In Act V of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth internally grapples with the consequences of her murderous actions. Wracked with the guilt of committing horrors in the pursuit of power and ambition, she dreams about her culpability, scrubbing her hands over and over in a vain attempt to rid them of the blood she knows stains them. Nobody save her co-conspirators knows of her guilt, but she knows, and her mind won’t let her forget. “Out, damned spot!” She doesn’t try to rectify her actions and certainly hasn’t repented from them — she is only focused on trying to rid herself of the feel of her guilt that she has indelibly infused into her skin. But she will never be free.
The United States has a long pattern of revisionist storytelling, which is perplexing given its dedication to willfully committing atrocities to maintain power. Chattel slavery has been vigorously defended for centuries and was only restricted by force, due to fierce resistance at every step by Black people, and a minority of white people in positions of power who acted to change that trajectory. Predictably, many white people held up as champions of abolition, like Abraham Lincoln, openly spoke about their indifference, and even abhorrence, to the idea that Black people deserved equality and freedom. Yet the whitewashing machine paints Lincoln as an emancipator who championed freedom for enslaved Blacks, and the Confederate traitors as merely fighting for “states rights” even though they boldly told the world that the right they were fighting for was the right to forever enslave Black humans for financial and political power.
Black people in this country, dragged from our homelands, trafficked for hundreds of years, legislatively barred from reparations, or even equal compensation for toil and sacrifice serving this country, refuse to be washed away along with our history. Our buried and tortured bones float to the top of the United States’ cesspool of tyranny. Despite attempts to minimize the horrors perpetuated on us, to rewrite textbooks so the aggressors are the victims, to minimize 400 years of calculated abuse, and then to downplay our experience as a bland postscript that insists that we were “happy servants” – We rise. We rise and our blood is still on your hands.
White enslavers tore out most of the Bible so enslaved Black people would be deprived of any scriptures offering assurance about equality or encouragement to resist oppression from the god white people always claim to worship. White enslavers beat and raped enslaved Black men and women, and then read the sanitized blasphemy to their captives in church on Sundays, leaving fingerprints of red on every page. But the deceit of white slaveowners did not prevent enslaved Blacks from knowing the truth about their right to be free, or from keeping their minds stayed on freedom.
Likewise, removing photographs of the permanently-whip-scarred back of a formerly enslaved man named Peter from a museum does not erase his blood from the hands of the descendants of his abusers. They can still smell it and feel it, sticky and damning, and while they try to scrub that image from the museum and from the country’s memory, Peter stands there and stares at them, watching. In a rage, they destroy every evidence that condemns them with truth, and yet the afterimage is seared into the very molecules of the earth upon which they walk. His disfigured back shimmers in their nightmares, and they scrub and scrub and scrub their hands.
Lynching has a long and protected history in this country. On Sept. 16, 2025, 21-year-old Dematravion “Trey” Reed was found hanging in a tree at Delta State University in Mississippi. Like the last several hanging deaths of Black men in the US, it was immediately branded a suicide. Despite the dizzying speed at which police and other officials closed ranks to dismiss the family’s questions and deflect closer scrutiny, an independent autopsy will determine if Mississippi has more blood on their hands. Historically, Black lynchings were blamed on the behavior of the Black victim, and white lynchers went unpunished as no one was even looking for them. Even when the lynching of a Black man by a white man happens in front of the eyes of the entire world on video, the whitewashing machine turns that into the innocence of the white murderer and the guilt of the dead Black person. The lynchers and the white supremacists shake hands dripping in innocent blood and then go home and hug their own white children with those same hands. George Floyd stands and stares at them wherever they go.
How desperately white supremacists scrub and scrub at their bloody hands. Rebranding enslaved Black people as “servants” and the Black women white enslavers raped as “companions” does not remove the defilement from white hands, nor does putting up statues for white champions of chattel enslavement change who they really are. Claiming that brutality against Black people at the hands of white people in the U.S. for 400 years wasn’t that bad does not change the truth. It does not erase the documents signed by my fifth great-grandmother Rachel’s enslaver and father that doubled down on her enslavement. It does not erase his DNA from my blood, and it does not erase the generations of my family who are here because of him and his human trafficking.
What is happening now in this country is nothing new or even mildly creative. Throughout this country’s sordid history of willful victimization of Black bodies, white people have simultaneously worked to rid themselves of the stain of their continued barbarities. Congregations of Black spectres follow them everywhere they go, staring, truth blazing in their eyes. White supremacists throughout the land, from the poorest MAGA pattyroller to the most empowered politicians, can feel legions of Black spectres watching, always, inescapable witnesses to their racism.
White supremacists in the U.S. fear Black people because we cannot be erased. Our memories are long — one of the things white people could not prevent us from inheriting from our ancestors, no matter how hard they tried. Our very presence here is damning evidence that white people have and do perpetuate unforgivable and unforgettable horrors and inhumanity upon Black people on this soil and across the globe. And despite that, here we are, looking at you. SEEING you. Knowing the truth that you know and try to obscure with every lie and with every new-and-yet-old atrocity.
We are the bloody spot white Americans can never wash from their hands.
They wander, and hopelessly scrub and scrub their bloody hands. Out, damned spot.
Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton.