From “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America” by Joel Edward Goza
Since America’s inception, white supremacy has waged its war against hope by making racial injustice feel immutable. America’s founding generation understood that to give racial injustices the semblance of immutability, those injustices needed to seem to flow from innate racial differences. Dissecting the logic of racial sciences in the nineteenth century in The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter writes: “Innate qualities are needed to prove the justice – the naturalness and inalterability – of the status quo.” And it has been precisely this function – to make America’s racial hierarchy seem immutable, natural, unalterable – that racist ideas have played from the days of slavery to today. Once racial difference became innate in the minds of white America, white supremacy provided the racial paradigm that divided the nation along racial lines ever after. This history is the foundation of today’s racial crisis. Until that foundation is faced and repaired, all attempts to address today’s democratic and racial crises build upon a broken bedrock.