The field of epigenetics suggests that trauma can so profoundly affect our bodies that genetic markers are “placed” on our DNA. In this way the effects of trauma we experience can be passed on to subsequent generations, creating, according to Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry with a specialty in epigenetics, a “predisposition rather than an inevitable outcome.” They can also increase both an individual’s vulnerability and resilience. Either way, as she puts it, our traumatic “experiences lodge physiologically” and the effects of trauma endure.
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Since the end of the Civil War the thing most likely to incite white violence against Black people was the success of Black people. Giving Blacks full rights beyond the freedom that had grudgingly been granted them proved to be a bridge too far for many whites, and any steps Blacks took to avail themselves of those rights triggered swift and severe reprisals. It seems self-evident that the driver behind the essential reenslavement of Black people was Black prosperity.
The establishment of Black communities united by churches and benevolent societies, schools, and, most significantly, political organizations that resulted in real electoral power threatened the Southern ideal of white supremacy. And while Blacks understood the power of achieving literacy, whites understood the threat that literacy posed. Disrupting the spread of knowledge among the Black community became an important tactic in the project to reestablish and maintain the antebellum white social order in the postwar South. Because literacy rates were so low, educated Blacks often served in more than one leadership role. As Susan Opotow writes, “Violence by terrorist groups limited the ability of the black community to sustain an influential presence in Southern decision-making institutions, destroying a political and social movement by targeting the intelligentsia.” This strategy was called sophiacide, literally, the “killing of knowledge.”
Black prosperity was punished with relentless savagery. When Black soldiers returned home after World War I and World War II wearing their uniforms, proud to have served their country with honor, they were treated like a threat to the established racial hierarchy, because they were. While Black veterans expected that their having served would confer on them a certain respect, white people interpreted their expectation as arrogance. That a Black man would think himself equal to a white man could not be allowed to stand; Black veterans were beaten and lynched, their uniforms a visible reminder of their equality and an implicit rebuke to the white man’s false sense of superiority.
Black Americans had to try ten times as hard to achieve one-tenth as much, and Black people’s success even in the face of the obstacles placed before them was the greatest offense against white supremacy. It was also the most dangerous challenge to it. Mostly through violence but also through legislative means, whites impeded, undermined, and reversed Black advancement with complete impunity. Law enforcement was often involved or looked the other way.
The 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which has been called the nadir of race relations in this country, was a direct result of the white supremacist hatred of Black success. Fifteen years after it had been established by O. W. Gurley, a wealthy Black American from Alabama, Greenwood was a thriving, predominantly Black section of Tulsa with over ten thousand residents, dubbed “Negro Wall Street” by Booker T. Washington because of its successful businesses and affluent inhabitants. As Greenwood became more prosperous and populous, however, tensions with the neighboring white population simmered.
On May 31, 1921, white citizens finally found a reason to retaliate when Dick Rowland, a nineteen-year-old Black man, entered an elevator in a downtown building operated by a seventeen-year-old white girl named Sarah Page. We don’t know specifically what happened between them, but shortly after Rowland entered the elevator Page screamed. Knowing what assumptions might be made and what danger they would put him in, Rowland fled. When questioned by police, Page stated that Rowland did grab her arm, but she did not consider it an assault and she declined to press charges. Word that Rowland had indeed assaulted Page, however, got out into the larger white community and a manhunt ensued.
Rowland was arrested the next day and, due to a threat on his life, taken to a secure jail at the county courthouse. In short order a white mob formed outside. Black residents from Greenwood feared the worst, and approximately fifty men armed themselves and proceeded to the courthouse in the hope that they could keep Rowland safe. By the time they arrived, the crowd of white men had swelled to over a thousand. An altercation broke out when a white man attempted to take a Black man’s gun. The weapon accidentally discharged and all hell broke loose. Within minutes several Black men were lying dead in the street.
At dawn the next day, as many as fifteen hundred National Guardsmen, police officers, and the white mob, many of its members having been deputized by the police, streamed through Greenwood, looting and burning businesses and homes. By the time it was over, three hundred Black people had been murdered, some of them shot in the back or burned to death, and the neighborhood had been razed.
Blacks who survived were placed in internment camps. Thirty-five square blocks had been destroyed and the equivalent of thirty-two million dollars lost. When the smoke cleared it was as if Greenwood had never existed. For decades, history failed to record that the massacre itself had happened. Newspaper accounts were never transferred to microfilm. Books made no mention of it. Even eyewitnesses kept silent—white participants out of shame, and Black victims out of a desire to spare their children the fear and pain they had experienced.
