The Democracy That Never Was: An Afro-Indigenous History of America

We're taught that American democracy was built on liberty and self-governance. But what if it was actually built on two erasures at once — the enslavement of African peoples and the dispossession of Indigenous nations — happening together, by design? In this episode of Rethinking Freedom: The Other Side of Freedom, part of our USA at 250 summer series, we sit down with historian Dr. Kyle T. Mays — an Afro-Indigenous (African American and Saginaw Chippewa) scholar at UCLA — to talk about his landmark book, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press). We dig into the arguments that make this book required reading: why enslaved Africans should be understood as Indigenous people in their own right, how antiblackness and settler colonialism worked as a single system rather than two separate histories, the complicated and often painful history of the "Five Tribes" enslaving their own Afro-Indigenous kin, the moments of real solidarity between Black Power and Red Power movements, and what a genuinely honest 250th anniversary of American independence would actually look like. This is a conversation about the freedom struggles that got written out of the official story — and why putting them back in changes how we understand the whole country. 📖 Get the book: An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States by Kyle T. Mays (Beacon Press) 🎙️ Part of our summer series: Rethinking Freedom — The Other Side of Freedom: The USA at 250 🔔 Subscribe for more episodes in this series, where we explore the histories marginalized or erased from the official American story.#AfroIndigenous #BlackHistory #NativeAmericanHistory #USAat250 #KyleTMays #AmericanHistory #Decolonization #BlackPower #RedPower #PodcastSupport the show