It only makes sense that I didn’t know this additional origin of the term “motherfucker” until recently because we are in a country where one can live to be an old man without ever hearing of the Red Summer of 1919. Red Summer, an exceptionally long and ugly season, had little to do with the communist scare, the decades-long J. Edgar Hoover-driven Red Scare that was the rationale for cracking down on workers’ rights. The red of the summer of 1919 was the blood spilled in over 36 American cities in pogroms against blacks, many of them returning veterans from World War One, the War to end War (and make the world safe for democracy). You know, as enraged citizen mobs do from time to time in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And so I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the plausible description of the supremely flexible term motherfucker that my father laid on me as a boy was only part of the inflammatory word’s origin story. After the year 1807, when the “importation of such persons as the states shall see fit to admit” via the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the plantation system labor market would have to be replenished by native slaves reproducing so their monetized children could be sold.

So we learn of breeding farms, where these slave selling motherfuckers would force slaves to have sex with each other, to impregnate the females and produce more human capital. The men who ran these farms didn’t give a damn what degree of relation there might have been between the slaves, anymore than they would have considered the ancestry of a goat or other farm animal they were breeding, as long as they were of sturdy stock. More than one female slave was forced lie with her own child, in order to produce new baby slaves. A strong slave man would be forced to have sex with his own mother, to produce offspring his masters could sell. Who is the actual motherfucker in this scenario, is not hard to reckon.

This is a horror story, though true, documented and painful, that must, according to the faithful of MAGA world, never be discussed among today’s innocent, white, Christian school children. To force it on them is as evil as once upon a time forcing a young man to have sex with his own mother! That’s why we made it illegal in several states, so far, to teach this horrific racial, uh, stuff.

Jesus, it is so hard not to hate the present day evil motherfuckers who perpetrate this brazen, shameful erasure of vast, destructive, evil crimes that went on, with perfect legality, for generations. Ah, anyway, at the risk of seeming righteously angry, fuck those motherfuckers.