Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

BAR Book Forum: Margaret Kimberley’s “Prejudential”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
22 Jan 2020
BAR Book Forum: Margaret Kimberley’s “Prejudential”
BAR Book Forum: Margaret Kimberley’s “Prejudential”

The history of enslavement and American apartheid segregation has permanently disfigured politics in this country.

“Abraham Lincoln hoped to win the war and then send black people out of the country.”

In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Margaret Kimberley. Kimberley is Editor and Senior Columnist of the Black Agenda Report.  Her book is Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents.

Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?

Margaret Kimberley: Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents  demonstrates that the history of enslavement, followed by American apartheid segregation, has permanently disfigured politics in this country. The slavocracy was mollified from the earliest days of the country. They insisted on building a capital located firmly within the sphere of the plantation economy. Ten of the first twelve presidents were slaveholders. These facts make clear that the subjugation of the black population would remain a political imperative, even after emancipation.

In 2020 we are still doing what we did beginning in 1865. We make political decisions based on the goal of defeating whichever of the two major parties represents white racism. 

For 100 years the Democrats were the party of southern segregationists, Republicans were the party of Lincoln, and they were trusted to keep the Dixiecrats at bay. That dynamic changed at times with Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. But the process of trying to keep “good for black people” presidents in office resulted in betrayals with Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt. Frustration with Republican lip service led to black leaders of the day endorsing Woodrow Wilson, an unreconstructed southerner who practiced his own betrayal and segregated the District of Columbia and screened Birth of a Nation, the KKK homage, inside the White House itself.

What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?

Hopefully they will throw away the 150-year old discredited playbook of trying to keep the “white” party out of power. Black people are now at their lowest political ebb, with compromised leadership and a political party, the Democrats, who take them for granted and can’t even guarantee being elected. Love for Barack Obama and allegiance to the problematic Hillary Clinton didn’t prevent the racist Donald Trump from taking office. 

Disgust and fear of Trump and disappointment in lesser evilism are the least of our problems at this juncture. We are in a failing system and the degree of rot is accelerating rapidly. Wages have been stagnant for 30 years and the paltry minimum wage hasn’t gone up in more than 10 years, even when Democrats had the opportunity to take action and raise it.

Forever wars and the Trump administration’s recent attack on Iran are symptoms of a collapsing but still dangerous empire that cannot get its way as often as it wants. 

Black people must end their dependence on the hapless Democratic Party and look for new ways to advance the people. The system can’t be shored up; it must be dismantled. The old ways failed black people 100 years ago. As our society circles the drain ever faster we must discuss how to bring about something new and transformational.

We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?

We must unlearn the history we were taught since grade school. A new capital was built on a swamp in order to keep it within the bounds of slavocracy control. Abraham Lincoln hoped to win the war and then send black people out of the country. Bill Clinton was hugely popular with black voters but he increased mass incarceration, and ended the 60-year old right to public assistance. Barack Obama was beloved despite having no interest in the black community except as a target for scolding and dog whistling to assure white voters that he was really on their side.

The extent of lies told by historians and biographers is worse than I thought before I began researching this book. They are usually more interested in preserving system justification and supporting the status quo. Lincoln remained a devotee of colonization plans to send black people out of the country until the end of his life. Cursory research shows that this is true. The information is not top secret or difficult to find. Yet it has been censored by Lincoln admiring historians who teach lies about him and other presidents when doing so preserves the myth of a benevolent nation.

Presidents are touchstones with markers telling us where they slept and schools, states, and cities named after them. They have their own holiday but some of them bought and sold human beings. They displaced millions of others from their ancestral homes in order to secure ownership of the first group. They either identified with overt white supremacy or justified acquiescence to that ideology. 

The ideology of white supremacy and its perverse relationship with exceptionalism and benevolence is one that must end. 

Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?

My Black Agenda Report  colleagues such as my co-founders Glen Ford and the late Bruce Dixon both educated me greatly. I thought of myself as well informed but I learned more useful information from them than I did in my college education as a history major. The entire Black Agenda Report  team is an amazing resource for anyone who wants to understand national and international conditions and how they relate to the black diaspora.

My heroes are people who are leftists, not Democrats, but people firmly committed to socialist action and scholarship. That political orientation is necessary in order to dissect American history. Unfortunately, the teaching of history almost always leaves leftist analysis out and repeats useless bourgeois interpretations. Perhaps I shouldn’t say useless. The determination to carry on the dissemination of fairy tales about this country being a “force for good” is useful to someone. Just not to us.

“The teaching of history almost always leaves leftist analysis out and repeats useless bourgeois interpretations.”

I need to do more research about the scholars and activists whose stories have been erased. I want to know more about people like Claudia Jones, whose existence I only discovered about 10 years ago when I was well into middle age.

Thanks to your work with Black Agenda Report  Book Forum I have come to know the work of other scholars who see the world as I do and not the bourgeois Eurocentric views I was taught and accepted for most of my life.

In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?

