Did Sojourner Truth Really Say Ain’t I a Woman? What the Archive Actually Shows
Short answer: Not in the words you have heard. The famous "Ain't I a woman?" version was written down twelve years after the fact by Frances Gage, a white abolitionist who gave Truth a Southern plantation dialect she never had — Truth was born into slavery in New York and grew up speaking Dutch. Truth almost certainly delivered a version of that speech in Akron in 1851, but the line everybody quotes is Gage's.
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I'm glad to see you man. I'm glad you said, you know, get it together. But yeah, I'm Ryan. I am in my normal foolish self. I see you. The thing that's got me feeling some sort of way is that you haven't been able to pack me inside of your suitcase yet to go on all this jet setting and plane riding and then sliding and gliding that you've been doing these past years. Good grief. Every time I see you on social media, you know, just the nation, the finding what it is.
And that's partially because that's the only thing I'd be posting. And so that's really part of what it is. So let's see, should I turn the other way? Should I turn towards the books? Man, you're perfectly fine where you at, man. We recording already. So don't even get it twisted. Okay, this part's going to get edited out of the ultimate one that ends up going on YouTube before our Patreon. All this stuff is going to be in there, bro. Oh, yeah, I remember one of the ones we did before, it flashed up at some point. And all my shucking was on there. Oh, Lord, here we go. Here we go. Rec and Rob, man.
Like I said, I'm glad that you're taking the time out, man. I know you got a lot of things to do. And so just taking the space out of your busy schedule to be on the show. I really appreciate it, man. So thank you for that. If you're not aware, this is the incredible In The Black Podcast, a podcast dedicated to covering the current events and social issues going on in your Black world and covering it all from the perspective of three grown men who try to stay educated. I am your host, Big O, Mr. In The Black himself.
Well, I guess I'm doing this alone tonight. All the guys are missing in action. But I have a very special guest tonight. Our guest tonight is Dr. Robert J. Patterson, Professor of Black Studies at Georgetown University, where he served as the inaugural chair of the Department of African American Studies. He's the author of Exodus Politics and Destructive Desires and the editor of the award-winning Black Cultural Production After Civil Rights. He also co-chaired the College Board committee that developed the AP African American Studies course. His newest book is Black Narratives of Slavery: A Very Short Introduction, out now from Oxford University Press. Dr. Patterson. Thank you, man. I appreciate you. Welcome.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here, to be in brotherhood, to be in fellowship, and to be in good cheer. Yes, indeed. Now, I'm familiar with you. You're the big homie. You've been on the show before, so some people might know of you. But for those folks that don't know who you are, please. I know I gave you an intro, but you can speak better about yourself than I can. So please tell the folks about yourself.
Look, that's something that I don't necessarily like to do. But let me say you've covered the ground. I'll just say a couple of things. I have always been passionate and interested in Black studies, Black people, Black life, before I even knew that was necessarily an area of inquiry that I could study in college and in some respects in graduate school and then devote my life in many ways to that work. Sometimes I don't get into some of the personal things, but why not, as 2026 be newer. And so I do like to travel a lot. It actually is the opportunity to rethink, to reset, to get my mind clear, to make some waves on some of the projects I might be thinking about.
I like to have a good time. I don't think many of you would be friends of Dr. Patterson on social media. But if you are, you know the pictures that he posts online make everybody jealous. So listen, I can't tell you how many times the wife has asked me about some of the places that you've gone and why haven't we gone there. You can get me in trouble on the low. For those folks who don't know, I'm going to tell you, Dr. Patterson is passionate about his work.
We met, I think, in 2013, 2014. So it's been a minute. And my introduction to Dr. Patterson was at a shindig, I guess, for lack of a better description. And Dr. Patterson was digging into some young man about Black history. Look, the verbal whooping that you gave this young man has sat with me for how many years, bro.
Listen, that's funny. And I think that it could be instructional. Here's the thing. When I go to social events, I just try to go as Robert. I just go trying to hang out. And I actually discourage people from wanting to have what they see as casual banter or friendly talk about these topics, because I don't want it to lean or go towards the direction that you've identified, right? And so I say, just let us leave that alone. Let us enjoy some adult beverages. And as soon as they hear that I've written a book, or was in the process of writing a book, or collaborating, or that I'm doing something related to the study of Black history, Black life, Black politics, Black culture, sometimes those conversations then want to go, don't you agree with something I do not agree with? And then I have to clarify and now offer expertise, which is not to be confused with opinion. Yes, indeed. Or as I used to learn it from my PhD mentor, this phrase that I have used in response to papers: you're passing supposition and stereotype off as facts. And so I don't like that.
And so I suspect that that is the circumstance that you have lamented on many occasions, the stresses that you experience by trying to straighten these young minds out. You've been doing this work for quite some time. Are you still feeling those stresses? You know, I will say that it's different. I had a conversation maybe two weeks ago with one of my former students and former employees and former mentees, now turned friend. And I was saying how I have really watched the evolution of the students' engagement with some of these topics, Black studies, Black history, Black culture, Black life, just how it has changed over time in ways that I do think speak to this current moment. And I think that some of this is about thinking about, you know, you have an administration that is assaulting any and everything that's not white, in particular that's Black. And I do wonder, in some of these cases, are they wondering, if I leave in the next year or two with a degree in Black studies, what would that signify?
So I do think that there may be some questions that I could understand why they might be thinking about it. Although I would add, would you actually want to work at a place that had a problem with you and Black studies or whatever the case might be, or taking this class? And I recognize that I am exacting in asking students to read, to write, to think energetically, to participate in class, to come to class. I understand that that is not what some of the students are interested in. And I say at the beginning of the semester that these are what my interests are. And if you're not interested in these things, perhaps this might not be good, you might make a different choice. And each semester someone still makes a choice. I have had wonderful, outstanding students who have had all types of academic and other successes. And some who have been wonderful and that has not been the case, and we still have a wonderful relationship and interaction.
