The Clapback Mailbag: White Kwon Do

Our weekly response to emails, DMs, messages and comments from our readers.

Eight score and seven days ago, our founders brought forth on this internet a new site, conceived in Blackness and dedicated to the proposition that all stories are created equal.

Over the past six months, ContrabandCamp’s writers, editors and contributors have endeavored to insert often overlooked Black perspectives into the national conversation. But today is not about them. Today’s Clapback Mailbag is dedicated to answering the worst and whitest comments, questions and criticisms that our readers have shared with us.

You’re welcome.

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Infrequently Asked Questions

ContrabandCamp was initially conceived as a place where Black journalists, writers and creators could tell Black stories. Yet somehow, without fail, the most frequently asked Caucasian query can be boiled down to one simple comment that comes in varying forms. Sometimes it’s a simple “Not all white people.” In other cases, it’s an attempt to center a white perspective. Perhaps my favorite one presented in the form of the age-old question: “If white people did that …” However the question is phrased, the underlying sentiment is always the same:

But what about me?

From: Jonathan

If there was a news site with only white reporters, would you call it racist?

From: Lisabeth

It’s incorrect to say “white women voted for Trump.” You should specify that it was only the majority of the white women who voted.

Dear Jonathan, Eric and Lisabeth,

Let me tell you a story:

On Feb. 25, 1644, the Dutch West India Company settled a lawsuit filed by 11 men who claimed that the international human trafficking company that enslaved them had promised them their freedom after 18 or 19 years. As the word of the legal victory spread, other people began winning freedom suits, so the Dutch company set aside a portion of New Amsterdam that became the first free Black settlements in America. The enslaved people cleared the land, and free and enslaved Blacks were allowed to congregate in the area, south of Houston Street, which was legally known as “The Land of the Blacks.”

However, the people who resided in the Land of the Blacks weren’t technically free. In exchange for an annual fee to the Dutch West India Company and a vow to protect the white settlers from the natives whose land had been stolen, the Africans were granted a status called “half-freedom.” In fact, aside from winning a lawsuit, an enslaved African could be freed and sent to the Land of the Blacks if they could really fight. The Akan Warriors who lived in the Land of the Blacks lived on the west side and eventually organized into a military unit called the Fly Boys. The fighters that had been trafficked from the Caribbean were the Long Bridge Boys.

In 1647, the New Amsterdam Council passed a requirement that the half-free Africans had to spend 12 days a year building a fort to protect the white people. Those who didn’t want to essentially be re-enslaved for two weeks could pay a separate fee. To ensure compliance, the white citizens enslaved the warriors’ children and wives as collateral. On December 13, 1711, the men who were half-free found out that their work was going to be used to house a slave market to sell their children.

On April 6, 1712, more than a half-century before white people came up with the idea of declaring their independence from tyrants who taxed them without giving them representation, the Africans started an American Revolution. Armed with guns, hatchets and swords, the Fly Boys and the Long Bridge Boys set fire to a building just outside the Land of the Blacks.

Then they waited.

When the white colonists realized that the Africans were not going to put out the fire, they gathered and tried to extinguish the blaze themselves. That’s when the Fly Boys and the Long Bridge Boys attacked. At least nine whites were shot, stabbed or beaten to death, and another six were wounded. The whites reclaimed the land and began using it as a commercial district.

After the white American Revolution, the Land of the Blacks became the center of trade. The few remaining Black residents were banished during the Industrial Revolution that followed the Civil War. Soon, factories abandoned the area, relocating to cheaper labor in the South, Midwest and, of course, New Jersey. In the 1950s, it was still called “Hell’s Hundred Acres,” but no one remembered that it was originally a Black settlement. By the 1970s, white hipsters had moved in and transformed the Land of the Blacks into a white neighborhood.

The rich white residents who live in this wealthy artistic enclave today will smugly inform you that the name of their “SoHo” neighborhood is just a shortened version of “the Area South of Houston Street,” but they have no idea why or how Houston Street became a land of demarcation. Even the New York Times referred to the white hippies who finished off the final step of micro-colonization in the 1970s as “the last of the bohemians, you might call Soho’s first settlers.”

The suit-clad stockbrokers who populate New York’s financial district might understand that Wall Street was named after a wall, but even the ones who Google it will conclude that it “was built by the Dutch settlers in Lower Manhattan … to protect their land from Native Americans, pirates, and, most importantly, the British,” as if Natives didn’t know how to climb a fucking wall. They don’t know that Black people protected them. They don’t know that white hands didn’t clear the land or make it livable. They don’t bother to learn the names Paulo Angola, Groot Manuel, Cleijn Manuel, Manuel Gerrit de Reus, Sijmon Congo, Antonij Portugies, Gracia, Piter Santomee, Jan Francisco, Cleijn Antonij and Jan Fort Orange — the Black people who went up against one of the largest international corporations in the world and won. They can’t fathom the idea that no slaves were involved in the event white people call the New York Slave Revolt of 1712. To be fair, a few white people actually know about the Fly Boys and the Long Bridge Boys. They just called the African warriors by another name:

Gangs.

White America is not just afraid to tell the story of the violence required to make New York City one of the most important cities in the world; they don’t want anyone to know. They’d rather tell a lie. They don’t even want to learn the truth themselves. It’s essential to tell the stories from a Black perspective because white people do not know the true story.

Perhaps the greatest example of this obliviousness comes from a 2021 New York Times story about SoHo residents who were fighting to keep affordable housing out of SoHo.