Anthony Johnson
You have to understand, the first thing they do, the people who want to control the goddamn show, is they write a simple script. And in the story of America, the script is beautiful, simple, and completely fraudulent. It’s a clean morality play. The villain: the big, bad, white European in a hat, a creature of pure, mustache-twirling evil. The victim: the noble, peaceful, and completely innocent African, stolen from a beautiful, green paradise where everyone was probably holding hands and singing songs.
What a load of horseshit.
The truth, the real, ugly, beautiful, and completely inconvenient truth, it’s always messier.
You already knew the first part of the lie, the appetizer. The fact that the Africans weren’t “stolen” by white men running through the jungle with nets. No. They were sold. By other Africans. By their own goddamn kings and warlords. It was a business. A beautiful, ugly, and completely honest business transaction.
But that’s not even the punchline. That’s just the warm-up act. The real joke, the beautiful, gut-shot, and completely hilarious punchline to the whole goddamn tragedy, is a man named Anthony Johnson.
Now, Anthony, he’s the American goddamn dream. The poster child. He’s brought over from Africa in 1621, not as a “slave” in the way we know it, but as an indentured servant. A contract. He works his ass off, he does his time, he pays his debt, and poof… he’s a free man. A real, honest-to-God landowner. He gets a farm, a 250-acre tobacco plantation. He’s a beautiful, shining, and completely honest example of the system working.
And what’s the first thing this beautiful, enterprising, and completely liberated bastard do with his new-found freedom? Does he start a goddamn charity? Does he go on a speaking tour about the horrors of servitude?
Fuck no. He does the most American thing in the world. He buys his own servants.
And not just black ones. Let’s get that straight. The man was an equal-opportunity employer. He owned white people, too.
Now, here’s where the script gets thrown right into the goddamn fire. One of his servants, a black man named John Casor, he does his time. His contract is up. He says, “Alright, boss, I’m out of here. Time to get my own piece of the pie.”
And Anthony, this beautiful, ambitious, and completely ruthless sonofabitch, he looks at this man, and he thinks… no.
He takes his ass to a Virginia court. A court full of white, respectable, and completely confused men. And he argues something new, something no one has ever had the balls to argue before. He argues that John Casor isn’t an indentured servant. He argues that he is his property. For life.
He invents, right there in that quiet, dusty, and completely unprepared courtroom, the legal concept of permanent, chattel slavery in America.
And the court, the white judges, they look at this black man, suing another black man, and they listen to his beautiful, ugly, and completely brilliant argument for the right to own another human being like a goddamn mule… and they agree.
They rule in Anthony’s favor. They give him John Casor, for life.
And just like that, the first legal, court-sanctioned slave owner in the history of English America… isn’t some rich, white bastard in a powdered wig, sitting on the porch of a great, white plantation.
It’s a black man. A former servant. A beautiful, ugly, and completely inconvenient pioneer of human shittiness.
And you ask yourself, “Why the fuck don’t they teach this in the schools?” Why isn’t this part of the quiet, respectable, and completely bullshit narrative they feed you every February?
Because it’s messy. It’s inconvenient. It fucks up the whole goddamn movie. It shatters the beautiful, clean, and completely fraudulent story of the simple villain and the simple victim.
It tells you the truth. That greed, and the lust for power, and the quiet, ugly, and completely human desire to put your boot on another man’s neck… that’s not a “white” disease. It’s not a “black” disease. It’s a human disease. It’s the oldest goddamn story in the book. The second a man, any man, black, white, brown, or goddamn purple, gets a taste of real power, he’s just as likely as the next bastard to become the very monster he was running from.
And they hate that. They hate that truth. Because it robs them of their greatest weapon: their beautiful, clean, and completely unassailable victimhood.
The real illusion, the real trick, it’s not what they’re telling you. It’s what they’re not telling you. They’ve just quietly, politely, and completely edited out all the beautiful, ugly, and completely inconvenient parts of the story that don’t fit their goddamn script.
And that, my friend, is a hell of a lot scarier than any ghost story they could ever tell.
