An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

within the context of the travesty of enslavement, they were forced to come
to deal with the reality of white racism.
For instance, in the essay “Many Thousands Gone,” which is a critical
reflection and discussion of the meaning of Richard Wright’s acclaimed
novel Native Son, Baldwin offers his thoughts on Black people in the white
imagination. In the second paragraph, he writes, “The story of the Negro in
America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of
Americans.” 63 He directs his focus not on the forced creation of Black
people of their own accord but on what it reveals about American society.
Baldwin continues, “What it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps
be suggested by an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him.” 64
Here, Baldwin points to the visibility of Black people (or lack thereof) in
the white imagination, what he identifies as a set of myths that simply exist
to perpetuate the invisibility of black humanity in the eyes of whites, non-
Blacks, and even Black people—even as Black people have fought over and
over again to imaginatively assert their humanity throughout US history. In
this way, Black humanity’s invisibility is not much different from the
invisibility that Indigenous peoples experience, albeit their existence is
ignored altogether. What binds the Black and Indigenous experiences
together, and what we might extrapolate from Baldwin, is that to have your
humanity invisible renders you inhuman to white people, and thus, they can
construct you in any way they desire.
Baldwin also challenged white Americans to think about what it means
to be a Black person on this continent: “Negroes are Americans and their
destiny is the country’s destiny.” In search for a respect and recognition
from white Americans, Baldwin wrote, “They have no other experience on
this continent and it is an experience which cannot be rejected, which yet
remains embraced.” 65 For Baldwin, in order for any recognition of Black
humanity to occur, white people had to understand that Black folks were
their kin. I disagree with Baldwin. For one, there are white allies who have
recognized that the US was a fundamentally flawed project, including one
of my favorite nineteenth-century abolitionists, John Brown, who attempted
to take over Harpers Ferry in 1859, for which he was hanged. And white
women like Viola Liuzzo, who left her home in Detroit to travel to Selma,
Alabama, to march for Black rights during the historic March in Selma on
March 25, 1965. A mother of five and the wife of a union leader, she was
murdered by the Ku Klux Klan that same night.