Have y’all ever heard of Ona Judge?
She was an enslaved Black woman who escaped from George Washington’s presidential household in 1796.
Lemme say that again for the people in the back: Ona Judge ran from the household of the white man this country calls the “Father of the Nation.” And she did not run because Washington was “complicated.” She ran because she knew exactly what kind of rotten degenerate the man was.
When the Washingtons were preparing to leave Philadelphia and return to Virginia, Ona Judge understood what awaited her if she went back. She said, “I should never get my liberty.” And she said she would rather “suffer death than return to Slavery & liable to be sold or given to any other person.”
Listen to what the ancestor said, Y’all. I WOULD RATHER DIE THAN GO BACK TO GEORGE WASHINGTON’S HOUSEHOLD!
Now, what does that tell you about life inside this man’s so-called respectable home? What does that tell you about his plantation? His power? His character? His so-called “greatness?”
Ona Judge gave us the best review of George Washington’s household that history could ever produce. This woman risked her life to escape it and spent the rest of her days refusing to go back even as Washington obsessively tried to hunt her down. When she was later asked if she regretted running away, she said, “No. I’m free.”
So when people ask whether Washington’s slaveholding negates his so-called “greatness,” maybe they should ask the Black woman who ran from that “greatness” and never looked TF back.
And then imagine what would happen if we asked the hundreds of other Black people Washington owned. Imagine if we asked the men he worked, the women he controlled, the children born into his ledger, the families he separated, the fugitives he hunted, the mouths he fed just enough to keep producing, the bodies he whipped and treated as property until death or escape. Imagine if we asked the enslaved people owned by Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and all the other degenerate Founding Fathers whose “greatness” depends on keeping Black testimony out of the room.
What if we stopped beginning the American story with white men in wigs talking about liberty and started with the Black people they held in bondage while they said it? What if the first voice in the founding narrative was not Washington crossing the Delaware, but Ona Judge saying she would rather suffer death than return to his household?
Then maybe we would stop calling these men “complicated” and start calling them what they were: human traffickers and monsters.
Now, take a deep breath and flash forward 230 years with me.
We are on the eve of the 250th anniversary of this country. The nation is draping itself in flags, fireworks, museum exhibits, school programs, documentaries, presidential speeches, and patriotic pageantry. We are about to be force-fed another round of founding-father worship at the very moment states are banning books, gutting Black history, attacking teachers, sanitizing slavery, and pretending that telling the truth about racism is some kind of national betrayal. And right on cue, here comes the respectable liberal version of the same old American lie.
Listen to the recent words of former president Barack Obama:
“And that’s why it’s possible for me to be a great admirer of George Washington and also acknowledge he was a slave holder. And that does not negate his greatness. It simply acknowledges that there’s a profound deep flaw in these founding fathers who were also geniuses and gave us these tools. We’re just true of all of us, right? It’s true of every president. We’re this mixed bag. We’ve got contradictions.”
Umph.
“Deep flaw.” “Geniuses.” “Mixed bag.” “Contradictions.”
That kind of language is profoundly disrespectful to Ona Judge and every enslaved Black person who had to survive these so-called contradictions. Imagine looking at a woman who said she would rather suffer death than return to George Washington’s household and calling the man who hunted her a “genius” and a “mixed bag.” Owning human beings, extracting their labor, raping them, controlling their children, selling their relatives, whipping and torturing their bodies, and pursuing them when they ran for freedom is not a “contradiction.” That is a crime against humanity!
The ancestors did not endure the auction block, the lash, hunger, surveillance, the theft of their children, and the terror of being hunted down so we could sit here in 2026 and call their tormentors some goddamn “geniuses” with “contradictions.” How dare anybody fix their lips to ask the dead to scoot over and make room for the reputation of the men who owned them.
I am sick and tired of of this liberal habit of laundering brutality and evil into “complexity” and treating slavery like some unfortunate footnote attached to otherwise noble men. Noooo. Slavery was not a side issue. It was not a regrettable blemish. It was not a little historical mildew on a marble statue. It was the organizing crime of these founding father’s lives and this country writ large.
Owning hundreds of other human beings was not a “flaw.” It did not make Washington “complicated” or just “a man of his time.” It made him an evil demon with a rotten soul. He was a man who chose, every day, for 56 years, to profit from stolen labor, terror, reproduction, captivity, family separation, and human trafficking.
For fifty-six years, Y’all.
That is not a moral blind spot or a bad chapter buried in an otherwise admirable life. That is a lifetime commitment to domination.
Washington’s wealth, comfort, household, plantation, status, and political mythology rested on Black bondage. The food on his table, the clothes on his back, the land beneath his feet, the horses, the crops, the parties, the correspondence, the “statesmanship,” the polished image of republican virtue . . . all of it was made possible by Black people who could be whipped, sold, hunted, raped, separated from their children, and worked until their bodies gave out.
So lemme ask Y’all . . . what are we supposed to admire?
That he helped found a nation while denying the humanity of the people who made his life possible? That he preached liberty while keeping Black people in chains? That he became the “father of his country” by treating actual Black fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and children as assets?
And while we are here, let’s talk about his rotten-ass teeth and how his dentures were fashioned from his slaves’ teeth. That’s right! Black people at Mount Vernon were so trapped inside his depraved economy of domination that even their mouths became extractable property.
Y’all call this “greatness?”
Now listen, I understand what Obama is trying to do. He is trying to hold contradiction. He is trying to resist simplistic history. He is trying to tell Americans that we can acknowledge evil without throwing the whole national story away. But the problem is that Black people are always being asked to make room for the humanity of enslavers while enslavers made no room for ours. We are always being told to admire the architecture of a house built on bones. We are told to appreciate the Constitution, the republic, the offices, the speeches, the “vision,” the “genius,” the “framework,” the “experiment.” Meanwhile, the history of Black suffering keeps getting treated like a footnote under somebody else’s so-called greatness.
As this country approaches its 250th anniversary, the demand for this kind of nuance is going to get louder. The museums, politicians, pundits, and patriotic influencers will tell us to honor the founders while admitting, in the softest possible voice, that they “fell short” while they owned people, sold people, and hunted people. They built fortunes, plantations, banks, churches, universities, and political dynasties from the captivity of Black human beings. I don’t know about Y’all, but that don’t sound like falling short to me. It sounds like evil to me.
This conversation isn’t just about George Washington. It is about whether this country gets to keep calling human traffickers “great” because their victims were Black. It is about whether Black suffering has any moral weight in American memory. It is about whether enslaved people’s lives are finally enough to disqualify their enslavers from worship.
When people insist on “nuance” for enslavers, what they are really saying to our ancestors is this: Your suffering is not enough to cancel this white man’s greatness. Yes, he owned your body, stole your labor, controlled your children, terrorized your family, hunted your kin, and built his legacy off your bondage. But please understand, he also had political ideas white people find important.
That is obscene!
We need to stop sprinkling nuance over evil. George Washington was a human trafficker and a racist monster. You cannot own people, sell people, rape people, brutalize people, hunt people, profit from people, steal their children and their futures, and then get polished into a marble saint because you wore a uniform and gave hypocritical speeches about liberty.
Black people are not required to admire the architecture of a house built on bones. And if any of this offends you more than slavery does, then that tells me everything I need to know about your rotten soul.
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