An African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz
Introduction - "Killed Helping Workers Organize
Page 2-3
The abolitionist Frederick Douglass sough tot reenvision American history as he took to a podium in Boston to explain the origin of the Civil War to an audience of Northerners in 1862. While his audience likely expected him to heap invective against the Confederacy, Douglass came to demand that Northerners take responsibility for their part in the making of the catastrophe. Douglass toiled to changed his listeners' understanding of their history in order to make them realize the damage their politics had wrought. Above all, Douglass had to dismantle what Americans have always treasured most: their innocence, and the sense that their history was so exceptional that they had managed to avoid the problems other nations faced. Douglass began by observing that the Civil War had been ushered in by decades of settler colonialism, corruption, and the promotion of slavery. In a rush to expand slavery's profits, the United States had transformed the Americans into a gigantic war zone:
"We have bought Florida, waged war with friendly Seminoles, purchased Louisiana, annexed Texas, fought Mexico, trampled on the right of petition, abridged the freedom of debate, paid ten million to Texas upon a fraudulent claim, mobbed the Abolitionists, repealed the Missouri Compromise, winked at the accursed slave trade, helped to extend slavery, given slaveholders a larger share of all the offices and honors than we claimed for ourselves, paid their postage, supported the Government, persecuted free negroes, refused to recognize Hayti and Liberia, stained our souls by repeated compromises, borne with Southern bluster, allowed our ships to be robbed of their hardy sailors, defeated a central road to the Pacific, and have descended to the meanness and degradation of negro dogs, and hunted down the panting slave escaping from his tyrant master --all to make the South love us; and yet how stands our relations?"
Introduction - "Killed Helping Workers Organize
Page 2-3
The abolitionist Frederick Douglass sough tot reenvision American history as he took to a podium in Boston to explain the origin of the Civil War to an audience of Northerners in 1862. While his audience likely expected him to heap invective against the Confederacy, Douglass came to demand that Northerners take responsibility for their part in the making of the catastrophe. Douglass toiled to changed his listeners' understanding of their history in order to make them realize the damage their politics had wrought. Above all, Douglass had to dismantle what Americans have always treasured most: their innocence, and the sense that their history was so exceptional that they had managed to avoid the problems other nations faced. Douglass began by observing that the Civil War had been ushered in by decades of settler colonialism, corruption, and the promotion of slavery. In a rush to expand slavery's profits, the United States had transformed the Americans into a gigantic war zone:
"We have bought Florida, waged war with friendly Seminoles, purchased Louisiana, annexed Texas, fought Mexico, trampled on the right of petition, abridged the freedom of debate, paid ten million to Texas upon a fraudulent claim, mobbed the Abolitionists, repealed the Missouri Compromise, winked at the accursed slave trade, helped to extend slavery, given slaveholders a larger share of all the offices and honors than we claimed for ourselves, paid their postage, supported the Government, persecuted free negroes, refused to recognize Hayti and Liberia, stained our souls by repeated compromises, borne with Southern bluster, allowed our ships to be robbed of their hardy sailors, defeated a central road to the Pacific, and have descended to the meanness and degradation of negro dogs, and hunted down the panting slave escaping from his tyrant master --all to make the South love us; and yet how stands our relations?"
Page 5
Here, we will retrace the odysseys of African American and Latinx thinkers as they theorized outside of the nation's borders and beyond its mythologies of innocence and exceptionalism to challenge the crises facing them inside the bell of the beast. El Malcriado did not believe that a return to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers or the principles of the US Constitution would solve their members' problems. The Colored American, one of the nation's first Black newspapers, had asserted quite frankly in 1840,
Here, we will retrace the odysseys of African American and Latinx thinkers as they theorized outside of the nation's borders and beyond its mythologies of innocence and exceptionalism to challenge the crises facing them inside the bell of the beast. El Malcriado did not believe that a return to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers or the principles of the US Constitution would solve their members' problems. The Colored American, one of the nation's first Black newspapers, had asserted quite frankly in 1840,