First we must be clear on how the past brought us to our current state. Knowing that our politics are driven by a misperception that we must side with one wing of the dismal duopoly will allow readers to free themselves from a failed and dangerous orthodoxy. 

The Democratic Party is not the solution. They are the problem and their institutional corruption gave us Donald Trump, a president loathed and feared by black people more than any other in the modern era.

In this 2020 election year black people must do anything but “vote blue no matter who.” That is a recipe for defeat and guarantees getting the opposite of what we want. We have seen this movie and we know the ending. We must upend everything we have been taught and dare to think that we can have what we are told is impossible, a true democracy that treats its people with care and justice.

Understanding the history of our relationships with 45 presidents forces us to see what worked and figure out how to repeat successes. Of course we must also identify what didn’t work and commit ourselves to leaving failed practices in the past.

We know that we have made the greatest strides when we struggled for self-determination. Usually we did so against the wishes of the people we supported and elected into office. We can’t have amnesia about those struggles if we want to create a different reality for our people.  

The story of our relationships with 45 presidents is mostly sad. That realization doesn’t have to bring us down. It can inspire us to do what we are told is impossible, to have a just and peaceful country that frees itself from its awful past. We must do what we have been told can’t be done. Repeating failure because we think that Trump is the worst president, he isn’t, is a rejection of a great legacy and consigns us to live in a country that will never advance.

Roberto Sirvent  is Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for the Political Theology Network.   He is co-author, with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong, of the new book, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.

COMMENTS?

Please join the conversation on Black Agenda Report's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/blackagendareport

Or, you can comment by emailing us at [email protected]

Black History

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles. Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


Related Stories

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney, Jr.’s Book, “From Rights to Lives”
26 February 2025
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book.
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
The Problem with Juneteenth
19 June 2024
As we approach Juneteenth, Black Agenda Report is republishing this article
The Problem with Juneteenth
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
The Problem with Juneteenth
15 June 2022
Juneteenth was a people's holiday with deep meaning for the descendants of enslaved people.
SPEECH: The Meaning of African Liberation Day: Walter Rodney, May 27, 1972 
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
SPEECH: The Meaning of African Liberation Day: Walter Rodney, May 27, 1972 
26 May 2021
At the 1972 event, Walter Rodney proclaimed that “black unity must be international because we live on every continent, through no choice of our ow
Dr. Gerald Horne
Against Left-Wing White Nationalism
26 May 2021
Much of what is called the “left” still insists that the American “revolution” of 1776 is “unfinished,” when history shows that white supremacy was
Alphaeus Hunton: The Unsung Valiant, by Dorothy Hunton
Denise Lynn
Alphaeus Hunton: The Unsung Valiant, by Dorothy Hunton
19 May 2021
Hunton’s devotion to peace and “mutual cooperation” came out of his understanding that “war and militarism were endemic” to capitalism.
“This is a Crime Scene:” An African Artist/Activist Journey, Part I
Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, BAR editor and columnist
“This is a Crime Scene:” An African Artist/Activist Journey, Part I
22 July 2020
An interview with Dr. Karen Wilson- Ama’Echefu.
The Weaponization of Culture
Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, BAR editor and columnist
The Weaponization of Culture
08 July 2020
While statues glorifying white supremacy are being torn down across the globe, a Maryland county is busy desecrating African graves and building a
Black Lives Extinguished, Black Ancestors’ Bodies Desecrated
Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, BAR editor and columnist
Black Lives Extinguished, Black Ancestors’ Bodies Desecrated
03 June 2020
We are killed in the streets while we are alive and then our bodies are dug up and thrown away like trash when businesses require the land for prof
Forty-Five Felons With Their Own Holiday: The U.S. Presidency
David Swanson
Forty-Five Felons With Their Own Holiday: The U.S. Presidency
22 January 2020
Margaret Kimberley’s new book on US presidents and Black people shows why the executive mansion is called the “White” House.

More Stories


  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Ryan Coogler, Shedeur Sanders, Karmelo Anthony, and Rodney Hinton, Jr
    07 May 2025
    Black people who are among the rich and famous garner praise and love, and so do those who are in distress. But concerns for the masses of people and their struggles are often missing.
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    LETTER: Thank you, Mr. Howe, Ama Ata Aidoo, 1967
    07 May 2025
    Ama Ata Aidoo lands a knock-out blow to white neocolonial anti-African revisionism.
  • Jon Jeter
    The Only Language the White Settler Speaks: Ohio Police Say Grieving Black Father Avenges Son’s Slaying By Killing One of Theirs
    07 May 2025
    The killing of Timothy Thomas in 2001 ignited Cincinnati’s long-simmering tensions over police violence. This struggle continues today, forcing a painful question: When justice is denied, does…
  • Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    DOGE— Department Of Grifter Enrichment
    07 May 2025
    "DOGE— Department Of Grifter Enrichment" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
  • Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
    BAR Book Forum: Brittany Friedman’s Book, “Carceral Apartheid”
    07 May 2025
    In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Brittany Friedman. Friedman is assistant professor of sociology at the University of…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us