Welcome to Karen Hunter's awesome. I'm Karen Hunter. And I'm coming back to one of my favorite books on the institution of slavery. It's called The H Has Never Been Told, Slavery in the Making of

American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist. Now, last year, I did four podcasts, episodes 50, 51, 52,

and 53, highlighting this book because in the early days of starting on the radio at Sirius XM,

I would get a lot of calls from people.

And this was in the wake of, you know, the killing of Mike Brown and Eric Garner.

And it was just like a string of killings of black men at the hands of police officers.

And we kept coming back to this racism and this being foundational and

the paddy rollers and we were having all these conversations but I would get quite a few people,

melanemic people, people without melanin, arguing that racism is not a thing. We had Obama twice.

And I interviewed Edward Baptist and I read this book. And when I tell you, I probably

have about 80 bookmarks in this book because every page, it was a revelation just about.

I said, oh my goodness. I hadn't met Dr. Gray Carr then. I hadn't met Dr. Daniel Black.

But this became the book that I went to most often because it talks about how this country, the United States of America, was formed off of the bodies of black people, African people.

And the brilliant way in which Edward Baptist marks each chapter by body parts.

So the introduction is the heart.

Chapter one feet.

Chapter two, heads.

Chapter three, right hand.

Chapter four, left hand.

And he's actually showing how the body parts took shape through the years.

So left hand is 1805 to 1861.

Tongues, 1819 to 1824.

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