Having said all that, I do participate in conversations that are not about Robert Patterson, but that are about the current state of academia, that are not about what happened in my class specifically, that may be a part of a larger conversation. And in some respects, the trends that we see across the board, students are not immune from them. And if that's sort of wanting to do something quickly, wanting AI to do some of the hard work — there's nothing wrong with using AI, but you have to know enough to know if the AI messed it up. You can't know if the AI messed it up if you don't know the thing to begin with. If you don't know the root of it. I dig it, one hundred percent.
Now we already got started running our mouths with each other. So let me at least tell the good folks, if you're checking this out on YouTube, please make sure that you finesse that thumbs up button. It goes a long way. Hit the subscribe so that you can catch the next incredible episode. You can follow us across social media at In The Black PDCST — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all of the places. Going over to our website, www.intheblackpdcst.com, you can subscribe to our newsletter so you can find out when the next Dr. Patterson book is going to be coming out and all that other great stuff. And if you really want to become part of the family, you can join our Patreon. We promise you, you will not regret it. So let's get into the meat and potatoes, the real question about your book.
Now, one of the first questions I have for you is about your research. I know this took you some time. You've been radio silent for a while. So I knew something was up. In the book, you take apart one of the most famous moments in American history: the Sojourner Truth "Ain't I a Woman" speech. Now, the version everybody knows was written down by Frances Gage, a white abolitionist who gave Truth a Southern dialect that she never had. Truth grew up speaking Dutch in New York. But you don't throw that out, though, right? So what do we lose if we only trust the words enslaved people wrote for themselves? And what does Gage's version still tell us about how even white people who opposed slavery saw Black people?
Yeah, thank you for that. I love that question. So we're jumping right in. That's coming out of chapter two. And so I wanted to answer that question, but I want to back it up just a little bit to say that part of the challenge of studying this moment in American history is the very fact that there are documents that were not retained, that were actually produced by Black people and would not necessarily be preserved. There are places where the archive is actually oral. And so it needed to be transcribed. And so part of what I get at in that chapter is thinking about the importance of looking at what I call oral narratives of slavery, that might have been later written down, but when they were first given, or when they were first produced, they were speeches, they were told-to stories, they might have been a family having a conversation on its own and otherwise overheard.
There are African pieces to all of this through storytelling and so on. Yeah, exactly right. Thinking about those African retentions and those types of issues as well. And so part of what happens is that — so absolutely right. Frances Gage writes down this "Ain't I a Woman." And then some other scholars have questioned whether it was actually "Ain't I a Woman," getting at the point that there wasn't a dialect. And then there are some scholars who, because of the fact that it's not verbatim what she said, and because of the dialect, have dismissed Gage's transcription as fabrication, recollection, whatever word we like to use.
And so one of the interesting things is that this book is a Very Short Introduction. So some of these details were in and then they were out, because the books in this series are limited to 35,000 words. So you really have to be precise and exacting in what you include. But some of this is lost. And so there's a scholar who then came back and said, well, I'm not sure we should actually throw this out. Because as we begin to triangulate the sources, it seems that Truth did give this speech, or a version of it. And even if Gage embellished, fabricated, used some racial iconography to make it sound a way that it didn't, it seems likely that Truth did have some version of this speech, and that it may not have been a question, it may have been a statement: I am a woman. And so that person puts this forth too. That's a scholar whose last name is Washington.
And so basically, I say all of that to say, even in the midst of these racist — I don't have a problem using that word — caricatures of Black people, there are enough parallel sources and other information that can help us to disentangle or to get at what really might have been said. And what really might have been said may not actually be as important as the fact that you had Black people, enslaved or otherwise, and in this case formerly enslaved, who were leading thought partners and activists in this work around Black humanity, around Black personhood, around Black creativity, around Black ingenuity.
And so that is what that story is really trying to get at. And that comes in a chapter where I'm also talking about the WPA narratives. These are the narratives from the 1930s, during the Great Depression, this moment where the government hires people, oftentimes white, who would go to these communities of Black people who had been formerly enslaved to try to write down their stories of what it had been like to have been enslaved several decades later. And one of the most fascinating discoveries, when you read a large swath of those narratives, is that when there are white transcriptions of what these Black people told them, they look very much like Frances Gage's transcription of Sojourner Truth. And years later, that is what it looks like — these dialects, or whatever the case might be. And then when you look at somewhere like Virginia, where the state of Virginia hired a not insignificant number of Black WPA workers who went out, you get a different presentation.
So you get what some might consider non-dialect, or what people would call standard English, for whatever it looks like. And you get more detailed narratives that really turn attention to the atrocities of enslavement. You get people thinking about the ongoing effects of slavery's legacies in Jim Crow, talking in ways and revealing things to these Black recorders or workers that you don't necessarily see when they're talking to some of these white recording workers. And we don't know if that's because they tell them and they exclude it, or — what I think reasonably is the case — is that they don't tell them.
Okay, so I've got to ask you this question then, because of this dastardly fabrication that we've just talked about. Has there ever, based on your understanding of how Black people have struggled here in America, or in the Americas I should even say — has there ever been a time when we've been able to tell our own story without it ultimately being filtered through the white gaze, through white translation?
Yeah, I think so. I think that this is one of the most fascinating parts about reading these moments in history. I think these narratives in many ways are about what they say as well as what they don't say. And part of what I talk about in the introduction, by way of a scholar named Saidiya Hartman, is this critical fabulation, which is really a way of thinking about how contemporary art producers or artists, or even contemporary people like me who are going and looking at these texts and trying to analyze them, are thinking about the ways that the imagination and the historical record — what's said and not said — come together to produce a narrative about what actually happened or what could have happened. That's one way of thinking about it.
