https://youtu.be/CHVfpFoNz-EJust Pearly Things has a live YouTube show called, “The Pregame,” where she invites guests on to discuss many topics, including those related to the manosphere and Red Pill. The manosphere is a social movement of men that promote toxic masculinity, misogyny and anti-feminism. On the other hand, the Red Pill community claims that society favors women over men. Consequently, their views are extremely patriarchal and sexist, and in many cases their rhetoric borders dangerous to women. The main members of the manosphere and Red Pill communities are involuntary celibate men (aka incels) that possess toxic ideology of manhood and a hatred for women. Just Pearly Things is a strong proponent of sexist and misogynistic beliefs, and a large percentage of her supporters are black men. Recently, she had an infamous white supremacist live streamer named Nicholas Fuentes on her show, where they discussed and shared their racist views on the Jewish holocaust and chattel slavery. To no surprise, Nick did what he does, which is spew his ignorant and racist ideas, referring to the holocaust as, “not a big deal,” among other things. However, what’s shocking is Just Pearly Things saying that slavery was essentially “embellished” and “made more horrible so that they can control people.”Now, I’m not sure who “they” are or what’s the relationship between the reality of slavery and “controlling people.” However, I think it’s important to remind ourselves of some of the events that took place throughout the institution of slavery and assess if perhaps the events were “embellishments”. What better way to do this than to refer to slave narratives provided by the people who actually experienced it. According to the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, written for Sojourner truth by Olive Gilberty, she was given the name Isabella, and tells us:…her master, Charles Ardinburgh…[moved into a ] new house, which he had built for a hotel, soon after the decease of his father. A cellar, under this hotel, was assigned to his slaves, as their sleeping apartment—all the slaves possessed of both sexes, sleeping (as quite common in a state of slavery) in the same room. She carries in her mind, to this day, a vivid picture of this dismal chamber; it’s only lights consisting of a few pines of glass, through which she thinks the sun never shone… and the space between the loose boards of the floor, and the uneven earth below, was often filled with mud and water, the uncomfortable splashings of which were as annoying as its noxious vapors must have been chilling and fatal to health… Both sexes and all ages, sleeping on those damp boards…she wonders not at the rheumatisms, and fever-sores, and palsies, that distorted the limbs and racked the bodies of those fellow-slaves in the after-life… so much to any innate or constitutional cruelty of the master… that inherited the habit among slaveholders, of expecting a willing and intelligent obedience from the slave, because he is a MAN—at the same time everything belonging to the soul-harrowing system does its best to crush the last vestige of a man within him; and when it is crushed, and often before, he is denied the comforts of life, on the plea that he knows neither the want nor the use of them, and because he is considered to be little more or little less than a beast… [Isabella] was often surprised to find her mother in tears, and when, in her simplicity, she inquired, ‘Mau-mau, what makes you cry?’ she would answer, ‘Oh, my child, I am thinking of your brothers and sisters that have been sold away from me.’”And if the selling of her brothers and sisters weren’t bad enough, soon Isabella and her remaining brother, Peter, would find themselves on the same auction block as their siblings years earlier. Ms. Truth describes the experience of being on the auction block saying:A slave auction was a terrible affair to its victims, and its incidents and consequences are graven on their hearts as with a pen of burning steel. At this memorable time, Isabella was struck off, for the sum of one hundred dollars, to one John Nealy, of Ulster County, New York…she was now nine years of age… she says with emphasis, “Now the war begun” … Then she suffered ‘terribly—terribly,’ with the cold. During the winter her feet were badly frozen, for want of proper covering. They have her a plenty to eat, and also a plenty of whippings. One Sunday morning, in particular, she was told to go to the barn; on going there, she found her master with a bundle of rods, prepared in the embers, and bound together with cords. When he tied her hands together before her, he gave her the most cruel whipping she was ever tortured with. He whipped her till the flesh was deeply lacerated, and the blood streamed from her wounds—and the scars remain to the present day, to testify to the fact.Frederick Douglas testified to Ms. Truth’s claims of barbaric physical abuse during slavery in his book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, stating that:Master, however, was not a humane slaveholder… He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rendering shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.Douglas referred to slavery as “hell” that he couldn’t begin to describe in words. Now, imagine your babies being snatched out of your arms and then sold to the highest bidder for you to never see again. Picture screaming and begging for your little one to be returned to you, falling to the floor, only for your pleas to go unheard. This was a regular experience for many slaves, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. Douglas tells of his experience being taken from his mother, saying:My mother was named Harriet Bailey… [she was] colored and quite dark. My father was a white man… My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.Beatings to a bloody pulp and being separated from mothers and fathers doesn’t sound quite like embellishments to me. However, for a white woman, who obviously has no knowledge or even a basic understanding of what slavery was like for black people, to sit and suggest that their