4 years, 20 episodes, and 163 essays

In which we reintroduce ourselves…

 

In such challenging, and yes, scary times, all of us look for voices of sanity.

Not ranting, not polemics, just good old-fashioned sober analysis of what is going down.

Investigative journalism is being gutted by the takeover of mainstream media by a coterie of billionaires.

The people behind Project 2025 would like to push an agenda in which our children are only allowed to learn and read things aligning with a White Christian Nationalist outlook.

People interested in learning the truth about anything – current affairs, history, science, corruption – are now forced to fight through a daily firehose of bots, misinformation, disinformation, lies, and AI-generated slop and propaganda.

Who can we trust?

For a start, we should deal with verifiably real people who are up front about their education and the source of their claimed expertise.

Here is a mini-bio so you know a bit about the person behind Before We Were White – Podcast.

My name is Brian Halpin.  I was born 60+ years ago in Kansas City, Missouri.

I left home and school at 15 but managed to work my way through college, eventually picking-up a degree in archeology (specializing in the prehistory of the British Isles and underwater archeology).

Completing a degree meant less to me than the effort it took to become a competent ironworker/blacksmith somewhat later.

Far more than my work or education, I am most proud of managing to raise (along with my partner) a good kid who understands right and wrong.

My personal passions have always been nature, music, history, art, science, writing, and handmade things – both artistic and practical – which speak of human creativity reaching for something more than mere profit.

A couple of decades ago, a restless mind (probably sprinkled with the dust of obsessiveness) caused me to wonder why my deceased grandfather had looked so…brown.

Genealogical investigations soon morphed into general historical investigations, and within a few years, I had compiled a database with well over a million records.

This database very possibly represents one of the most comprehensive examinations and collations of information about the ethnic background of frontier-era Americans in existence.

This database is the foundation of my “expertise”, and the basis upon which I feel qualified to offer certain opinions.

So when I write an essay saying that the earliest settling and colonizing of the American frontier was done by mixed-ethnic people, it is because I have viewed the 1820 census form showing that Daniel Boone‘s daughter married into a family including free people of color from Maryland, for example.

When I critique religion in the USA, I can draw on innumerable papers and historical records showing the high levels of illiteracy among frontier era preachers, or the numbers of preachers who came from a partly non-European background.

When my opinions run counter to received wisdom – such as the widespread belief that only wealthy southern planters were slaveholders – I can point to thousands upon thousands of historical records telling a different story.

This sort of in-depth research and investigation soon leads one to the realization that the average American’s perception of American history is deeply flawed and often downright wrong.

This is often not through any fault of their own, but is due to centuries of historical teaching being curated by people with an agenda.

 

*****

 

I eventually felt compelled to share this information in the face of ever-increasing right-wing ideological attacks on people teaching real history – that is to say, people who prize truth over mythology and propaganda.

And so was born the Before We Were White podcast during the Covid-19 lockdown days of 2020.

My primary goal was the deconstruction of the American belief in, and obsession with “race”, and in particular, the concept of “racial superiority”.

Why “race”?

Because the USA is founded on a combination of myths concerning “race” and “American exceptionalism”.

Without the myth of “racial differences” and “racial superiority” being invented by the greedy in order to justify the enslavement of others, our entire history and present would look completely different.

There would have been no Andrew Jackson, no Andrew Johnson.  No Civil War.  There would have been no KKK.  No “Mississippi Goddamn“, no Rosa Parks, no Central Park Five, no George Floyd, no BLM.

There would be no Donald Trump, no Elon Musk, no Peter Thiel, no J. D. Vance.

Why?  Because all of the above coup instigators are themselves racists of one stripe or another, and the sooner we say it constantly and out loud, the better.

They were only able to give their long-planned power grab an air of legitimacy by directing the outcome of an election with shocking amounts of money and laser-focussed propaganda emanating from the newspapers, TV channels, and social media platforms owned by these selfsame billionaires and unscrupulous technocrats.

Most of the propaganda involved not-so-subtle forms of racist messaging directed at the post-Reagan, Fox News-viewing GOP base of “White Christian Evangelicals”.

Remember those dog and cat-eating Haitians?  Mexican rapists?  Venezuelan gangs taking-over entire towns?

And while quite literally weaponizing hatred in order to gain office, these same people endlessly claim that the USA is more virtuous, fair, moral, and democratic than other countries.

This tactic is as old as civilization itself.  People will always vote for the person confirming their “specialness”.