But more to the point, we can take the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, or as we used to call him in graduate school, Freddie D, as if this were one of the homies, somebody we were hanging out with. And so you think about Frederick Douglass writing three autobiographical narratives over the course of the 19th century. He writes the famous Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, in 1845. And that's the one I take up in chapter one when I'm talking about the written narratives of slavery.
And in that narrative, he says he has no recollection of his family, or limited recollection. And he makes it a point to follow the conventions of the narratives that were written around this time, where part of what you want to show is how disruptive, how horrible slavery had been to the familial unit. And so you drive home this narrative of disruption. And we see this across narratives. I think here of Harriet Jacobs, who says she kind of had some recollection, and then something happens, there is something that disrupts it, and that something is the evilness of white supremacy being facilitated through chattel slavery.
But then in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass gives a little more about his family. And so we're thinking 1845, there's an autobiography that's really being used on the abolition circuit, in conjunction with his collaboration with the different abolitionists, who have a clear goal of trying to overthrow slavery. My Bondage and My Freedom is circa the 1850s and 1860s. By the time we get to the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, he has all this information, these narratives about his family, and these memories. Now, did he have amnesia? Did he have early onset cognitive impairment in the 1840s? I don't think that that's the case.
So part of what Black people consistently have done is we adjust — we adjust to our audiences, to our circumstances, or whatever the case might be. So is this pandering? Not sure. But is this strategic use of culture, of information, use of history, of politics, political savviness? It plays out, and then to kind of return to these narratives — that's one of the beauties that you see around someone who has such a long life, who has such a rounded-out life. You see something like this with somebody like W.E.B. Du Bois, who talks about the Talented Tenth at the turn of the 20th century, who later says, I had it wrong.
And then for someone like our man Booker T., who people give a hard time to, and who does things to make himself have a hard time perhaps — this is something I push back on but offer some additional texture to in chapter three — is that he dies what we might say is prematurely. And so Booker T. doesn't really get a chance to revisit Up From Slavery the way Du Bois gets to revisit something he writes in The Souls of Black Folk. And so we don't know if Washington had the chance to return to this 30 years later, 40 years later, if there had been some different insights. Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough.
So here's question number two for you. You argue that when the written record was built by the enslavers, imaginative work — novels, films, television, the whole nine — becomes its own archive. Now, that's a big claim. How do you answer somebody who says a novel isn't evidence? That Colson Whitehead or Octavia Butler is at the end of the day making it up? So how do you answer that question?
Yeah, I would say to that, I would encourage that person to think more energetically about the processes that actually go into the work that novelists do. And so when one listens to artists talk about the craft, talk about the research that goes into particularly these genres that are around recuperating historical periods, that are about thinking about what's been left out of an archive, then part of what they're saying is that we've actually done some research. We've gone and we've looked at primary documents, we've looked at newspapers, we've looked at records of bodies that were exchanged, we've looked at diaries, we've looked at these artifacts, to tell us what they have said and to think about, or perhaps imagine, what they haven't said. And so there is this marriage of sorts of the imagination and this other thing.
But I want to make an important point about this for two other reasons, that I would be, as I like to say, remiss — that's a good Black word — I would be remiss to anybody who knows me or who doesn't know me. So the first point is that part of that claim yields too much room to a set of documents that we know are problematic, that we know don't tell the story, that we know intentionally excluded Black voices in the writing of these narratives. There are textbooks that wouldn't use the term slavery, that would say they were workers. Or made it seem like there was a partnership, there was a collaboration. And right now, in Philadelphia, I believe it was a museum in Philadelphia, but also at the Smithsonian, there is a concerted effort to rewrite these histories about slavery, about what white people's roles were in perpetuating the institution. And without any pushback or retaining of these facts, those will become the narrative and people will be running around saying this is what it was. And it wasn't that.
So that's one thing. The second thing is just as important. Art and culture have consistently been important ways and important areas in which Black people have done and shaped politics. And so we go back to this example of Frederick Douglass and the Narrative of the Life, Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. And yes, the abolition movement might have taken those up and moved with them and given them a piece of life. And they also were actively involved in making sure that the abolitionist movement was able to take these issues up and give them life, because the big goal was to do what? To overthrow the institution of slavery.
So the big point here is that historical narratives themselves are not about this thing happened, this thing happened, this thing happened — facts, facts, facts, as people like to use that term. There is a level of interpretation, even if it is to decide what is to be included and what's not to be included. And that is part of what's at stake in these conversations and in these debates: to diminish not only Black experience but Black contributions, that in and of itself is problematic. But what these people are really trying to do in this moment is to deny anti-Black racism and white supremacy, to deny its effects and then to pretend like those things never happened and do not exist, and that things are the way they are by virtue of what Black people have done or haven't done.
If you would just work harder, if you would just do these things, you could be where we are. And that is a failure of honesty, integrity, but also the facts of history don't bear that out. But I think that's one of the biggest challenges, and I hate to beat a dead horse, but it's one of the reasons why many people have difficulty accepting, reading and digesting Black history — not because there's no truth to it, but because ultimately the feeling is, for those of us that are more cognitively aware, that ultimately that narrative, that story, that fact, if you want to put that term on it, ultimately gets filtered through the white gaze or through a white filter. So it's like, how much of what I'm getting can I necessarily trust, because I know it had to go through this filter first before it gets to me.
