An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

5. Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016), 2.
6. Carter G. Woodson, “The Relations of Negroes and Indians in Massachusetts,” Journal of Negro
History 1, no. 5 (1920): 45; J. H. Johnston, “Documentary Evidence of the Relations of Negroes and
Indians,” Journal of Negro History 14, no. 1 (1929): 21–43.
7. Sharon P. Holland and Tiya Miles, “Afro-Native Realities,” in The World of Indigenous North
America, ed. Robert Warrior (New York: Routledge, 2015), 524–48.
8. William A. Galston, “The Populist Challenge to Liberal Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 29,
no. 2 (2018): 9–10.
9. David Orr, “Does Democracy Have a Future?,” in Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild
Government for the People, ed. Orr et al. (New York: New Press, 2020), 2–11.
10. See, for instance, chapter 5, “Slavery Takes Command,” in Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A
Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2014), 98–135. See also Edward E. Baptist, The Half
Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books,
2016).
11. Claudio Saunt, “Financing Dispossession: Stocks, Bonds, and the Deportation of Native
Peoples in the Antebellum United States,” Journal of American History 106, no. 2 (2019): 316.
12. Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2016), 5.
13. Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 10.
14. Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 9.
15. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “Tracing Historical Specificity: Race and the Colonial Politics of
(In)Capacity,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2017): 257–65.
16. Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origins of Racial Oppression in Anglo-
America (New York: Verso, 1997), 239. Historian and whiteness scholar David Roediger offers a
brief explanation in How Race Survived U.S. History (London: Verso, 2008), 5–6. See also Aileen
Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Moreton-Robinson has contributed significantly
to this conversation centering the link between whiteness and Indigenous dispossession.
17. Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 30. See also the debate between Kauanui, “Tracing Historical
Specificity,” and Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native,” American
Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2017): 267–76. The debate between scholars is that Bacon’s rebellion was solely
about Indigenous removal. Kelley and Harding, writing many years before, don’t dispute that. They
argue, however, that Africans likely had their own reasons, including seeking freedom from hardened
racial lines. I fall on the side of Kelley because Kauanui, like Wolfe, ignores the fact that Africans
were Indigenous in some capacity. In other words, they have to answer the question: When did these
Africans participating in Bacon’s rebellion lose their Indigenous roots? While Kauanui offers a
righteous critique of Afro-pessimists, she in some ways reiterates the point of them having little
agency or desire for freedom that was not so easily aligned with whites.
18. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2014), 3.
19. Sidney J. Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelley, “Imagining Home: Pan-Africanism Revisited,” in
Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, ed. Lemelle and Kelley
(London: Verso, 1994), 2.
20. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; repr.,
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 121–22.
21. Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2.
22. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1710–91.