Slavery-Lite
We must continue to write the books, poems, plays and films that dig into the real truth of history, no matter how gritty.
“But who is Steve Biko?” Dalena turned to me, her eyebrows raised. “I’ve never heard of him.” Three of us were having drinks at a hotel bar in the South African town of Thohoyandou, a few miles south of the Zimbabwean border. Behind us, the musical pinging of slot machines sounded and colored lights reflected off from the mirrored shelves of bottles in front of us. It was 1996, just two years after the election of Nelson Mandela as the South African president in the first democratic election in the country’s long history. Dalena twirled a twist of her brown hair behind her ear. She was our tour guide, in her early thirties and of Afrikaner descent, but she fiercely described herself as a “South African.” An Afrikaner, she explained, was a “schmoe,” a fool, who lived in the hills and didn’t even speak English.
“You don’t know who Steve Biko is!” my colleague exclaimed. He and I were professors on an academic junket to the nearby University of Venda. We stumbled over ourselves to tell her about the anti-apartheid activist and leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, who was murdered in 1977 while in police custody. The year after his death, exiled journalist Donald Woods published Biko, a book about Biko’s work and death, and in 1987, the Richard Attenborough-directed film, Cry Freedom, based on Woods’s book, hit American theaters. It was the film, then a decade old, that had made both my colleague and I aware of Biko’s remarkable life.
When we explained to Dalena that Biko was the first martyr of the anti-apartheid movement, one of the most important figures in her country, she sighed, turned to look at the few people pulling at the slot machine levers, and then, her face slightly flushed with embarrassment or anger, or both, said, “You must understand. I grew up here.”
In that moment, I realized the power of an autocratic government to keep people ignorant, to lie about the obvious, and to rewrite history. All authoritarians do it, whether they are ancient or modern, abroad or domestic.
When I lived in Cape Coast, Ghana, I took a group of young boys, ten or twelve years old, to tour the Cape Coast Castle—a fort built by Europeans in the 1650s, but was soon turned into one of the grisliest slave trading posts in West Africa. The schoolboys were shocked to learn the history of the glistening and monumental edifice cemented on the coastal rocks of their small town. They saw it every day, but could never spare the price of an entrance fee. And though travelers came from far and abroad to walk through it, to look aghast at the stain of feces on the dungeon walls, and to look out of the door of no return, no one in the town taught the boys about it.
The people, a scholar I asked told me, were never allowed to talk about it. They saw the hapless victims marched into the fort, heard torturous screams, and sometimes, their own relatives disappeared, but the Chieftaincy, the authoritarians who benefited from the trade in human souls, did not allow them to talk about it under penalty of death or enslavement. Centuries later, even though it was a major tourist site, the local people knew little about its history.
Censorship, the arrests of journalists, the revision of history and the squelching of protests are stock and trade of oppressive regimes. If you have been paying attention—and how could you not?—then you have seen that these tactics are being inflicted by the heavy foot of the present US government.
Of course, as writers, this oppression is of great concern to us.
First and foremost, we writers are concerned with all aspects of the truth, factual and emotional. We recognize that interpretation is an element of truth, especially when it comes to history and we depend on vigorous debate among scholars, not politicians, to present us with a range of reasonable interpretations. So when our government asserts that it knows best about what historical interpretations should be, as the Trump administration did when it issued the Executive Order of March 27, 2025 which purported to “restore truth and sanity to American history by revitalizing key cultural institutions and reversing the spread of divisive ideology,” we, as writers—certainly I as a writer of historical fiction—should be alarmed.
The cultural institutions which are the target of the “revitalization” as clarified by a White House “Fact Sheet” published the same day as the Order, are the museums of the Smithsonian Institution—though they are not directly under the purview of the executive branch—and the National Park Service. Especially, singled out in the Fact Sheet was the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
In August 2025, the president posted on Truth Social, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future [sic].”
Though President Trump visited the museum in 2017, he seems not to have noticed that the museum emphasizes the successes of African Americans. A visitor literally moves from the dark lighting on the slavery exhibits, to brighter and brighter lighting of successes and the future. But the administration does not want exhibits which tell of the horrors of slavey, preferring a “lost cause” approach which tells of happy slaves—Prissy and Mammy of Gone with the Wind. Or for that matter, slavery as taught in my fourth grade Virginia history book, mandated by the state, which, among other felicitous lies, said, “The regard that master and slave had for each other made plantation life happy and prosperous.” Such was the state of Virginia’s public schools in 1965.
Admittedly, within the context of slavery, enslaved people found happiness—a marriage, the birth of a child, a small kindness, even from an owner—but the institution of slavery was brutal, and the chattel slavery of the United States, where men often enslaved their own children, was one of the most inhumane institutions in the world. When telling the truth about slavery, there is nothing to say, except “how bad slavery was,” and how its legacy still entangles people.
