The Democracy That Never Was: An Afro-Indigenous History of America

We're taught that American democracy was built on liberty and self-governance. But what if it was actually built on two erasures at once — the enslavement of African peoples and the dispossession of Indigenous nations — happening together, by design? In this episode of Rethinking Freedom: The Other Side of Freedom, part of our USA at 250 summer series, we sit down with historian Dr. Kyle T. Mays — an Afro-Indigenous (African American and Saginaw Chippewa) scholar at UCLA — to talk about his...