Yes, I think that's excellent. And I'm glad you said that, because this is what Black Narratives of Slavery: A Very Short Introduction is really trying to do. It's trying to offer one approach to engaging, that is to really get into Black-produced texts that are consciously doing the thing you just said, which is either resisting this gaze or attempting to have a more fleshed out, a more nuanced perspective. And so we think about someone like Harriet Jacobs — and I'm going to pivot to cinema in one second, which chapter five takes up, these cinematic, these visual narratives of slavery.
And so Harriet Jacobs is sexually harassed by her owner, Dr. Flint. And Harriet Jacobs talks about this man slipping her notes, because he knew she knew how to read, even though Black people supposedly couldn't have the capacity to. And hounding her and wanting her to sleep not in the cabin, but then next to the wife, and then the wife is doing absurd things like whispering in her ear pretending like it's the husband to see how she responds. I mean, this is just ludicrous. Although this could make an interesting Black film in some respects. But in any case, she never says that he sexually violates her, that he rapes her. She says she ends up having sex with another man.
And she says she thought it would be less degrading to give herself to someone than to be violated, which makes a lot of sense. And it shows again, in that moment, yes, there's this harassment, but she's actually resisting. So we think about resistance, we think about how those things look, that these things don't have to be slitting his throat from one side of the neck to the other, although people perhaps would have preferred that. The point though is that she makes this choice. And so even in these limited situations, we're making choices, and that should resonate in all kinds of contexts for many people perhaps. But I like talking about it in terms of Black people.
But I think one of the questions becomes, why wouldn't he have raped her? He has the law, he has all these things on his side to make this the case. There have been people who have done wonderful archival work on this, trying to figure out if that did happen, if she didn't say, whatever the case might be. But I think the point we're really trying to make here is that whether she tells us this or not becomes kind of secondary to her point, which is that the circumstances of slavery, the law, the complicity of white women who are wives with white patriarchy — all that makes Black women unsafe. And so whether they were raped, or the threat of rape, they are endangered. And that becomes central to what the question is.
And I think that one of the most important, one of the most fascinating points about this is one of my colleagues, Karitha Mitchell, who is a professor of English at Boston College. She's written about how in some respects Harriet Jacobs becomes like a foremother to some of the women in the Me Too movement, and thinking about what later becomes Black feminist thought.
And so part of what I say here is that these early forebears, foremothers, ancestors — whatever you want to say — part of going back to what they did, going back to their work, going back to their thinking, going back to their epistemologies, if you want to use that term, is that it does create this genealogy. It does create this lineage that is decidedly putting to the forefront of the conversation Black people, what they were doing, and how they were doing it, not only necessarily in response to anti-Black racism and white supremacy, which are always overarching, but even in their absence: how are they creating culture? How are they formulating community? What does this look like? What does this actually mean?
So I know you said you wanted to pivot to cinema, and I want to help you make that pivot. Thank you. Once again, I have to return to how all of our narratives get filtered through the white gaze. We look shortly after Reconstruction — Time magazine and the New York Times and many other outlets had Birth of a Nation as one of the greatest films of all time. And that was the introduction, if you want to say it, to cinematic anti-Black stereotypes and racism in the United States or in the Americas. So we still see some of those little tidbits here and there in cinema. I mean, it's gotten better, not to overstretch it. But at the same time, those elements still exist. So how do we make that separation, especially in media, especially at a time when we're always consuming, Netflix is on your phone, all of those things? How are we able to remove ourselves and not fall into the trap of, once again, the white gaze or the white filter?
Yeah, absolutely. I would like to just put a point on Birth of a Nation because I think there were two conversations happening about that film at the time. And I think that that's actually the case now too. And what I mean by that is, you know, Woodrow Wilson reportedly had people over at the White House to view it and, as the reporters have said, this is history writ with lightning and all the things. And I think that part of turning that gaze on itself is to say, yeah, this is something, but it's not what y'all think it is. And this is part of what I get at in chapter five that talks about these cinematic or visual narratives of slavery. In particular, Nate Parker's 2016 film by the same name. And so what I think that film does is it actually underwrites the pervasiveness, the widespread ways that white supremacy, that white depravity, that anti-Black racism, that white violence is critical to the sustainment of a nation that was built on the destruction of Black people and Black bodies.
And that is the story that actually is the story that Birth of a Nation tells and that we should remember. That is the story that it tells that needs to be remembered. This notion that Gus is chasing this white woman, and she'd rather throw herself off a cliff than be touched by a Black man — as our sister Ida B. Wells, anti-lynching activist, has written about, these cries of rape, this notion of the Black man as the perpetual rapist, this is more mythology than actual practice. And oftentimes when this happens, these are consensual relationships that once they become known, they need to find an out. You know, they say that every accusation is a confession.
And so it's all of this silliness, but it has material impacts. People saw that and you saw lynchings increase. You see all this violence. So it is real, it has real material consequences. And I do think that, back to the point earlier about if something's just fiction or if it's not, well, these cinematic representations had material consequences on Black people. And so we could use that as an example to think about the other question as well. I think that part of what we're seeing is the fact that even if a white gaze exists, it is not the gaze, it is not the audience that the cultural production is being targeted to.
And so we could concede, I could say there's going to always be a white gaze. And these stereotypes, whether it is hypersexual or oversexual or undersexual lives, whatever the case is — if Black people are constantly being stereotyped, then there is very limited space to move anything, because if we concede that being the case, then it would seem as though we're always responding to, or trying not to be, this, that or the other thing. And so if we accept the fact that anti-Black racism essentially wants to deny the humanity of Black people in terms of representation, whether it's written, visual or otherwise — once we know that's the case, when we are doing these depictions that are pertaining to Black humanity, what these Black representations are trying to do, it seems, is to show what those dimensions of humanity look like. But it's never a question about proving that the humanity exists. We take that as our starting point. We are human beings who have conflicting desires, who may feed into what somebody might call one of these stereotypes, but that's not what the guiding principle is.