What the administration seems to want is what I call “slavery-lite,” a Disney version of the violent institution—one in which people break out into song and dance in the midst of back breaking labor, one in which people are whipped without bleeding or scarring, and where families accept the heartbreak of children being sold away with a head scratch and a “Lawdy-Lawd.”
For a century after the American Civil War, white Southern writers of the plantation myth tradition softened and excused the horrors of slavery, or worse, they promoted vile and bestial portrayals of black people in novels like The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, later to become the D. W. Griffith-directed film, The Birth of A Nation. But even as these books were popular in certain segments of the American readership, there were others—the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, or the novels of Charles Chesnutt, William Wells Brown, and Mark Twain—which challenged the lost cause views.
These 19th century writers often drew on their own experiences with slavery, however they chose to interpret them—or to propagandize them. Contemporary writers are dependent on our access to the artifacts in museums and archives for research for our fiction, resources that are even more critical for the scholarly writers.
This brings me to my second important point. When historical artifacts are manipulated by propagandists, when history is white-washed, then factual truth, much less emotional truth, is more difficult to understand.
When I research as a fiction writer, I seek out artifacts, photographs, as well as documents to help me understand the period and the characters I am creating. I try to engage with all of my imagination. For example, when looking at a photograph, I do an exercise in which I imagine the scene of the photograph as a hologram which I may enter. I enter with all my senses alert—imagining smells, sounds, textures the scene might offer. I imagine I am wearing the clothes of the subject—scratchy wool or soft cotton, scented with cologne or putrid with sweat. I do this exercise many times, trying ultimately, not just to understand the physical scene, but how that scene must impact the psychology and emotions of any character I place there. It is this emotional state, this mood, more so than a description of the museum relic, that I want to portray to my readers.
The Trump order, however, goes much further than just the removal and reinterpretation of materials. In many cases, the administration seems to want to erase history. This seems especially to be the case of the histories of courageous African Americans. One of the very earliest attempts at the removal of historical artifacts was the removal of information about the Tuskegee airmen and women from Air Force training films in response to the Administration’s anti-diversity push; then abolitionist Harriet Tubman was removed from a National Park Service webpage. In December 2025, as reported by the New York Times, the Administration ordered the removal of anything that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living,” including some materials related to slavery and Native Americans, from NPS gift shops. In January 2026, the Park Service removed displays about enslaved people owned by George Washington from President’s House in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. Though the display has been order restored by a Federal judge who granted a preliminary injunction, a court case about the removal is proceeding.
In September 2025, according to a Washington Post report, the administration ordered the removal of the famous photograph of a formerly enslaved man showing his whip-scarred back. The photograph, taken in 1863, variously known as the “Scourged Back” or “Poor Peter,” is an important piece of evidence, among many others, of the cruelty of slavery. Fortunately, inhumanity in US history is well documented, whether photographs of Spotted Elk’s frozen corpse at Wounded Knee, or the aftermath of the Ludlow, Colorado massacre of striking miners, or the burnt homes after the Tulsa, Oklahoma riot, or those after Rosewood, Florida or the lynching postcards sent through the US Postal Service during the early 20th Century.
In August 2025, the administration gave the National Museum of African American History and Culture 120 days to prepare for a review of its displays. Since then, materials such as Harriet Tubman’s bible and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, have been removed from the display. The White House says it has nothing to do with the removals, and the museum says the removals are a part of its regular rotation, though some loan materials have been returned to their owners. Critics, and I am one of them, see this as part of an effort to rewrite history.
As the administration forces the Smithsonian and National Park Service to make mush out of our history, fortunately independent museums are still able to tell the hard truths. The APEX museum and National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, and the National Museum for Peace and Justice in Montgomery are just three.
Keep in mind that the United States, unlike South Africa, has never had a truth and reconciliation initiative to air historical crimes. What airing that has happened has been done by the work of museums, archives, memorial sites, and writers, both scholarly and creative.
Importantly, we still have the ability to buy and borrow books that explore our difficult history. Though I think that some of our fiction, even fiction by African American writers, sometimes takes the “slavery-lite” approach, there are many which engage in thoughtful approaches that explore the emotional panorama of the enslaved and other oppressed Americans and do not soften the cruelty of our history, when our history is cruel.
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
--Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’.
As writers, we must continue to write the books, poems, plays and films that dig into the real truth of history, no matter how gritty. To do so is not just an act of resistance in the face of censorship, but it is a moral calling of our art. I am not calling us to write propaganda, or to take any particular political stance. I encourage us to research and to write truthfully, with emotional depth. To do so, especially in an atmosphere of censorship, is a courageous political act. But writing, like it or not, no matter how you approach it, is always a political act.
For more about Anthony Grooms and his work, go to AnthonyGrooms.com and AnthonyGrooms.Substack.com.
Sorry, but SONG OF THE SOUTH ain't gonna' cut it anymore.
Such a brilliant and powerful essay, Tony!