This was not the first or the last racially motivated mass murder in this country: Black men, women, and children were murdered frequently, usually without consequence to the murderers. In fact, there were thirty-four documented massacres during Reconstruction alone and at least twelve between 1908 and 1923, with four in 1919. But what happened in Tulsa was emblematic of the intense racial animosity felt by whites and the backlash Blacks could expect for having the audacity to thrive.
On either side of the divide, we carry these holocausts with us in the present and into the future, whether as a victim or—either through identification or benefit—the guilty.
The assault on rights was inexorable, the terror and violence unceasing, and the value of what was stolen beyond measure, yet white America still refuses to acknowledge the harm done even to the perpetrators, let alone the victims. By that I don’t mean to excuse or absolve their behavior or in any way equate the suffering of the two groups. Rather, it’s important to highlight the necessity of identifying what went wrong on the individual, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and societal levels that caused people to behave so monstrously and feel justified in doing so to the extent that they kept letting themselves and each other off the hook.
In many of these cases, but by no means all of them, we know the names of the victims, but the perpetrators, the ordinary men who committed these barbaric crimes, and the white women who enabled them, suffered no consequences and instead, proud of what they had done or participated in or witnessed, went home to their families and lived out their lives without legal consequence. Sometimes the wives of these men accompanied them to the lynchings, complicit in their crimes, and sometimes their children came, too, witnesses to monstrosities against other human beings committed in the name of whiteness, which they were taught to celebrate. In photographs, whether of lynchings or of scenes of forced school integration, I look at the faces of the white children. Some seem confused. Sometimes their faces are brightened by smiles or contorted with rage and loathing. Not infrequently they look afraid. How many of these children grew up to espouse their parents’ white supremacy, as James Eastland did? How many, traumatized by violence and the glorification of it, grew up permanently damaged?
CHAPTER 6
We Hold These Truths
Despite the centuries-long project to prove otherwise, and as much as many of us still believe otherwise, there is no truth to the myth of white superiority. That fact, unfortunately, is irreleva
nt in the context of the power inherent in the racial hierarchy white people have built. White supremacy is an increasingly powerful construct that spins a narrative designed to confer power on whites and deny it to Blacks. It teaches whites across generations that their race confers upon them significant advantage and prestige. The theories upon which these beliefs are based are utter nonsense. The advantages, however, are quite real.
Given that white supremacy seemingly runs through every strand of fabric from which this country has been woven, it’s understandable that one might conclude that it is a uniquely American phenomenon. It was brought to the Northeast coast by the Puritans, however, along with their stringent brand of Reformation Protestantism known as Calvinism. In search of freedom to worship, for themselves if not for anyone else, the original settlers of what would eventually be called New England embraced concepts of whiteness, white superiority, and Protestantism as fiercely as they embraced Calvin’s theology.
While the Reformation in general represented a turning away from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and all the advances in science, intellectual exploration, and art they represented—anything that was not aligned with biblical teachings—John Calvin’s insistence upon the totality of this rejection and the righteousness of his own cause bordered on, or crossed into, the fanatical. (He once claimed that proponents of the heliocentric model of the universe exhibited “monstrousness” and that “the devil possesses them,” simply because they thought the Earth moved through space—which it does.)
Calvin’s doctrine of predestination posited that only a select few have been chosen by God for salvation, and everybody else, regardless of the quality of the mortal lives they lead, is condemned to eternal damnation. The belief that good works have no impact on the disposition of one’s soul might have influenced the development of the character of the future American. It also might explain, at least in part, the enduring myth of rugged individualism that continues to plague us. When people searched for clues to their divine fate, the conclusion was drawn (probably by people of means) that material wealth was the most obvious sign of God’s mercy. Not much about this assumption had changed by the time Fred Trump began to espouse Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking” in the 1950s, and not much has changed since then.
By contrast, poverty marked you out as one of the damned. It was through this lens that slavery came to be seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy of Black inferiority. Enslavement was the destiny of the enslaved and the clearest sign that Blacks were not deserving of God’s grace. In this way slavery and the genocide of Native Americans could both be accepted and, as a result, Black labor could be believed to have no value, existing only as something to be taken with impunity by their white “owners.”
When European explorers first touched down on these shores, there were as many as six hundred distinct tribes with advanced cultures and languages comprising approximately seven million people. The Europeans’ drive to conquer the land and spread their faith made them pitiless. The Puritans looked upon Native Americans as barbarians and savages to justify their wholesale slaughter. They were infidels against whom a holy war must be fought. And so it was, unceasingly, for decades. Only 225,000 survived into the twentieth century.
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In Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination, bell hooks neatly describes how “Black folks associated whiteness with the terrible, the terrifying, and the terrorizing.” This is an apt distillation of the way whites have structured society in order to prop up white supremacy. The myth of supremacy is an exercise in projection, which continues to be a powerful tool for whites in power and gestures at the reality that has been grounded in their perpetuation of a cycle of fear, control, and violence throughout generations.