And so in my discussion of Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation, I take up some of these issues. I take up the original, I take up some of the stereotypes that we might have just talked about — the Black man as eternal rapist, the brute, whatever. I take up what Nate Parker says that he was trying to do in the film. And then I take up sort of this fact that you said, which is that I know I have Black friends who have basically said, I don't want to see a movie about slavery. I don't want to see another movie about this horror, about this trauma. And this is really what I write. I say, who wants to see another Black body thrown overboard into the Atlantic Ocean? Who wants to see the scarring of one's back?
With the anniversary of Kunta Kinte coming up — who wants to see some limb being chopped off? Who really wants to see that? And does that type of representation on the screen function to paralyze people? Does it make them not want to see it? Do they not make these connections between what was done in slavery and what is being done in a contemporary moment, because they are actually immobilized by the level of violence that they see in these films? So I take that. I think those are real. I think those are honest. I think those are hard questions.
And I think that this is something that people who make these films grapple with. But what I will say — and I've been avoiding these "buts" because two things we know are pretending to occupy the same space at the same time, at the same damn time, as one of the hip hop artists might say, because that is in fact true — I do think that there are other stories that are actually being told in those spaces that we can miss out on. And one of those scenes that I take up: in The Birth of a Nation, there is this scene where Nat and his dad have gone out and they have some encounter with some patrollers, and the dad defends himself and kills one of the people who's trying to harass them. Nat takes off. They get back to the cabin. The point is the people show up to find out where Nat's dad is.
And at some point, some of the items that they had brought back almost roll out in front of the patrollers. And so the mother gets on the ground, oh, no, please, whatever the case is. And what she's doing is she is protecting everybody, because by doing that, she is covering up the items that had begun to roll that would have put them in a precarious situation.
So it becomes this somewhat, ironically perhaps, comical moment that draws attention to: do you know the things that Black people had to do? Do you know the level of quick thinking, of ingenuity that Black people had to have to stay alive under slavery? And that is one of those interesting takeaways.
And so there's that, and when the Black men are preparing for battle and they are standing around and they know they're all not going to make it. There is a decision that has been made: I am going to get as far as I can because I see something else. And the alternative to remaining enslaved with these immoral people who purport to be Christians is that I'm willing to take this risk. And so they're sitting around, the sun is rising, and they're reflecting on had they still been on the plantation, this is what we would have been doing at five in the morning. And one says, I would have poured this over the master's head.
And you think about all the moments people would have wanted to have done that. But they resisted in other ways, whether it was slowing down work — a way of reclaiming your economic value — whether it was pretending to be sick. And so I think that part of what these stories do is they show how one of the central logics to dehumanize Black people during enslavement was that because we were not human, we lacked the capacity to think, to reason, to do all of the things that are fundamentally human to the human experience.
And there is nothing about these representations that could lead us to that conclusion. And we also know that when Black people were together in the absence of these whites, owners and otherwise, supremacists and cruel people, they were doing what we do now when third parties, whomever they may be, are not present. They were laughing. They were having a good time. They were saying stuff about them. They were demonstrating these things.
And that is part of what that thing I said before, critical fabulation, gets at. That's part of what Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, any of these people are getting at when they bring some of these historical points together. And then they fill in the humanity that was otherwise left out or purposefully excluded. I dig it.
All right. So I'm going to read a question that we posed to our Patreon subscribers. If you're not a subscriber, I don't know what you're doing. You should become a subscriber. Come on over and join the family. And this is one of the questions that we got back. There's a line in your epilogue that I want to say out loud. You write that 400 is greater than 60 — 400 years of legalized discrimination against 60 years since civil rights legislation. And that expecting 60 to undo 400 is implausible. When someone tells you slavery was a long time ago and it's time to move on, is that the argument you make? And in your experience, does it land?
That is part of the argument that I make. And so part of what I say in that passage is that, again, this is like a math lesson. And so I think that it's important to start there, because when people do come with the point that people just made, it's like, of course we're beyond this. So I want to turn that back. In quantifiable terms, how can we be beyond that? How could 65 years — depending on what you think of as your markers, some people might say 70 if you want to use Brown as the beginning — how would 70 years undo it? How could 70 years of haphazard, well-intentioned in some cases but incomplete public policy — that's being very generous — that is consistently being eroded, was being eroded as early as the 1970s? And so we know the first challenge to affirmative action is with the Bakke case, and I believe that was 1978. So we know that there were always these attempts to undo it.
We know that we get the War on Poverty with Johnson that builds on the work of the civil rights legislation. And then no sooner than that happens, Nixon comes in and has a war on the impoverished, which is aimed towards Black people. That gets extended, and Reagan — these people ultimately come out and admit this in all kinds of ways. So the point is that you can't have an intentional, systematized institution that worked diligently to suppress Black people's abilities to have access, to succeed, to have economic, cultural, political, any of these forms of power, and then think that these piecemeal policies — they might have been thought out, but as far as implementation goes — would undo those effects across time. It just hasn't happened. And it's unreasonable to think that it will be the case. Because you would need years to close the gap.
And then there's another hundred and some odd years to get on par. And I think that this is part of where the movement comes from equality to equity, part of why you see this equity language. I've taught a course on race and racism in American culture. And one of the books we use is by a white woman scholar named Paula Rothenberg. And the point is, it says, to have educational parity — and this was the last published edition I used maybe 15 years ago, so this is worse now — it might say it'll take 150 years from then, so it'll be like 2150, to be able to have some educational parity. Other things were 200 years. And so the students will be sad because it's not going to happen in your lifetime either. And so I say that to say, yes, that is part of the math lesson, and I think it's a good way to start that conversation. Because it just doesn't make sense. This is 400.
