Author Clay Cane argues that misinformation distorts history and consolidates power. He quotes Alexander Nix saying that misinformation only needs to be believed, not to be true. Truth enables collective opposition; lies convince people that resistance is futile. Like enslavers who prevented enslaved people from learning about successful revolts, modern propagandists maintain ignorance. Cane believes that remembering is an act of opposition.

Cane says that contemporary claims about enslavement being beneficial or a necessary evil are erasure tactics that have shaped policy, from attempts to rewrite the 14th Amendment to suppressing Black history education. Kanye West’s 2018 statement that enslavement “sounds like a choice” and his 2019 comment about avoiding “slave nets” echo the “lost cause” narrative perpetuated by films like The Birth of a Nation (viii).

The author argues that the assertion that enslavement was a universal phenomenon—voiced by figures from Condoleezza Rice to Bill Maher—ignores race-based chattel enslavement’s unique brutality. Unlike servitude systems prior to colonialism, European chattel enslavement commodified people by skin color and made bondage hereditary. The United States had “perfected” this system by the 1860s.

Recent attempts to sanitize this history include Florida’s 2023 curriculum claiming that enslavement provided “personal benefit,” Nikki Haley avoiding citing enslavement as the main cause of the Civil War, and Mississippi’s Confederate Heritage Month declaration in 2025.