The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy
and the Path to a Shared American Future
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4.7 • 9 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Bestseller
Taking the story of white supremacy in America back to 1493, and examining contemporary communities in Mississippi, Minnesota, and Oklahoma for models of racial repair, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy is “full of urgency and insight” (The New York Times) as it helps chart a new course toward a genuinely pluralistic democracy.
Beginning with contemporary efforts to reckon with the legacy of white supremacy in America, Jones returns to the fateful year when a little-known church doctrine emerged that shaped the way five centuries of European Christians would understand the “discovered” world and the people who populated it. Along the way, he shows us the connections between Emmett Till and the Spanish conquistador Hernando De Soto in the Mississippi Delta, between the lynching of three Black circus workers in Duluth and the mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota men in Makato, and between the murder of 300 African Americans during the burning of Black Wall Street in Tulsa and the Trail of Tears.
From this vantage point, Jones offers a “revelatory…searing, stirring outline” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) of how the enslavement of Africans was not America’s original sin but, rather, the continuation of acts of genocide and dispossession flowing from the first European contact with Native Americans. These deeds were justified by people who embraced the 15th-century Doctrine of Discovery: the belief that God had designated all territory not inhabited or controlled by Christians as their new promised land.
This “blistering, bracing, and brave” (Michael Eric Dyson) reframing of American origins explains how the founders of the United States could build the philosophical framework for a democratic society on a foundation of mass racial violence—and why this paradox survives today in the form of white Christian nationalism. Through stories of people navigating these contradictions in three communities, Jones illuminates the possibility of a new American future in which we finally fulfill the promise of a pluralistic democracy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this illuminating and erudite study, historian and religious studies scholar Jones (White Too Long) contends that the origins of American racism can be traced back to 1493, the year when, in response to Columbus's voyage to the "New World," the Catholic Church set out the Doctrine of Discovery, which asserted that Christian European culture was innately superior, and therefore Europeans had the right to settle and rule over other lands and their inhabitants. This edict, Jones argues, formed the legal basis for both Indigenous dispossession and African enslavement. Tracing the long arc of this white supremacist worldview, Jones surveys the entire sweep of post-Columbian history at the sites of three acts of 20th-century racial violence—the 1920 lynching of three Black men in Duluth, Minn.; the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma; and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi. He draws parallels between these episodes of anti-Black violence and the earlier history of Native American dispossession at these same sites: the mass execution of 38 Dakota men near Duluth in 1862, the mistreatment of forcibly resettled Indigenous refugees in Oklahoma beginning in the 19th century, and the expulsion of the Choctaw from Mississippi between 1830 and 1850. Arresting and deeply researched, this unique account brings to the fore the deep-rooted sense of "divine entitlement, of European chosenness" that has shaped so much of American history. It's a rigorous and forceful feat of scholarship.