And then those other pieces, if you're familiar with them, they add to that conversation. Those systems, slavery and Jim Crow, they were well designed. Better designed than the affirmative action policies. Yeah, by far, by far. And I think there's a part of the affirmative action period that many people would argue there wasn't a genuineness in it, for lack of a better description. It was a political machine to get votes or to help usher in a Democratic Party, not necessarily that they were genuine about the ultimate end effects that it would take.
So all right, I want to get you out on this last question. And it's about the moment that we're in currently, and how you've written a short and accessible introduction to this history at a moment when books are being banned, critical race theory is under attack, and there's been federal rollback of a bunch of different things, diversity programs and so on. Now, you write in the epilogue that institutions capitulating makes this work more urgent. Was this book a response to that? And what do you say to a young person being taught that this history is divisive?
Right. I would say a couple of things if I might. So this, as I like to say, like a good Black preacher, before I take my seat, I have to fully exegete the text — in the AME tradition, homage to Richard Allen and Jarena Lee. But a couple of things. So, yes and no. The book was published in 2026, but I had been working on it prior to that. I got slowed down. There was, you know, life be life. I mean, it's hard to jet set and be writing. Sometimes when I'm over wherever, having a good time, I get a good thought, I get some good clarity.
But I will say that when they approached me about writing — as I said, this is part of this Very Short Introduction series, meant to be introductory — they had a different vision in mind. And part of the vision in mind was that this really would have been about the autobiographical narratives that formerly enslaved people had written. And so it might have been a survey of those narratives. And I said, I think that this is fascinating, but that's not the book for me to write. The book for me to write is to make the connections from slavery to the contemporary moment. Because the legacies of Jim Crow, the legacies of slavery are still manifesting themselves. They manifest themselves at the base level in the denial that there is any legacy at all.
That is exactly part of what the point is. Books like this one are trying to make sure that we not only get the different historical records right that reflect the contributions that Black people have been making and continue to make, but that we thread the needle from slavery to the present, and how some of the things that we're seeing — voter suppression, we're back in slavery; lack of access to health care, we're back in slavery. I mean, part of what I say is that there is not a contemporary issue that is plaguing or negatively impacting Black people and Black communities that is not implicitly, and I would also say in many ways explicitly — though people will try to deny this — related to slavery or Jim Crow.
What's divisive is white supremacy trying to suppress Black people and Black culture. That is what is divisive. Telling the multiple stories about Black life, about Black politics, about Black cultural contributions — that is telling the American story that oftentimes is not told in the ways that it should be. It is among the reasons that I participated in the construction of this course for AP African American Studies, to be able to expose hundreds of thousands of students to Black history and culture that they can then go and study further in college on their own. Otherwise, I think it's doing a great disservice to what needs to be done in this moment with what these people are trying to do in terms of banning books.
I say this when I speak to younger people, because sometimes reading — there might be other things one might want to do other than to read, that goes for older people too, myself sometimes. Oh, Lord, why did I pick this hobby? You have to pick up this book of all books to pick up. But what I will say is, would somebody be working so hard, would some institution be working so hard, if this stuff didn't matter? If this information was just wrong, if this information was so inaccurate — there's all kinds of inaccurate stuff that's floating out in the atmosphere. No one's trying to ban bad climate science. They might say it's bad or it's not true, but they're not trying to ban it.
I dig it. So why is it that someone would be working so hard to try to get you to not read something if it were just fake or not important? People who claim they don't want to regulate, who claim you do whatever — except for when I don't like what you're saying, because it calls attention to the things that I am deeply invested in. So if voting weren't important — for people who have sort of adopted that voting isn't effective, they checked out. The best way to suppress voting is to have you believe that your vote does not matter, because then you will not vote and I won't need a law to make it more difficult. I won't need to close a polling place early. I won't need to do anything.
And so I decided to say, stay woke. They tried to co-opt all these together. You got to be careful using some of these terms. I mean, sometimes we'll be up on one of these lists. But that's fine, because this is just kind of true. And so what I say is that, and it could seem cliche, but there's a reason why people used to say knowledge is power. And it is not just cliche. It's actually because when you have access to this information and you go into more depth than what's presented on the surface, then it is hard to be argued with, or even if people try to argue with it, you have the receipts. And so yes, the civil rights acts were important and the civil rights acts did increase access and they did increase outcomes.
I know I said I was going to get you out on that last question, but I've got to ask you a follow-up and then we're going to wrap it up immediately after that. There are people who want the power, reading is power, knowledge is power. But in this day and age of misinformation and disinformation, it's become more and more difficult to parse what's truth and what's not. As an academic, as a professor, as someone who's been doing the research, what advice would you give to someone who is trying to take this information and parse it so that they know what's real and what's not?
Right. So I think that in order to do that effectively, one has to be persistent and curious. And I say that because it means you've got to read multiple sources. And I think that becomes a big point. Also, I think there are places to go that sort of — I wouldn't say pre-vet these things, but there are, for example, certain university presses where there would have been a review process that would lend itself to the fact that there might be some disagreement and argument, but these are at least vetted and have some points there. But Michael Harriot has a book called Black AF History, and y'all know what the AF stands for. The point here is that it really pushes some of the things you might know. And then there's something you just really didn't know about it.
Or the other thing that people will do is they'll do something reductionist. So they'll say, well, this Black person did this, but then they did this thing that may not have been supporting Black history to its finest, and they try to throw the whole work that they did out. And I say that — and I know I've got to go, but let me just say this before we take up the offering — this is about Booker T. Washington. And I make this point in chapter three. So people oftentimes stop Booker T. in the debate with W.E.B. Du Bois.
