My Parents, the Propaganda Dealers
When my Black parents decided to sell racist memorabilia online, they saw it not as exploitation, but as the achievement of the American dream
I grew up around racist memorabilia from the Jim Crow era. It was sort of the family business.
Both of my parents are Black, but I was raised to approximate whiteness. My immigrant mother taught herself English watching soap operas and worked multiple shifts at the most American of places, McDonald’s. Just a year before my birth, in 1987, my mother was a night-shift line cook at the Fort Lauderdale Beach McDonald’s, where she met my father, a former Marine turned beachfront security guard. They got married, had me and my brother, raised us to be bright, articulate, and clean, then set to achieving the American dream in the most American of ways: profiting off of the exploitation and dehumanization of Black Americans.
In December 1997, my parents incorporated their book business, pivoting away from in-person book fairs for sales in favor of a digital storefront — the first of its kind on the shiny new internet. The early internet was one of message boards, and as such, collectors and sellers connected via boards, using short text posts to describe what was being sold and how much for. My father, who…
