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

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.

Donald Yacovone’s Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity, his ninth book, will be published in the fall of 2022. Yacovone is the lifetime Associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His book, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, co-written with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., won the 2014 NAACP Image Award. He is the recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois medal, Harvard’s highest honor in the field of African American studies. Yacovone earned a Ph.D. at the Claremont Graduate University and has taught at several colleges and universities. He helped edit the Black Abolitionist Papers, and before becoming the Manager of Research and Program Development at the Hutchins Center, Yacovone was the Senior Associate Editor of Publications at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where he founded and edited the Massachusetts Historical Review.  He has written widely on abolitionism, gender, the African American role in the Civil War, white supremacy, and American cultural history.

Introduction xi
 
1. The Contours of White Supremacy 3
 
2. “The White Republic Against the World”: The Toxic Legacy of John H. Van Evrie 40
 
3. From “Slavery” to “Servitude”: Initial Patterns, 1832 to 1866 82
 
4. The Emancipationist Challenge, 1867 to 1883 117
 
5. Causes Lost and Found, 1883 to 1919 163
 
6. Educating for “Eugenocide” in the 1920s 215
 
7. Lost Cause Victorious, 1920 to 1964 236
 
8. Renewing the Challenge 277
 
Epilogue 311

Notes 329

Bibliography of Textbooks 393

Index 403

Illustration Credits 429