Why this cultural critic set out to tell 'The Un-Whitewashed Story of America'

Cultural critic Michael Harriot is masterful at translating the complex issues of race into twitter threads you'd actually want to read. He manages to take weighty, hard topics and make them understandable and funny.

Harriot's witty social commentary also appears in his new book, "Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America," which he hopes will give readers a new lens for viewing American history.

“When we talk about American history, we usually…view it either through the lens of a white-centered perspective of America; we usually think of it as objective. But a lot of times what we call ‘objective’ is filtered through a white lens,” Harriot says.

“But rarely do we see…American history through the lens of Black people. And that's what I want to do with this book,” he adds.

Harriot was homeschooled as a young child, and attributes that upbringing to giving him a more balanced understanding of American history.

"It gave me a way to view America, in terms of a way that didn't [put] whiteness at the center of the American universe."

Harriot points to the sanitized narrative surrounding America’s Founding Fathers, which many children learn in elementary school, as an example of how centering whiteness can obscure history.

“We learn about the Founding Fathers and the valiant men who came to this country and built it. And then years later — maybe in the 10th grade or in middle school — we learn that some of them were slave owners,” he says. “And when you've learned for so long to valorize them, it's hard to comport them with the idea of liberty and justice and equality, once you just held those ideas in your subconscious for so long.”

In many ways, Harriot’s book is a response to ongoing attacks on critical race theory and how – and if – children learn about America’s racist history in schools.

“It makes the villain out of the people who have or want to tell the whole story.” he says.

“It's easy for people to just believe the first story they hear, right? It is the default story. And I think that teaches us about how America conceives of history, and how it's hard to undo a narrative once it is embedded in people's hands."

Throughout his research, Harriot says there was one consistency that stuck out to him: how much history has been lost to fire, and violence.

"One of the things that I found is so prevalent is that there would be these two sentences that I would run across all of the time: 'Burned by a white mob'; 'No surviving copies exist,'" Harriot explains. "And a lot of times, that's because these newspapers, these schools, were burned — just so that they wouldn't exist — by white mobs."

Harriot says it's part of the reason why he's so active on Twitter. He's a well-known voice on the platform and he's been dubbed the “Dean of Black Twitter” by political analyst Tiffany Cross.

It's also part of the reason he wrote "Black AF History."

"A white mob can't burn Twitter down, right?" Harriot says. "They can't eliminate it."

Harriot will be at Town Hall Seattle on Sunday, Sept. 24.

Listen to Soundside’s full conversation with Michael Harriot by clicking the play icon at the top of this story.