But even if you side with W.E.B. Du Bois about the Talented Tenth, you might ask, well, what was he going to do with the other 90 percent of the population? Probably they would have been doing the industrial education that Booker T. Washington had been supporting. And so part of it was that. And although people may have wanted Booker T. Washington to be in people's faces saying, hey, you want us to be at the bottom of the totem pole, you want us to be in the back of the bus, you want us to be second class citizens — part of what he does with that money that he raises at Tuskegee is create a generation, a class of educated Black entrepreneurs who may not have had access to other things but for what they were able to do in that institution.
And lastly, Booker T. Washington put up a not insignificant amount of money to join lawsuits that were challenging all of those restrictive laws throughout the South that were infringing upon the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. And people are complicated. People are contradictory and they do multiple things. And you don't know that if you stop at the 1903 debate, if you only read Du Bois's text, and if you don't do further investigation and push into these archives that people sometimes think had otherwise been exhausted.
Dr. Robert Patterson, I really appreciate you taking the time out. Before we get out of here, please tell the folks where they can find you if they'd like to find you, any other new projects that you have coming up, and possibly where the best vacation spots are, because I know you've got the good information.
Okay, so where you can find me. I am attempting to get better with the social media. The fact that I'm putting a "the" in front of it should tell you how good I am with it. You just aged yourself. Well, I just blackened myself, actually. But DRRJPatterson on Twitter, so you can find me there. You can find me on Facebook too. Now it might take some maneuvering because of what the settings are, but one can, and people seem to. So those are the main places.
As far as next projects go, I have been moved to do another passion project. My book on rhythm and blues culture — part of what I love, and part of why I was able to do it while I was doing all this heavy administrative work at Georgetown, is because I just loved what I was writing about. I was writing about film and I was writing about artists and I had the chance to fly to Phoenix and to interview Adina Howard. And it was just delightful in all these kinds of ways. And I have consistently had an affection for the 1990s.
And so the project that I'm currently working on, I did another pivot. I said, I want to write about something that will be fun. I want to write about the 1990s, but not the 90s itself. We are living in a profound moment in the 21st century where the 1990s is consistently being summoned. Even next month, the 21st century version of A Different World is going to hit. We had The Best Man and then we had The Best Man Holiday and then we had The Best Man: The Final Chapters. We had Boomerang and then we had the young folks of Boomerang. And so we see this. We see Burna Boy going back to Toni Braxton. We constantly see these invocations of the 1990s. So the book that I'm working on now, this project, is called For The Culture: Black Life in the 1990s.
Can't wait to get that. Another thing that I still have all this stuff on is reparations and Black communities. And so I'm thinking about working on that. There are days where I'm just sort of like, I think this is important — it's every day. What I had to think about was my audience. And so this is not to persuade white people about the importance of reparations. It is to equip Black and other people who are interested in the history and the language and the culture to be able to stake those claims. So they have the receipts necessary when they have the arguments. That's exactly right.
The best vacation spots. This is a hard one. I can't deal with the superlative. But what I can tell y'all now — you can hop off the press because I have not made a post about this yet — but Japan is delightful. I had the opportunity in April to go to Tokyo and Kyoto. Did you go to Shinjuku? I went past it. But Tokyo's so big. Fair enough. It was really the first time I had to rely on public transportation. And then I finished in Hiroshima, which was delightful and heartbreaking in terms of the history and the museum and the artifacts they had kept there. But it was just delightful in terms of the customer service, all of the things, the culture. You just get such a variety. I don't know if y'all know this, but you may know about Japanese whiskey — I'm just stopping by to tell you that Japanese gin is where it's at and the distilleries were hitting. And so if you partake in what one might call the devil's cup, then there's that.
And so I did all kinds of things, and Google Translate will help you, and they are very excited to see Americans. I don't know about all Americans, but this Black American, they were excited. So I'm going to give it out to Japan for 2026. I also did go to Ghana in March and that was delightful. We're going to need to talk offline about your trip to Ghana, because there's the whole Year of Return in 2019 and how things have transpired since then.
When we went down to the point of no return, this was a conversation and this was a thing about the commercialization — perhaps too lightweight a way to put it — about the exploitation and what that means and what that looks like. And so we were cognizant, and when you look at the demographics of who was down there, who was leading these initiatives or these explorations, that definitely came up. So forget the closing, we know we're going to close, this is for the Patreon folks, they're going to get a little bit extra.
So when we went to Ghana in 2019 and that was during the Year of Return. And it was my first time going to another African country. I'm originally from Nigeria. So going to Ghana was an eye-opening experience just to compare to Nigerian culture and so on. And we did go to the slave castles. And I will say that going to the slave castles — when somebody tells you that they did something and they had a spiritual feeling — I stepped in there and I'm not going to lie to you, I felt it on my skin. I couldn't shake it.
And as much as I was impassioned and overwhelmed by the whole experience, I did ask myself afterwards, when we were ending the tour, what benefit is this? Because when we finished, a lot of the faces that we saw were white faces, taking pictures by the cannons and by the beachside and all that other stuff at the slave castle.
So I'm thinking to myself, is it fair, is it moral to monetize the pain of enslavement? And then once again, ultimately, as we've been talking about throughout the entire show, having it go through the white gaze before it gets to the general public. So to the degree that it was such a rich experience — at Elmina Castle in particular, the rage that I felt when we were touring and we get to the governor's bedroom. And when they said that that man had a little chute to have the enslaved woman run up to him, whatever I had been feeling prior to that, I was disgusted on a number of levels.
And then to have that be on top of a church. So I had that experience. But let me tell you what changed that thing for me, and it goes to answer this question. Because as I was having that experience, I looked out and I saw all these beautiful Black children just playing around the sand, around the sea. And I thought, a place where they would have been made captive or taken to a premature death has been repurposed in some respects.
