It's time to revisit America's heroic creation myth and what really happened in 1776, author-historian tells Salon

With a sweeping and widely praised new essay on reparations in the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has challenged Americans to reconsider how they view their country’s history and to place the influence of white supremacy front and center. Rather than imagine the damages inflicted against African-Americans by white supremacy as having occurred mainly during the antebellum period, Coates asks us to recognize how Jim Crow in the South and redlining in the North denied black people the means to build real, stable lives for themselves, directly explaining the disproportionate poverty we still see in the African-American community today.

Yet as penetrating as Coates’ essay may be, a new book from University of Houston professor Gerald Horne would have our revision of our own history stretch back even further — to the very founding itself. In “The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America,” Horne marshals considerable research to paint a picture of a U.S. that wasn’t founded on liberty, with slavery as an uncomfortable and aberrant remnant of a pre-Enlightenment past, but rather was founded on slavery — as a defense of slavery — with the language of liberty and equality used as window dressing. If he’s right, in other words, then the traditional narrative of the creation of the U.S. is almost completely wrong.

Salon recently spoke with Horne about his book, why the conventional story of the U.S. founding has been so widely accepted, and what this new view of the American Revolution might mean for those still fighting white supremacy today. Our conversation is below and has been lightly edited for clarity and length.