There are many problems with this document — not the least of which is the fact that it is absolutely fake. By William Jelani Cobb
By William Jelani Cobb Africana.com
I long ago stopped listening to sentences that begin with “The problem with black people is,” or end with “and that’s why black people can’t get ahead now,” which partly explains my initial indifference to the now-famous William Lynch Speech.
In the few years since the speech on how to train slaves first appeared, it has been cited by countless college students and a black member of the House of Representatives, along the way becoming the essential verbal footnote in barbershop analysis of what’s wrong with black people. The rapper Talib Kweli laments on the song “Know That,” “blacks are dyin’/how to make a slave/by Willie Lynch is still applyin’,” and one professor at a Midwestern university made the speech required reading for her class. Of late, the frequency of its citations seems to be increasing — at least three people have asked me about it in the last month.
According to the speech’s preface, Master Lynch was concerned enough with the fortunes of his slave-holding brethren in the American colonies to present a lecture on the bank of the James River, explaining how to keep unruly servants disunited. The old, he argued, should be pitted against the young, the dark against the light, the male against the female and so on. Such disunifying tactics “will control the slaves for at least 300 years,” he guaranteed. And that, it seems, is why black people can’t get ahead now.
There are many problems with this document — not the least of which is the fact that it is absolutely fake.
As a historian, I am generally skeptical of smoking guns. Historical work, like forensic science, isn’t some flashy field — it depends on the painstaking aggregation of facts that lead researchers to the most likely explanation, but rarely the only one. Slavery was an incredibly complex set of social, economic and legal relations that literally boiled down to black and white. But given the variation in size of farms, number of enslaved workers, region, crops grown, law, gender-ratios, religion and local economy, it is unlikely that a single letter could explain slave policy for at least 151 years of the institution and its ramifications down to the present day.
Considering the limited number of extant sources from 18th century, if this speech had been “discovered,” it would’ve been the subject of incessant historical panels, scholarly articles and debates. It would literally be a career-making find. But the letter was never “discovered.” Rather, it simply “appeared” on the Internet — bypassing the official historical circuits and making its way directly into the canon of American racial conspiratoria.
http://www.afro-netizen.com/2003/09/willie_lynch_is.html
