Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity - Hardcover

Yacovone, Donald

 
9780593316634: Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593316630 ISBN 13: 9780593316634
Verlag: Pantheon, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A powerful exploration of the past and present arc of America’s white supremacy—from the country’s inception and Revolutionary years to its 19th century flashpoint of civil war; to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter.
 
“The most profoundly original cultural history in recent memory.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

“Stunning, timely . . . an achievement in writing public history . . . Teaching White Supremacy should be read widely in our roiling debate over how to teach about race and slavery in classrooms." —David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History, Yale University; author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Donald Yacovone shows us the clear and damning evidence of white supremacy’s deep-seated roots in our nation’s educational system through a fascinating, in-depth examination of America’s wide assortment of texts, from primary readers to college textbooks, from popular histories to the most influential academic scholarship. Sifting through a wealth of materials from the colonial era to today, Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which this ideology has infiltrated all aspects of American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity.
 
Yacovone lays out the arc of America’s white supremacy from the country’s inception and Revolutionary War years to its nineteenth-century flashpoint of civil war to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter. In a stunning reappraisal, the author argues that it is the North, not the South, that bears the greater responsibility for creating the dominant strain of race theory, which has been inculcated throughout the culture and in school textbooks that restricted and repressed African Americans and other minorities, even as Northerners blamed the South for its legacy of slavery, segregation, and racial injustice.
 
A major assessment of how we got to where we are today, of how white supremacy has suffused every area of American learning, from literature and science to religion, medicine, and law, and why this kind of thinking has so insidiously endured for more than three centuries.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DONALD YACOVONE is a lifetime associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, the author or editor of nine books, the winner (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) of an NAACP Image Award for The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross in 2014, and a recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University in 2013.

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1 The Contours of White Supremacy
 
To the Caucasian race by reason of its physical and mental superiority, has been assigned the task of civilizing and enlightening the world.  —Samuel Train Dutton, The Morse Speller, 1896
 
 
Samuel Train Dutton was superintendent of schools in Brookline, Massachusetts, when he wrote the ever-popular Morse Speller, which enjoyed its thirteenth edition in 1903. For about half a century, however, he reigned as the nation’s leading authority on school administration and public education. He also had led New Haven, Connecticut’s schools, served as superintendent of New York City’s famed Horace Mann School, and had been named professor of school administration at Columbia University. At the time of his death in 1919, he was general secretary of the League of Nations’ World’s Court League, the founder and first secretary of New York’s Peace Society, and had been a member of the International Commission on the Balkan Wars. He also helped organize colleges in Turkey and China and chaired the Armenian and Syrian relief efforts. As the country’s leading educator at the beginning of the twentieth century, he also earned worldwide renown as a diplomat and philanthropist. For all his philanthropy and insistence that American schools teach about slavery and the Civil War, Dutton also asserted that schools must explain “how the ancient Egyptians differed from the Negro, and why.” Moreover, as he advised teachers, the failures of American missionaries had proved that Native Americans and Africans were fit only for manual labor training, the kind of education appropriate for the “heathen and the savage” as well as the “vicious and defective.” The white race must take up these responsibilities as its prime mission, Dutton declared in 1896. Such Northern-born leaders who dominated American educational thinking reflected the countless ways, both subtle and blatant, that white supremacy permeated the culture.
 
Many historians and commentators today understandably see slavery as the nation’s “original sin.” But slavery alone cannot account for the enduring nature of prejudice against African Americans and others who lacked the “whiteness” so highly valued by educators like Dutton. Groups from Native Americans to the Irish, and some English immigrants, had endured slavery or slavery-like conditions during the era of national development. English indentured servants, especially in colonial Virginia, at times could hardly be distinguished from slaves, as their masters did everything in their power to extend their terms of service and exploit their labor. In the ancient world, people we would now recognize as “white” endured slavery, even in England. And prior to the early nineteenth century, thousands of Europeans had become slaves of North Africans. The difference in North America is the unique combination of African American slavery and the simultaneous gradual development of democratic/republican principles. Determining who should participate in this dramatic and revolutionary process, repudiating the strictly class-based organization of European society, mandated an ideology of white supremacy and acceptance of it as normal and natural. The impact of that ideology is undeniable and defining. As the popular historian and commentator Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote over twenty years ago: “White Americans began as a people so arrogant in convictions of racial superiority that they felt licensed to kill red people, to enslave black people, and to import yellow and brown people for peon labor. We white Americans have been racist in our customs, in our conditioned reflexes, in our souls.” Borrowing from Herman Melville, Schlesinger confessed that in American history, “the world’s fairest hope” had been linked “with man’s foulest crime.”
 
Slavery, however, did not require racism to thrive. As a power relationship, it was an ancient institution whose benefits readily justified its means. Even John Locke, the seventeenth-century English theorist who so profoundly influenced the development of American liberty, agreed that slavery was fit punishment for captured enemies. One colonial Massachusetts judge even asserted that lawfully captured members of “Heathen Nations” could be justly enslaved. But in American colonial settlements with embryonic republican (and religious) ideas concerning rights and representation, unassailable qualifications for citizenship appeared necessary to guarantee success and justify those excluded. As Massachusetts judge John Saffin argued in 1701, God had set “different Orders and Degrees of Men in the World,” and any idea of universal equality would “invert the order that God had set.” Some were born to rule, and others were “born to be slaves, and so to remain during their lives.” Thus it proved more than an astonishing coincidence that both slavery and representative government were introduced in Virginia in the very same year. Ideas of ethnic or racial inferiority defined who could be trusted with citizenship—who would be the controlled race and who would be the controlling one, two ends of the same developing social and political contract. Each must be added to the political and social calculus to explain the unique development of American culture. But the ideology of white supremacy, not slavery, proved the more ubiquitous and more enduring institution. It became the standard by which citizenship was defined, and it determined who would prove worthy of power. White supremacy linked the Northern and Southern parts of the nation and distributed equal responsibility for slavery’s prolonged existence and the even longer life of racial repression. And it failed (temporarily) to uphold democratic society only when the nation could no longer agree on its parameters.
 
Rather than Southern slavery, however, it was Northern white supremacy that proved the more enduring cultural binding force, planted along with slavery in the colonial era, intensely cultivated in the years before the Civil War, and fully blossoming after Reconstruction. Inculcated relentlessly throughout the culture and in school textbooks, it suffused Northern religion, high culture, literature, education, politics, music, law, and science. It powerfully resurfaced after the Civil War and Reconstruction to reassert control over the emancipated slaves to become the basis for national reconciliation, exploded in intensity with renewed immigration in the 1920s and ’30s, and endured with diminishing force to the present day. It succeeded as the superstructure of democratic society by allowing normal political conflict to proceed with the assurance that the assumed dangerous mudsill class (once controlled by enslavement) could pose no threat to the social order. Hence democratic equality rested on racial inequality and malleable definitions of whiteness. Moreover, it offered something more alluring than wealth, more effective than politics, and far more appealing than education. For even the poorest of its adherents, indeed especially for them, white supremacy imparts a sense of uncontested identity and, as the American philosopher and social critic Susan Neiman wrote, an otherwise unattainable level of “dignity, simply for belonging to a higher race.”  The Rev. Henry M. Field, brother of the Supreme Court justice
Stephen J. Field, who helped decide the landmark 1896 Plessy v.
Ferguson case, had been born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The
so-called “color line,” he explained in 1890, “is not peculiar to one
section of the...

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Verlag
Pantheon
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593316630
ISBN 13 
9780593316634
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
464
Kontakt zum Hersteller
PANTHEON
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/

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