Have you ever spent a stormy afternoon curled up with a World Almanac or gazetteer? There’s something comforting about flipping through the pages and getting a quick overview of the facts, whether they’re about science, pop culture, or history. “Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents” (Steerforth Press) recalls the design of one of those informational roundups, but with a critical twist. It collects stories of US presidents specifically as they relate to Black Americans. As you might imagine, it’s the opposite of comfortable, and has much to say about the stories we tell ourselves in order to feel good.
Author Margaret Kimberley is at her best when she simply relates the facts about any given man; they need very little in the way of embellishment to be truly horrifying. If I heard the story of George Washington and the cherry tree in elementary school, it did not make a strong impression; we now know it was likely a bit of myth-making anyway. Washington and his wife were slaveholders who manipulated and lied to maintain their ownership of people. And while his rotten teeth were real, the story behind them doesn’t stop with wooden dentures; he had teeth pulled from the people he owned without benefit of anesthetic to try and make a set of false teeth. It’s ghastly to read about, and hard to sit with afterwards.
The chapters are short and the facts are relentless, including about revered figures like Abraham Lincoln, who gets credit for emancipation but, in part because he was assassinated and made a martyr, spared closer scrutiny. Lincoln favored a white America and was invested in colonizing freed black people. He also authorized the slaughter of Native Americans. To take the good about him, we must also engage with the bad.
Kimberley writes with spare efficiency, but there are times when her anger is palpable and it is both moving and very effective. If readers want to push back against her arguments, it’s hard to get a foothold when yet another elected official is right behind the one under discussion and almost surely doing the same or worse. White supremacy is systemic, but the system is enforced from the top down in our government; it’s ugly, and the evidence is clear.
If history feels old and stuffy, Kimberley is quick to make it relevant to our present moment, as in this passage from the chapter on Zachary Taylor: “The United States still basks in the glory of a romanticized past...if the institution of slavery and its aftermath aren’t examined, then objective truths like the inordinate number of blacks being killed by police won’t be, either. If people like Taylor could steal half of Mexico and be labeled heroic, then modern-day presidents can invade nations, change regimes, and kill with mechanized drones and be considered heroic, too.”
The list ends, of course, with the election of Donald Trump. Perhaps surprisingly, Kimberley assesses Barack Obama’s two terms in office with nearly equal vitriol. She is as unsparing toward him as any of his predecessors, driving home the notion that it’s the institution and not the man that reinforces white supremacy. She even calls out the Black Lives Matter movement for “handl(ing) him with kid gloves,” rather than pressing him harder to address police violence. The presidency is a world apart from the politics of the Black Panthers, and Kimberley expresses no small amount of nostalgia for their movement here.
Maybe a resurgence of black politics in that vein will show the way forward for social justice. If “Prejudential” can be taken as a guide, change for the better will not be pouring forth from the Oval Office any time soon, regardless of who is in charge. As Kimberley says, “We may ponder the ubiquity of white privilege in the twenty-first century, but its existence isn’t a mystery. It is exacerbated when the truth of … presidents’ roles in maintaining the chattel slavery system is kept hidden.”
Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2020
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