood as a boy in Danville-watching the chained lines going over the hills, or as Frank Baker and others had stood, watching the ships going down the James from the Richmond docks, bound for the Mississippi. Then turn and go with the marching feet, and listen for the breath of the half that has never been told.
Excerpted from the book THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD by Edward Baptist. Copyright © 2014 by Edward Baptist. Reprinted with permission of Basic Books.

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Without Slavery, Would The U.S. Be The Leading Economic Power?

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Edward Baptist argues in his new book that slavery was integral to establishing the America as a world economic power.

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Stella Young discussed the importance of not objectifying people because of their disabilities. As a society we have a view of disabled people that they are simply an inspiration for anything they do, but we need to view people with disabilities as the norm. We need to make it the norm that achievements are for people who do great things, and that it is not a surprise to see someone disabled in the workforce.

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Stella Young: I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much

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Stella Young is a comedian and journalist who happens to go about her day in a wheelchair - a fact that doesn't, she'd like to make clear, automatically turn her into a noble inspiration to all humanity. In this very funny talk, Young breaks down society's habit of turning disabled people into "inspiration porn."