Look At All These Slave Masters Posing On Your Dollar

The Left must call for the swift removal of the racist iconography that stains our currency and litters our parks, while making clear uncompromising demands for economic reparations.

The myth of America is weathered and worn, and like all things destined to crumble, it erodes slowly at first, then seemingly all at once. Just when we thought Joe Biden couldn’t make a more ludicrous, ahistorical comment than he had already in this election cycle, he crawled out of his basement only to, in a very Trumpian fashion, reconstruct reality to suit his agenda and subsequently shove his foot in his mouth. 

Just Wednesday in a Town Hall, the former Vice President stated that as a nation, “We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed, they’ve tried to get elected president. [Trump’s] the first one that has.” An absolutely absurd notion that is quickly dispelled after one opens their wallet and takes a long gander at the slave masters and purveyors of brutal genocide who pose proudly on their currency.

In the weeks after the nation saw an outpour of citizens flooding the streets to demand that we radically alter our racist police force, Biden attacks his opponent while erasing the extensive, pernicious, and emphatically racist policies that predate the formal foundation of our nation. They are deeply integrated into every level of our government, from local municipalities to the Oval Office and there has been absolutely no point in the history of the nation where that was not the case. 

Even predating our revolution, historical revision has been an absolute necessity in order to maintain the mythology of America. The myth of a virtuous nation that is home to all who seek refuge and freedom has been fabricated little by little since its founding. In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, for example, the racist Dixiecrats lobbied for the construction

of the monuments honoring Confederate soldiers as patriotic guardians of states’ rights and not fierce supporters of the right to brutalize and enslave. 

Now, as we see widespread calls for their long-overdue destruction, it is high time we reconcile the faces we see every day. From George Washington to Benjamin Franklin (yes, he too owned slaves), our currency is stamped almost exclusively with the ugly mugs of white slaveholding aristocrats. Americans are instilled with a veneration for our founding fathers through a massive propaganda campaign, otherwise known as history class. In a quite Orwellian fashion, our history books make heroes and martyrs of founding fathers, ardent defendants of freedom and equality. 

Often times school-issued history books quickly gloss over the horrific genocide of the indigenous peoples who freely roamed the land our forefathers claimed for themselves and viciously attempted to eradicate all who occupied it before them. Imprinting Andrew Jackson’s face on our twenty-dollar bill is in no way different than Germany imprinting the face of Adolf Hitler on their currency 100 years after his rise to power and giving the justification that it is important to remember our history, the standard justification employed by those vying to keep the south decorated with Confederate monuments. 

Why is the lunacy of emblazoning a tyrant like Hitler so easily accepted, while the understanding that our forefathers were also genocidal maniacs whose every decision was no doubt tainted by their deeply rooted anglo-christian supremacist orthodoxy remains entirely separate from their iconography? The men we honor on the face of our national currency, and with sparse exceptions, national monuments, are slaveholding aristocrats whether or not they adorned a Confederate uniform. Just as flawed as the argument to continue honoring the likes of Robert E. Lee is one that continues to revere that of Andrew Jackson, who, in addition to owning some 150 slaves, also signed the Indian Removal Act and forcibly uprooted more than 60,000 people from their homes, thousands of whom died in the process. All in an effort to cleanse the frontier for white settlers. 

If we come to accept that the very bedrock of American history is steeped in white supremacist orthodoxy then it must be entirely unraveled before it can be considered in any sense “free.” As such, we must begin the work of unraveling. It is incumbent on us to not only reckon with the criminality of our ancestors, but where at all possible, end the harm those actions have inflicted on Americans of color and Indigenous peoples.

Indeed this effort involves far more action than replacing the images of our nation’s oppressive aristocracy with true American heroes that fought for freedom and equality for all. The fearless individuals who realized that the American dream was farce and continued to plow forward in their attempts to bring it to fruition. We must also confront the economic implications of decades of persecution and subjugation. 

The white aristocracy long prohibited families of color from building any sort of generational wealth. In his seminal essay for The Atlantic, The Case For Reparations, Ta Nehisi Coates notes that long after emancipation, kleptocratic institutions, particularly those in the Deep South, cheated Black homeowners for generations. Citing one example describing state officials hijacking land from Black Southerners involving “406 victims and 24,000 acres of land,” “The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia, oil fields in Mississippi and a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”

Equally pressing, if not more urgent, than removing the racist iconography that stains our currency and depresses our parks, is correcting the dire economic consequences created for communities of color that have been beguiled by the despotic grifter class, happy to economically prosper off of centuries of cruel serfdom. If we are to succeed in constructing a just, post-racial society, it is imperative we remove and replace the racist iconography that blanket our currency and litter our streets while making clear uncompromising demands for economic reparations. First went the monuments, now comes the money.