After 400 years of living under tyrannical emperors (after Julius Caesar trashed the Roman Republic), most Roman citizens still lived in a virtuous republic in their heads, where just being born Roman was enough to satisfy their need to feel “special”.

Roman emperors and senators and patricians understood that for the mob, “freedom” is a state of mind, disconnected from reality.

J. D. Vance has already stated as much, explicitly.  He has said that it is time for the USA to move into a “post-Republic” era.

All hail the new, improved, all-American Caesars!

The Romans could be cruel, chauvinistic and prejudiced.  But at least they weren’t so stupid as to be racists.

Now do your best Roman/Nazi salute…

 

*****

 

If a nation is to remain cohesive primarily through a belief in its own exceptional virtue, then anything suggesting otherwise must be suppressed, stamped-out.

“White” America, like Pontius Pilate, wants to wash its hands of all responsibility for the trans-generational social, emotional, mental, and economic damage caused by 300+ years of “white” supremacy and rapacious capitalism.

“White” America and corporate America do want to hear or talk about the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, the theft of indigenous homes and lands, slavery, slave rape, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, school segregation, red-lining – or how the current president of the USA and his father made a fortune in real estate through racist rental practices.

Even worse, “white” America wants to cast all worthy American achievements as “white achievements”, even though everything which is both good and quintessentially “American” ALWAYS has people of all ethnic backgrounds at its root.

Before We Were White decided to go straight for the jugular in this respect.

The history of colonial America and the early USA is not an exclusively “white story”, however hard Hollywood, TV, and politicians haved tried for decades to make it appear so.

When we say that the history of colonial America and the early USA is not just a “white story”, do not take this to mean we simply replace the “white story” with a “tri-racial” story shared between “white”, “Black”, and “indigenous” peoples.

We are going much further, and saying that in an American context, the very concept of “white people” in a profoundly mixed-ethnic population is a ridiculous and arbitrary construction.

Humans are not able to be categorized into three or four distinct “colors” or “races”.  Especially not in the USA.

AMERICANS WITH DEEP ROOTS IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY TIMES ARE ALL RELATED, WHATEVER THEIR PERCEIVED “RACE”.

Don’t get me wrong.  If a person is SEEN as being a certain “race”, TREATED as being a certain “race”, IDENTIFIES as a certain “race”, then “race” is all too real in a certain respect.

It would be just the same if there were no such thing as God, but millions of people still acted as if God existed.

This would mean that religion, just like racism, would affect how everyone experiences life – especially non-believers.

Before We Were White digs at the foundations of the deep-seated American belief in “whiteness”, and the belief in certain quarters that this “whiteness” is under attack, and in need of protection.

MOST OF THE UNDERCLASSES WHO SETTLED THE AMERICAN FRONTIER(S) WERE OF MIXED-ETHNICITY. EVEN THE ONES CALLING THEMSELVES “WHITE”.

And the historical record – census records, slave records, marriage records, wills, land transfers, letters – backs-up this contention.

To be a racist in America, more often than not, means to despise many of one’s own ancestors.

Fact.

 

*****

 

As I said at the beginning of this screed, current events – an ongoing fascist coup – have caused decent people everywhere to seek out reliable sources of information.

It is no coincidence that the current triumvirate tearing-down US democracy – Trump, Musk, Vance – are racists and white supremacists.

This is not a thing I say flippantly.  The evidence is overwhelming.

Before We Were White finds itself in a place where its subject matter meets the current moment.

This has led to an embarrassing backlog of emails on my website as I write.

Good people.  Worried people.  Generous people who have donated money to the Before We Were White project.

Everything has come so fast this year that I find myself caught between two stools, as the saying goes.

With thousands of “legacy” readers and listeners on other platforms, and new readers and listeners now arriving via Substack, a demand for more blogs and podcasts clearly exists, but there is more work and more correspondence than can be managed by one person still needing to do other work to keep food on the table.

A small number of deeply generous and loyal subscribers and patrons have kept this boat afloat up to now, but we’ll definitely need to grow this subscriber and patron list in order to kick-on and hire more crew to make this boat sail more quickly and smoothly.

Which is a long-winded way to say “sorry” for the correspondence backlog, but until we can afford to take on the extra hands which would allow us to answer all emails in a timely fashion while also writing and producing regular blogs and podcasts, “we are where we are”.

Meanwhile, away from the writing desk, life’s other realities eat up the hours.

 

Thank you to everyone who supports this project in any way.  I’ve no doubt we’ll get there eventually.

And yes, the truth WILL set us free.

 

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