For example, white people fear Blacks and the loss of power they would suffer if Blacks gained their autonomy. These fears created the need for control and the necessity of forming groups that can exercise that control. Under certain circumstances, control leads to violence and terrorism—for example, lynchings and KKK cross burnings. And when Blacks seek to protect themselves—as they did in numerous slave rebellions, during the Tulsa massacre, and in civil rights protests from the 1960s through today—whites then claim it is Blacks who are violent, which kicks the cycle off again.
Two things needed to happen in order for the colonists to rid the land of the natives and maintain an enormous population of enslaved Africans. First, both groups had to be “racialized.” Although hundreds of distinct native communities may have existed when the settlers first arrived, they were all placed into one racial category—Indian. The Africans, too, had come from diverse tribes and rich cultures, but they were distilled into the homogenous unit called Black.
Second, both of these daunting tasks demanded white unity. In order for this to be accomplished, wealthy white landowners had to make common cause with white indentured servants and poor laborers who actually had more to gain, from an economic perspective, by joining with Blacks. This potential alliance would endanger both the landowners’ wealth and the racial hierarchy, as white laborers in the South comprised 60 percent of the white population (while Blacks comprised 20 percent of the total population).
The historian Philip Rubio believes that unity across class lines was achieved because white laborers were bribed—whether through the promise of free land after the term of their servitude had expired or a reduction in poll taxes—by wealthy landowners. Either way, the overarching effect was the strengthening of white racial identity. Going forward, the white working class would remain committed to the cause of white power and privilege, from which they would continue to benefit. Over the centuries, more ways would be found to strengthen this commitment.
From the beginning, the colonists, and then white Americans, were united in their goal to keep enslaved Blacks under control. And white identity played an increasing role in American society and institutions.
The drive to purify the nation’s racial makeup continued with the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted immigration and naturalization to “free white persons.” It wasn’t until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was passed, 175 years later, that race, religion, and nationality were eliminated as bases for admission to the United States. Only when the Trump administration’s Muslim ban was signed by executive order in January 2017 was an interdiction once again placed on the immigration of nonwhites and non-Christians.
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While definitions of whiteness—or rather of who could be white—became more flexible throughout the twentieth century, being Black continued to remain a barrier to entry into white society and Black Americans continued to be barred from opportunities for prosperity.
After rioting during the Depression led to the legalization of unions, no anti-discrimination amendment was attached to the legislation because the AFL and CIO opposed it. For decades, whites would have job security as well as access to union-only jobs, and Blacks would have neither.
Although people don’t typically think of the G.I. Bill this way, Rubio describes it as “legislation that enhanced white supremacy.” While it provided government jobs, low-interest mortgages, and free college educations to white men who had served in the military during World War II, Black veterans were left out. The extent to which this widened even further the gap between white and Black wealth—in terms of education, real property and savings, and the success of future generations—is likely immeasurable.
“If the white race was invented in colonial America,” Rubio writes, “one could argue that it was reinvented with the post–World War Two suburbs.”
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The breadth and depth of Protestantism’s influence on American culture and politics gives the lie to the idea that America is “neutral in religious matters,” the First Amendment notwithstanding. Freedom of religion has typically meant freedom to practice Protestantism.
Puritans remained convinced past reason that their view was not just the ri
ght view but the only view. Any beliefs that deviated from theirs weren’t simply apostasy, they were ridiculous and not to be credited. Over time, the tenets of white supremacy and the Puritan worldview would become inextricably intertwined. And we’ve seen how dedicated this country has been to maintaining both.
The idea that America could be seen as God’s chosen land, providentially ordained to lead a world that would otherwise lapse into barbarism, carried with it an apocalyptic cast that would frame other battles. World War II and the Cold War were couched in terms of “good” and “evil.” Ronald Reagan’s 1983 reference to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world” implied that America was on the side of good in that fight—and that God was on our side.
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Since at least the nineteenth century, biological determinism—the idea that all science is objective (it is not) and that differences between groups are inherited—has been the basis for some of the most influential and self-serving theories about racial differences. From craniometry—the “science” of measuring skulls—to IQ testing, racist, pseudoscientific arguments have been used to measure white superiority and establish the inferiority of pretty much everybody else.
Social Darwinism was the inane theory that attempted to co-opt Darwin’s theory of evolution in an effort to demonstrate that the racial and social hierarchies were determined by the survival of the fittest. Very popular in America, social Darwinism was also used to justify the atrocities of genocide and slavery. Poverty and failure to succeed were seen as proof that those at the bottom deserved to be there. Wealth, on the other hand, was seen as an indicator of innate superiority, which explains why magnates like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie subscribed wholeheartedly to the theory.
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