On White Supremacy
I could not write about democracy in the United States today without including the subject of white supremacy. But before I begin, let’s agree that humans, through the millennia, have always attempted to subjugate each other, in one form or another, and for some of the most ridiculous reasons, melanin levels being just one. It’s a habit hard to keep in check, even with the recent enlightening arguments given to us during the Age of Reason. So maybe it was our intransigence that caused the founders of this country to put their goals in writing, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Easy for them to say. The vexing problem was, when they wrote the U.S. Constitution, the writings excluded people that were not quite light-skinned enough. Blacks were not even mentioned, and referred to only as “three-fifths of all other Persons”, a compromise necessary at the time because southern planters needed to boost their numbers in Congress (Kids: See Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution), and did so deftly, without mentioning the “S” word (slavery). And the indigenous population, those who had lived here for thousands of years and developed complex cultures prior to European colonization? Well, they weren’t even counted.
What would eventually become the United States was formally announced to the world in 1776. In more recent years there are those who would insist that the seminal event that made us who we are as a nation occurred over one hundred and fifty years earlier, in 1619, when some Virginia colonists bargained with English traders to acquire twenty or so black Africans who had little say in the transaction. Extant records referred to them as “servants”, not enslaved, but regardless of terminology, they were some of the first of their color to become part of an unpaid work force. Thus began the establishment in the colonies of the importation of thousands of Africans against their will. And at least one historian argues that the reason it was so readily accepted and embraced dates back to even before Columbus’s famous voyages and has a religious aspect that deserves more attention.
It is hard for the contemporary mind to grasp the idea of humans discovering new lands on such a small over-populated planet as ours. One might have to conjure a scenario out of a Star Trek science fiction episode to do so. Let’s imagine Captain Kirk and his Enterprise crew landing on a planet inhabited by humanoid forms with whom they can communicate. But instead of their Prime Directive being to avoid any interference with the culture, their instructions are to exploit the native population and take anything of value, wiping them out if necessary, or taking them as prisoners to serve on board their spacecraft. The only exception to this Prime Directive is: If the newly discovered beings and their culture and technology is sufficiently advanced—or they have the ability to negotiate from power—then we treat them equally, exchange technologies, and embrace them as comrades, otherwise, all bets are off. That is not unlike what took place in 1452, forty years before Columbus’s lucky find, when Pope Nicholas V wrote a Prime Directive for Portuguese explorers of New Lands (and there were a lot more back then). It was called the Doctrine of Discovery (Dum Diversas), and it pretty much gave carte blanche to explorers. Read for yourself. It explicitly granted the following rights:
To invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens[Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.
Well, that about covers it. Want to guess how many Christians they found living in the New World? Not many. So everyone else was an “enemy of Christ” (at least until converted). So began the European invasion of the western continents under the imprimatur of the Church, with other countries such as Spain, France and England adopting the same approach to dealing with indigenous peoples of these new lands. The Prime Directive was pretty much, “These lands are now our lands. Join with us as a subjugated populace, or be executed.”
Operating from the understanding that it was under the protection of the Doctrine of Discovery (written by the hand of God, presumably) or a reasonably similar document (King Henry VII drafted one for John Cabot in 1496, specifically mentioning Christians), it must have been easy for conquerors to rationalize that it was God or Providence that sent them sailing across the Atlantic to spread His goodness. And woe be to those who got in the way. And so it came to be understood by many: Christians were meant to discover America. Is it any wonder that white Europeans back then thought they were supreme, with God riding shotgun? All they had to do was sell it to the natives and the help.
But it didn’t go quite so easy as that. The natives, after finally figuring out what these immigrants were up to, for the most part were incorrigible. They were used to living off the land; land that they thought was theirs. The liked their own religions and did not like the white man’s way. But they were overwhelmed. And they were moved out of the way. Or killed. And moved again. Or killed. And moved again. Black Africans, on the other hand, were transplants, having been ripped out of their cultures and placed in a foreign environment. To survive, they had to adapt; and adapt they did, as best as might be expected under such extreme and horrific conditions. There is no need to say any more about either the indigenous peoples or those brought here enslaved. There are many volumes written about the annihilation of indigenous peoples and the subjugation of enslaved people, if one can bear to read them.
And so is it any wonder that today, some believe this to be a Christian nation? But how is it that this strain of white supremacy continued, and seems to flourish today? Well, the virus of white supremacy that came over on the boats, whether it was under the aegis of Christianity or not, was not only allowed to spread, it was encouraged through education, for years, right up to the present. School textbooks offered myths about this country’s history that were received as truths. And most of us learned from history books that painted a picture of pioneers struggling “to tame the land.” To this day, efforts to teach a wider and more diverse history of the United States are being suppressed, and in some cases prohibited. Institutional racism has thrived, often with the help of the very government that was expected to at least protect, if not help all its people. Too often, white people have inflicted injury on themselves in efforts to assert white privilege. I’ve often marveled at the patience of these people who are so oppressed. Writer James Baldwin wrote:
“The American Negro has the great advantage of never having believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling; that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure.”
“Negroes know far more about white American than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.”
Many of us grew up here with some Christian religious instruction. In any denomination, the teachings of Christ were of forgiveness, and of love for our enemies, and helping one another, especially care for the poor or less fortunate. We are now seeing the rise of Christian Nationalists. More specifically, White Christian Nationalists, who rather than following Christ’s teaching, seem to prefer to go along with Pope Nicholas’s V scorched earth policy, that anyone who is not a white Christian is an “enemy of Christ”, and consequently an enemy of America. This thinking is antithetical to democracy. It also puts our country on a path toward a theocracy; a religious totalitarian system of government. Once we reach that point, we can sort out which one of the dozens of Christian divisions will have dominion over all the others. That, according to the history books I have read, never ends well.
Richard Waterman
The following sources offer additional information about the subject of white supremacy and white nationalism:
The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, by Robert P. Jones
Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity by Donald Yacovone
The Sum of Us by Heather McGee
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn