At my school in Andhra Pradesh, we read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain; 1884) as a gripping tale of adventure.
The river, the raft, the wit, the adventurous boy who had run away from home. What we innocently missed, thousands of miles from the Mississippi, was that the raft’s other passenger, Jim, was a man risking his life for the right not to be someone else’s property.
Looking back, it is surreal that we were reading one of American literature’s most harrowing documents of racial anguish, and filing it under coming-of-age entertainment.
Another school year, there was a story about the Black author and educator Booker T Washington, aged 16, arriving at a school in 1872 and being handed a broom and told to sweep the floor, as his entrance test. He swept the room three times and dusted it four times (as numerous Dalits have, to our shame, been forced to do in this country).
The lesson we drew from the story, incredibly, was one of perseverance, and proving oneself through hard work. We absorbed the lesson, and missed the context entirely.
Selective reading may be an issue in some schools in small-town India, but it remains a national habit in the US. Black History Month, born 100 years ago, began as a campaign against such selective amnesia.
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In February 1926, historian Carter G Woodson started Negro History Week (the week became a month in 1976) because Black history was still being treated as a “negligible factor” in American civic life.
He anchored the week to two birthdays: those of civil war-era President Abraham Lincoln (February 12) and escaped slave-turned-civil rights leader Frederick Douglass (February 14). By linking the two dates, Woodson staged a deliberate contrast: between what the Republic had promised and what it continued, methodically, to withhold.
All this time later, like a second Grand Canyon, the chasm persists.
On the one hand, the latticed bronze exterior of the National Museum of African American History and Culture rises from the National Mall in Washington DC. On the other, state legislatures actively debate what children should be allowed to know about slavery.
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Look closely, even at the lofty goals of the US Constitution, and the architecture of the rift becomes visible.
In the land of the free, the rules of the game were written to exclude Black lives from the start. Unless it was beneficial to do the opposite.
When mapping Congressional seats, the government counted slaves as three-fifths of a human being. This gave states with more slaves greater representation in Congress, though the slaves were not recognised, in any other way, as citizens.
The GI Bill of 1944, which promised a range of financial and educational benefits to returning war veterans, was designed to be race-neutral, as a way to encourage African Americans to sign up. In practice, segregated banks and housing markets excluded Black veterans by design.
The practice that denied loans to Blacks had a name: redlining. The term predated the war. It came from literal red lines drawn on maps in the 1930s, to mark certain areas as “high-risk”. This resulted in far higher mortgage rates, loan denials, and more stringent default penalties. What earned a neighbourhood a red line was a predominantly Black population. Redlining was eventually banned in 1968.
Meanwhile, segregation was still legally in force in the Southern states the year Barack Obama was born, 1961. Laws linked the right to vote with the ability to pay taxes or write one’s name, in an effort to keep Blacks off electoral rolls.
In 1965, the Voting Rights Act finally ended the literacy tests and other barriers to voting. A year earlier, segregation, including in theatres, hotels and restaurants, was banned too.
Through these decades, the barriers did what they were designed to do: hold the line.
The legacy of that ostracism persists.
In 2022, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances estimated median Black family net worth at $44,900, and median White family net worth at $285,000. In other words, Black families hold roughly 15 cents for every dollar of White family wealth.
Only 44% of Blacks live in a home their family owns, compared to 73% of non-Hispanic Whites.
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In the words of writer and civil-rights activist James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
In the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing six decades after Baldwin: “None of these things are in the past. All of their effects are with us now.”
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In a country where Black comedians in luxury cars are stopped so regularly by local police that it has for years been a running gag on Chris Rock’s Instagram account, what might reconciliation look like?
Obama has served two terms as US president. Kamala Harris served as US vice-president.
The music the world listens to, the vernacular it so casually speaks and the aesthetic that saturates global youth culture — in other words, jazz, rap, hip hop, slang — are predominantly African-American in origin.
But cultural power without commensurate capital is a paradox that does not resolve itself.
The Black maternal mortality rate in 2024 was 44.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, more than three times the White rate of 14.2. Black life expectancy in 2023 was 74.0 years against 78.4 for non-Hispanic White Americans.
The share of Blacks living below the poverty line in 2024 was 18.4%, against 7.6% for non-Hispanic Whites and a national average of 10.6%.
There are those who argue that these statistics represent a sort of compound interest on a debt that was never fully acknowledged. The Republic’s founding arithmetic, compounded across generations.
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Obama famously said that there is no Black America and White America, only the United States of America. The data, gently but firmly, disagrees.
Which is not an argument against such aspiration; but a measure of the chasms still to be bridged, in order to realise that dream. Can it be bridged?
The United States has shown an incredible ability to self-correct. It acknowledges the power of its people, and nurtures grassroots campaigns that drive systemic change. When Americans drag contradiction into the light, the world can be forced to rethink how it defines personhood, privacy, family, love. It is through organising and arguing, marching, litigating, writing and singing, that Black America was freed.
Today, there is an effort to treat that story as an appendix to the larger tale of the United States, when in reality it is the central test of whether the Republic can make good on its foundational premise: that all men are created equal.
There are those who argue that progress is being made. Yet even good-will gestures drag.
The US Treasury announced a decade ago that Harriet Tubman, conductor of the Underground Railroad, a woman who freed herself and then returned over and over to free about 70 others, would replace the slave-owner and former President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. As the United States celebrates 250 years, the note has still not been issued.
