Only two pages into my third reading of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, I came upon it as if anew, having crawled deeper up the rancid ass of the slave nation that both Frederick and I were born to.

We were born in the same state.

We both sought our manhood in Baltimore and found it fighting and reading in equal measure for our identity.

This man wasn’t a negro but a mulatto, placing my Uncle Robert—a fiercely intelligent quadroon—genetically half between us.

The similarities don’t end there:

We were both attacked on the job by white coworkers.

We were both challenged by Christian preachers and laid them low with our hands.

We both had white men threaten our wife and family even as they lacked the balls to fight us.

But I’m not allowed to identify with Frederick. His memory is owned by an emasculated coven of mixed race academics blaming my overworked ass and my white slave ancestors for Fred’s plight, even though it was white boys that taught him to read, and a white man would be there every step of the way to lend him a hand.

It doesn’t bother me that if we met he’d call me white trash—because he was as sloppy enough writer to leave a trail of truth that any reader could follow—but have not, because they’ve either looked at him as a devil or a hero, all of them failing to extract the facts from his own partisan narrative.

Unlike Frederick, William Wells and Moses Roper and other escaped mongrel slaves of an evil nation, the white slaves that sought their freedom had no white man to teach them letters, no patron to publish their book, not a single friend among the white-trash-hating, negro-loving criminals that ran the American Gulag system that ate the souls of my ancestors. So their stories require work to piece together. And it’s only fitting that the poor whites that helped these mixed-race men attain freedom [as well as helping blacks like Solomon Northup] who became the “black” men that obscured the fact that whites were more often owned than blacks, should provide illumination for the most shunned commodity in America—the Truth.

It will bring me great pleasure to afflict the Lie I was born to with the needlesome Truth. Besides, the Lie is so boring and the Truth so much more interesting. As I write here at the end of masculine time, hoping to see the evil system I was born to rot and fall, I might as well busy myself examining the fetid foundation of this criminal nation.