Kai Wright > Quotes

“In the comfortingly distorted view of the past, American slavery came about in the passive sense. That's just the way things were back then. Slavery was an inherited reality, a long-standing if unsavory fact of trade and war. In reality, colonial legislatures consciously conceived American chattel slavery at the turn of the eighteenth century, and they spelled out its terms in painstaking regulatory detail. Virginia's slave codes contained forty-one sections and more than four thousand words.

...

The slave codes of 1705 are among American history's most striking evidence that our nation's greatest sins were achieved with clear forethought and determined maintenance.”
― Kai Wright, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“It's a truism that we see the past as far more distant than it is in reality: my parents were adults before they could share bathrooms with white people; my grandmother was middle-aged before she could confidently enter a voting booth in Alabama. Yet these images fade easily into gentle sepia tones for me today. That's because it's safety, not wisdom, we're after when we look backward. We picture ugly things at a comfortable distance.

But Americans distort the past in other ways, too. We see horrible people as exceptional, and their many accomplices as mere captives of their times. We tell ourselves we would contain such wickedness if it arose today, because now we know better. We've learned. In our illusory past, progress has come in decisive and irrevocable strokes.”
― Kai Wright, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“In the comfortingly distorted view of the past, American slavery came about in the passive tense. That's just the way things were back then. ... In reality, colonial legislatures consciously conceived American chattel slavery at the turn of the eighteenth century, and they spelled out its terms in painstaking regulatory detail. ... Our nation's greatest sins were achieved with clear forethought and determined maintenance.”
― Kai Wright, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“The myths Americans tell themselves about the past--that it is distant, that people did bad things out of ignorance rather than malice, that the good guys won in the end--encourage a false faith in the present. They allow us to believe our norms are fixed and that the forward march of progress may sometimes be delayed but never reversed. Bad times will get better, because they always have.

But the past is close. The slave codes of 1703 are close. The past is filled with people who carried out evil acts with foresight and determination, supported by the complicity of their peers. It contains progress, but just as many reactionary entrenchments of old power. White supremacy became the norm in America because white men who felt threatened wrote laws to foster it, then codified the violence necessary to maintain it. They can maintain it with the same intention today, if we allow it.”
― Kai Wright, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“These demographics presented real threats to white planters, including a potential cross-racial labor movement. Plantation work was close and intimate, and it fostered a troubling solidarity between the growing Black population and white indentured servants. White planters could not afford for such a dangerous bond to form--which is why in 1705 Virginia's legislature did as much to codify white privilege as it did to establish Black subjugation.”
― Kai Wright, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019