experiences are “embellishments” is disgusting and a perfect exemplification of white privilege. Just Pearly Things has the privilege of basking in the comforts of her white experience where she’s always been protected from the myth of imminent harm by the big black buck. White men have perpetrated some of the cruelest acts of beatings, lynching, castrations, homoeroticism and cannibalism against black men and women, to not only gain control of black people, but also to protect the white woman from imagined injury. In his book, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture, Vincent Woodard details the horrible events of male rape and cannibalism during slavery, stating:Black exposed bodies allowed whites to entertain the idea that Blacks are the lady of the races or passive subjects to the aggressive will and ways of Europeans… But between the Slave masters and overseers existed the secrecy of human consumption and homoeroticism; acts that were considered dishonorable and against the rituals of white social etiquette. This secrecy manifested into an unspoken code of silence designed to preserve white male honor… The consumption of human blood and flesh was a common practice perpetrated during slavery by white slave masters. The origins of human consumption could be dated back to the first interactions between coastal Africans and white colonizers. In Africa, the encounters of cannibalism with white Christian ministers spread the reality and belief that the church, traders, and European imperialists serves as an institutionalized venue of cannibalism and resource consumption.During the Renaissance and Victoria eras people ingested the human tissue of executed criminals as a tonic or medicine. Reverend Edward Taylor was a New England practitioner whose dispensary included remedies made from human blood, flesh, and other human body parts.Despite denying cannibalism, slaves and ex-slaves have documented accounts of white male consumption of black flesh during slavery in several narratives, journals, diaries, black newspapers published in the 19th century, speeches, sermons, testimonies, autobiographies during the Antebellum period, accounts witnessed by white abolitionists, interviews, and advertisements for runaway slaves.Nat Turner, an African American slave who led a two-day slave revolt—causing the death of 60 white men, women, and children, was caught and his body was boiled, and his oil saved and sold as a remedy for medicinal purposes called Nat’s Grease. His life and political legacy represent one of the most graphic documented cases of white acquired tastes for black flesh and harvesting body parts. Black residents in Southampton, Virginia maintained oral records of whites who tried to coerce them into eating Nat’s boiled flesh and internal organs. Black people being eaten during slavery is an unspoken truth that shines a light on just how depraved and barbaric the system of slavery was. Yet, in 2023, a white woman feels comfortable sitting with a proud white supremacist and saying that slavery was “embellished to control people”. The only control of people that is very conspicuous is that of the patriarchal white supremacist capitalist system that she benefits from. And to think that at one point, her ancestors ate and raped black men, essentially claiming it was “white male codes of honor and self-glorification”. Homoeroticism was so prevalent during slavery that it’s no wonder, “many enslaved black men questioned their masculinity and even being a man altogether. The confusion caused many to resort to adopting the gender and identity of black and white women,” hence the significant number of men that identify as part of the LBGTQ community. Vincent Woodard tells us:Among themselves, black men held each other to a strict code of masculinity that entailed never being sexual subjects and defining their masculine relationship to another through the protection of black women. They emphasized radical masculinity, and traditional structures of black family, reproduction, gender and sexuality. So, to be sexually violated meant automatic consumption of his soul. He is then undignified and emasculated as a man. Some of the most popular black activists and ex-slaves have been raped by white men including Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, James Baldwin, W.E.B. Dubois, and Booker T. Washington. Vincent tells a story of a West African man named Joseph Lavallee who was captured by the French and wrote a book about the colonial homosexual relationships between Africans and Europeans. In the book, protagonist, Itanoko, was on a ship where the entire white crew were fascinated by the size of his penis and physique and raped him.There are infinite stories of black people telling their experiences of abuse and trauma during slavery. I assure Just Pearly Things and anyone else who believes that the reality of slavery is at any point embellished. It doesn’t need any extra drama or horror for neither control nor ‘clout’ but can Just Pearly Things say the same thing. And if that isn’t uncanny enough, some black men actually disregard her comments as racist and even agree with them. But there is a rich history and a wealth of analysts that have written books explaining the black man’s obsession with the white woman. It doesn’t matter if these women express their racist attitudes about black people, some black men have disassociated themselves from the black collective, and therefore, have no qualms with her racist views. Here are some of the comments that black men have made condoning Just Pearly Things opinions. I acquired these from the comment section of YouTube content creator, Anthony Brian Logan, and from Twitter: So, you see, there are so many black men who will protect racist white women but berate and leave black women to defend themselves. Just Pearly Things also has a black co-host named King Richez, who normally has no problem expressing his white supremacist attitude about black women, and of course he’s with a white woman. He came out with a video essentially defending her and making excuses for her racism. He