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This is a present book. A book about the here and now. A book that hopefully will help us better understand why we are where we are as Americans, specifically as our identity pertains to race.

Segregationists are haters. Like, real haters. People who hate you for not being like them.

Assimilationists are people who like you, but only with quotation marks. Like...“like” you. Meaning, they “like” you because you’re like them.

The year is 1415, and Prince Henry (there’s always a Prince Henry) convinced his father, King John of Portugal, to basically pull a caper and capture the main Muslim trading depot on the northeastern tip of Morocco.

That illustrious moniker would go to a man named neither Henry nor John but something way more awesome, who did something not awesome at all—Gomes Eanes de Zurara.

That illustrious moniker would go to a man named neither Henry nor John but something way more awesome, who did something not awesome at all—Gomes Eanes de Zurara.

He was a cheerleader. Kind of. Not the kind who roots for a team and pumps up a crowd, but he was a man who made sure the team he played for was represented and heralded as great.

He made sure Prince Henry was looked at as a brilliant quarterback making ingenious plays, and that every touchdown was the mark of a superior player.

Zurara made Prince Henry out to be some kind of youth minister canvassing the street, doing community work, when what Prince Henry really was, was more of a gangster.

More of a shakedown man, a kidnapper getting a commission for bringing the king captives.

And in that survey, Africanus echoed Zurara’s sentiments of Africans, his own people.

Either way, Zurara’s documentation of the racist idea that Africans needed slavery in order to be fed and taught Jesus, and that it was all ordained by God, began to seep in and stick to the European cultural psyche.

And what did Best use to prove this theory? Only one of the most irrefutable books of the time: the Bible.

In Best’s whimsical interpretation of the book of Genesis, Noah...tells them that the first child born after the flood would inherit the earth.

They were painting a compassionate picture about what was certainly a terrible experience, because, well, human beings were being forced into servitude, and there’s no way to spin that into one big happy family.

But the idea of it all let the new enslavers off the emotional hook and portrayed them as benevolent do-gooders “cleaning up” the Africans.

About Puritans. They were English Protestants who believed the reformation of the Church of England was basically watering down Christianity, and they sought to regulate it to keep it more disciplined and rigid.

And the first thing they did to spread the Puritan way was find other people who were like-minded. And with those like-minded folks, they created schools to enforce higher education skewed toward their way of thinking.

And Aristotle, though held up as one of the greatest Greek philosophers of all time, famous for things we will not be discussing here because this is not a history book, believed something else he’s not nearly as famous for. And that’s his belief in human hierarchy.

And just like that, the groundwork was laid not only for slavery to be justified but for it to be justified for a long, long time, simply because it was woven into the religious and educational systems of America. All that was needed to complete this oppressive puzzle was slaves.

I know we’ve been going on and on about the people working to justify slavery, but it’s important (very important) to note that there were also people all along the way who stood up and fought against these ridiculously racist ideas with abolitionist ideas.

The Mennonites were a Christian denomination from the German- and Dutch-speaking areas of central Europe.

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, orthodox authorities were killing them for their religious beliefs.

Mennonites didn’t want to leave behind one place of oppression to build another in America, so they circulated an antislavery petition on April 18, 1688, denouncing oppression due to skin color by equating it with oppression due to religion.

Anyway, Bacon was upset not about the race issue but instead about the class issue. Here he was, a White laborer who was also being taken advantage of by the White elite.

So, he had to devise a way to turn poor Whites and poor Blacks against each other, so that they’d be forever separated and unwilling to join hands and raise fists against the elite.

So, White privileges were created, and, at this time, they included:
1. Only the White rebels were pardoned; legislators prescribed thirty lashes for any slave who lifted a hand “against any Christian” (Christian now meant White).
2. All Whites now wielded absolute power to abuse any African person.

An eleven-year-old Harvard student (the youngest of all time), he was obviously a nerd, and on top of all that, he was extremely religious. He knew he was special, or at least meant to be, which of course did nothing but fill his fellow classmates with spite.

Because he was so insecure about his speech impediment, Cotton Mather took to writing, and eventually he would write more sermons than any other Puritan in history.

By the time he graduated from Harvard, he’d overcome his stutter, which to him was, of course, a deliverance from God.

Being delivered from his stutter was a good thing, because he was destined for the pulpit. The grandson of two Puritan preachers had to grow up to be one.

So, Cotton Mather, though a recent graduate of Harvard and a God-fearing, sermonizing, well-read man, had a problem on his hands because...he was rich.

He’d come from an elite family, gotten an elite education, and lived an elite, though pious, life, far from the planters and even farther from the slaves.

So, the Revolution of 1688, which was called the Glorious Revolution, was not so glorious for him. And, fearing that the anger that caused the uprising would go from the British elites to the elites right at home—meaning him—he created a new villain as a distraction.

Mather wrote a book called Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions.

In 1692, when Parris’s nine-year-old daughter suffered convulsions and chokes, he believed she’d been possessed or cursed by a witch.

Once the witch hunt eventually died down, the Massachusetts authorities apologized to the accused, reversed the convictions of the trials, and provided reparations in the early 1700s.

As the population of enslaved people grew, which is what slaveholders needed in order to till the land and grow the tobacco for free, the fear of more revolt grew with it.

Oh, and White indentured servants who were freed are awarded fifty acres of property, of course contributing to White prosperity.

And while all this was going on—all this systemic knife turning, all this racist political play, all the violence and discrimination—Cotton Mather, all high and mighty, was still trying to convince people that the only thing necessary, the only mission of slavery, had to be to save the souls of the slaves, because through that salvation the enslaved would in turn be whitened.