And so I use that to simply say that once I take as fact that this white gaze is always going to be present and doing what it may do, which may not be helpful, then what are some of the other things that I can pull and extrapolate from that too? And so we had a fascinating discussion about why the people were playing around it but why they don't swim in there. As reverence for the ancestors who have made that their final resting place. And you can learn that.
Small fees to get into this place or whatever the case is. I think that the problem you've identified is the same problem with people viewing some of these films on slavery that are trying to make connections. Is that they don't go and see, I'm situated in this. And as much as I could have been enslaved because I was Black, you could have been an enslaver or benefited by virtue of your not being Black and being white — and that identification is not being made. But having said all that, I don't think that that overshadows —
And I think this is my overarching point — the benefits of being in that place, of transcending time, of, as you said, something spiritual, making those connections. Coming back with a different sense of the self, a different sense of one's relationship to the Black diaspora or the African diaspora, understanding why they don't swim, and having that because you can map that history onto it. And so I think that that becomes more of a priority. And I think if we wait on some people to be moral and come to realizations, then we may as well go ahead and take our rest now. Yeah, you're right about that.
All right. I think we're going to wrap it up now. I am Big O. Dr. Patterson's already told you where you can find him, all the projects he's working on and all that great stuff. Once again, Dr. Patterson, man, I really appreciate you taking time out. I know you've got a busy schedule. So thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to actually chop it up with me. And I really appreciate it, man. Thank you for the opportunity. No problem, man.
If you're not following us, I should say you should be following us across social media at In The Black PDCST. I am your host, Big O, Mr. In The Black himself. You can find me on Twitter and on Instagram at Mr_InTheBlack. And I want to thank you guys for joining us for another incredible episode of the In The Black Podcast. You could have been anywhere else in the world, but you chose to kick with us and we really appreciate you for it. Make sure you follow us across social media.
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The speech everybody quotes was written down by somebody else
Dr. Robert J. Patterson — professor of Black Studies at Georgetown University and the inaugural chair of its Department of African American Studies — takes this apart in his new book, Black Narratives of Slavery: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press). Truth spoke at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. The version that ended up on posters, T-shirts and syllabi came from Gage's recollection, published in 1863. Gage added the refrain. Gage added the dialect. Truth, born enslaved in Ulster County, New York, spoke Dutch as a first language and never sounded like that.
Why Patterson does not throw Gage's version out
This is where most people stop, and Patterson keeps going. Some scholars have dismissed the Gage text as fabrication. Another scholar named Washington argued that when you triangulate the surviving sources, Truth clearly gave some version of that speech — and that it may have landed as a statement, I am a woman, rather than a question. Patterson's larger point is that the exact wording matters less than the fact that formerly enslaved people were leading thought partners in the argument over Black humanity. The archive is thin because Black-produced documents were not preserved, and because much of the archive was oral to begin with. Trust only what enslaved people wrote down themselves and you throw out most of what they actually said.
The WPA narratives are the receipt
In the 1930s the federal government paid interviewers to collect the stories of people who had been enslaved. Where white interviewers did the writing, the transcripts read like Gage's Truth: heavy dialect, sanded-down detail. Virginia hired a significant number of Black WPA workers, and the narratives they brought back look different — standard English, far more detail, and much more about the atrocities of enslavement and how its legacy was still running through Jim Crow. Same people. Same decade. Different listener. Patterson's read is not that the white recorders cut it. It is that the people being interviewed never told them.
Frederick Douglass revised himself three times, on purpose
Douglass published three autobiographies. In the 1845 Narrative he says he has almost no memory of his family, which fits the abolitionist convention of that moment: show slavery destroying the family unit. By My Bondage and My Freedom he gives more. By the 1881 Life and Times he has names, memories, a family tree. Did he have amnesia in 1845? Patterson does not think so. Douglass adjusted to his audience and his moment — the same political savvy W.E.B. Du Bois showed when he came back decades later and said he had the Talented Tenth wrong.
Is a novel evidence?
Patterson argues that when the written record was built by enslavers, imaginative work — novels, film, television — becomes its own archive. The objection writes itself: Colson Whitehead and Octavia Butler are making it up. His answer is to look at what novelists in this genre actually do — primary documents, newspapers, ledgers of bodies bought and sold, diaries — and then at what Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation: putting the historical record and the imagination together to reach what the archive left out on purpose. The harder point is that treating "only documents count" as the rule concedes far too much to a set of documents we already know were built to exclude Black voices. Textbooks that called enslaved people "workers" were documents too.
Why this fight is happening right now
Patterson co-chaired the College Board committee that built the AP African American Studies course, so he has watched the backlash up close: book bans, federal rollback, institutions folding before anyone asks them to. His question cuts through it — if this material were simply false, why would anyone work this hard to keep you from reading it? Nobody is trying to ban bad climate science. They just argue with it.
The epilogue does the math: four hundred years of legalized discrimination against roughly sixty since the civil rights acts, and that sixty was uneven, underfunded and eroding almost immediately. Expecting sixty to undo four hundred is not pessimism, it is arithmetic that does not work. The same logic runs through how the U.S. tax system quietly disadvantages Black Americans and through this summer's rollback of school civil rights enforcement. If you want the vocabulary people are fighting over, start with what critical race theory actually is.
Dr. Patterson also gets into Harriet Jacobs as a foremother to Me Too, Birth of a Nation in 1915 and again in 2016, the money Booker T. Washington quietly put behind civil rights lawsuits, and whether it is moral to monetize the pain of enslavement at Ghana's slave castles. Black Narratives of Slavery: A Very Short Introduction is out now from Oxford University Press.
Watch the full episode above. If you want the extended cut and the questions our subscribers asked, become family. Informed. Intelligent. In The Black.