claimed that she was ignorant and didn’t know what she was saying, which is insulting because she knew exactly what she was saying. However, she didn’t expect the level of backlash that she received for saying it. But King Richez’s attempt to save an ignorant racist white woman as if she’s a damsel in distress is very typical of many black men. As a matter of fact, most black men have accepted America’s definition of his experience and see themselves as the white men they could never be. They don’t necessarily say this to themselves or anyone else, but it’s innate in them and they don’t care enough to recognize it. What’s more, it doesn’t help that at one point in history, not only did the white man have unlimited access to black women, by force and voluntarily, but black men were legally and forcefully outlawed from having any dealings with white women. This made them more determined to acquire white women and once they reached their goal, they felt like an accomplished man. With their new manhood and white women on their arms, black men accepted everything that came with having those women, even to their own detriment. She could do no wrong in his eyes, and he justified her disrespect and racism by being delusional, convincing himself that her beliefs didn’t apply to him. Michele Wallace perfectly describes how this country molded the black man’s desire to imitate and acquire white flesh in her book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, saying:America had made one point painfully clear. As long as the black man did not have access to white women, he was not a man. The lynching, murders, beatings, the miscegenation laws designed to keep the black man and the white woman apart while the white man helped himself to black women, created in him a tremendous sense of personal urgency on this matter. America had not allowed him to be a man. He wanted to be one. What bothered America the most? The black man and the white woman. Therefore, if he had a white woman, he would be more of a man. And as it became more and more apparent that white America would regard any serious bid for social, economic, and political equality as a declaration of full-scale war, the white woman/black man version of freedom began to make a great deal of sense… Come 1966, the black man had two pressing tasks before him: a white woman in every bed and a black woman under every heel.It doesn’t matter that many white women entertain black men because of their fetish for black flesh. Most of these women don’t love, respect, or appreciate blackness in any capacity. They envy black women and believe black men are inferior to not only them, but to their white men as well. However, this doesn’t stop white women from sexing and procreating with black men. Michele Wallace tells us:Some white women were quite blunt: They wanted black cock because it was the best cock there was. Educated, middle-class liberal white men…seemed to feel it was their duty to condone relationships between white women and black men because that would mean they weren’t racist. Even the lower-class white man tended to simply look the other way…. And black women made no attempt to disguise their anger and disgust… Some black women would laugh low in their throats when they saw a black man with a white woman and make cracks about his high-water pants or his flat head or his walk, anything that might suggest that he was inadequate: “Only the rejects crawl for white pussy.”Many white women even treat their biracial children like toys or pets, wanting them only for their curly hair and tanned skin. They have no desire to teach them anything about their black heritage, and most times emphasize their racist views to the child about their disdain for blackness, shattering their self-esteem and confidence. And the black men who do stick around to raise the biracial kids have nothing to do with his own blackness, and therefore, leave the children to navigate the world as half black people on their own. Many black people don’t consider biracial people black enough and white people wouldn’t dare consider them white, so they’re left confused with identity issues.The fact is that most black men and white women share the same attitudes about blackness, especially as it relates to black women. But we listen as many black men give their unsubstantiated reasons as to why they prefer white women. Michele Wallace describes their excuses, saying, “Black men often could not separate their interest in white women from their hostility towards black women. “I can’t stand that black bitch,” was the way it was usually put. Other black men argued that white women gave them money, didn’t put them down, made them feel like men.”Regardless, many black men weren’t offended by Just Pearly Things offensive opinions, but others were. Not only did other black men and women condemn her racism, but many whites did as well. And because the uproar was so extreme, Just Pearly Things did what white racists do when they’re in damage control mode, and came out with a video, reading an apologetic script that didn’t seem genuine at all. She appeared as if she was indifferent and wasn’t truly apologetic. This is most likely because the black men that follow her aren’t going anywhere, and she knows this. Those that agree with or condone her disgusting attitude about slavery being “embellished to control people” possess white supremacist patriarchal mindsets. And white supremacists argue that slavery was a necessary institution for the betterment and sufficiency of the white race. Therefore, if you’re a black man with these racist beliefs, it’s no wonder that you can comfortably assume the mantle of indignity, and still follow and support a privileged, entitled, ignorant white woman like Just Pearly Things. Resources Used for this Article Sojourner Truth The Narrative of Sojourner Truth Shop for Book Frederick Douglas The Narrative of Frederick Douglas Shop for Book Vincent Woodard The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture Shop for Book Michele Wallace Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman Shop for Book