Besides being right, I’ve noticed something that is inn almost all pieces about Blacks Americans and I am trying to change my writing though it is difficult when you’ve been shaped by all the other writing—books, articles, etc.—your whole life. It is strange to say what is missing but I must. It is specific white people and specific groups of white people, more specific political leadership in local, state, and federal levels. None of these things that force the creation and the re-creation of this racial caste can happen without white men making the laws. There is a conspicuous absence of agency, of white agency.
For example, you are accurate in saying that there is a huge labor force to work for free at gunpoint. But who did this? How? Why? The why seems obvious, money. Slavery was a massive system of wealth generation for the white men on the top. Yet how? It was actually done by recreating laws that were destroyed around the permission in the 13th amendment. White legislatures in Mississippi created laws that allowed sheriffs to arrest engorges for being vagrant in 1865. They did. When they arrest them for what is called “loitering” today, the sheriffs could then auction them off “on call” to white men only as the law said, who would pay the sheriff the fine (usually about $1800 in today’s dollars) and then the black men or women would have to work for a year to pay off that fine in the bail “bond.” The laws were destroyed unilaterally by President Grant, but then started again after 1872. As a direct result of the election bloodshed, the civil rights republicans created the USDOJ to exclusively protect Black Americans civil rights.
If you look at the history of the Civil War in contrast and read a text, you will find mention of a lot white men maneuvering around each other, their names, the dates and times, who defeated who, getting many specifics, indicating white agency in detail. Glorious battles! But when you read an article on Black American history on race relations, you will that white agency is gone. Who made the laws and when specifically? Who fought back? Who killed who and why? It’s all gone suddenly. Look at the year 1870, one of the bloodiest and most violent elections in US history, where scores of white male conservative democrats inflict some of the worst political attacks and beating and killings against Black American and White American Republicans across many southern states. Gone, evaporated. Most nobody knows about one of the worst insurrections in terms of bloodshed and cheating in American history. White men of one party slaughter Democracy by killing and beating voters and organizers in the other party.
I heard a 9 volume set of books produced by the Senate report that was 15,000 pages. I look around for it and found volume 1, dealing with North Carolina, and some pages from South Carolina separately.
There were so many specific details about the black and white republicans who the white conservatives whipped, beat, etc. I read the transcripts of the trial in North Carolina where five white democrat conservatives admitted to be being members of the White Brotherhood and Klan who killed the white county commissioner elected in Alamace county and the first Black American Sheriff that the white Democrat conservatives hung from the tree. The white “conservative democrats” as they report called, named the “head sun” of the Klan as President Johnson, who was now disposed. That’s in the archival official trial transcripts from a federally sanctioned criminal trial under oath.
This is just one election season. The white conservative democrats killed, murdered, 4,000 Black American Republicans voters and organizers in the 1878 election season in just Louisiana. That is on the Senate report from an investigation that is 1,800 pages long. I had volume one and just got volume 2 and 3 that were originally printed by the US government as well. I’ve read about the murder and bloodshed by that one party of the other in every decade up to 1900. And I’m not including the threats, beatings, whippings, and moving of the ballot boxes.

Then there is Black American agency. Black Americans look passive, as though democracy and voting were awarded to them by generous whites somehow. Again, not true. Free blacks and free whites fought to overthrow the authority of the British monarch in 1676 in Virginia and as a direct result they wrote new laws explicitly granting voting rights to whites and negroes. Negro landowners voted since then and I’ve found them voting in 1701, 1703, the white conservatives taking away their rights in Virginia in 1914, then getting them back, being taken away, the Monarch restoring them by overturning laws. There is almost no decade in some colony where some black Americans struggled to maintain their freedom and their political voice by voting since 1676. That struggle, successful even by few, is the real black agency struggle missing from the American narrative to establish equality and democracy. It is missing from our “official” narrative. Whites started constructing the “official” narrative after 1910 in school books, and in many states there was no mention of black agency and in the South only briefly of slavery, and it was a force of good of course in the white history narrative books written and approved at the state level.

When it comes to wars and taking credit for political victories, you will find white male names and details. When it comes to white male conservative atrocities inflicted on Black Americans and some of their white allies, you will find none. You won’t even find the words “white men.” Like in your article and the countless I’ve read, they are scrubbed clean. It’s amazing and I’ve just been waking up to it in the last couple years slowly. The facts are there but absented from the records because they inherently tell the facts of black agency and white male depravity in specifics and suggest narratives contrary to our belief represented by the current one that whites built democracy, although liberals and conservatives didn’t get along. No, white male conservatives in particular fought against democracy and equality and still do. Most Black Americans and a few liberal white allies still fight for it.

You must keep on speaking truth to power.