I was reading this book during the time just ahead of the 2018 elections. The ironic part is that it was hard, at that time, to distinguish the past from the present. I realized, while the times may "change" the rhetoric does not. White people, you really need to be more creative. Just saying.

As I was watching CNN, MSNBC, and literally ANY cable or network news, I was hearing about how "all lives matter" and how immigrants were taking our jobs, and how Black people, while being shot in church (still), were being told to leave land that was, literally, built with the blood of their ancestors. I was watching a room full of white people give the "heil" sign as though they were back in 1940, seeing white women (falsely) accuse Black men of rape and nothing happened to them. I was seeing unarmed Black boys and men being killed by the people who are supposed to protect us and I was seeing Black girls and women go missing and no one knew their names. Their lives were stolen. No one cared.

Another fascinating thing was watching, in real time, how America's history was being rewritten to make white people feel better about their choices. Here I am, reading this book that details some of the most egregious behavior by white people while at the same time seeing said white people use the exact same tactics to protect their way of life.

I don't know if any of what I just said makes sense. In my mind it does. But that doesn't always translate. So, what I am trying to say, READ THIS BOOK!

This shit that white people have done, the pain and trauma they have inflicted on anybody that does not look like them, it hasn't gone away. It has changed its shape, a bit, but it is still ever present. Case in point: I was not surprised when reading this article about how, in 2019, there is an affluent town in Michigan where, if you want to buy a house in this particular area, you have to be two things: 1) Christian and 2) white. Nothing else is accepted.

leave now or die!

From the heart of the Midwest to the Deep South, from the mountains of North Carolina to the Texas frontier, words like these have echoed through more than a century of American history. The call heralded not a tornado or a hurricane, but a very unnatural disaster--a manmade wave of racial cleansing that purged black populations from counties across the nation.

We have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, but the story of widespread racial cleansing above and below the Mason-Dixon line--has remained almost entirely unknown. Time after time, in the period between Reconstruction and the 1920s, whites banded together to drive out the blacks in their midst. They burned and killed indiscriminately and drove thousands from their homes, sweeping entire counties clear of blacks to make them racially "pure." The expulsions were swift, in many cases, it took no more than twenty-four hours to eliminate an entire African-American population. Shockingly, these areas remain virtually all-white to this day.

Based on nearly a decade of painstaking research in archives and census records, Buried in the Bitter Waters provides irrefutable evidence that racial cleansing occurred again and again on American soil, and fundamentally reshaped the geography of race. In this groundbreaking book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin has rewritten American history as we know it.

As usual, you can listen to Elliot Jaspin talk about his book, his process, and get his perspective on why this book needed to be written. Also, you can buy the book and discover a part of the "real America" for yourself.