From “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future” by Robert P. Jones
As I’ve continued my reeducation journey over the last ten years, I have come to consider the Doctrine of Discovery as a kind of Rosetta Stone for understanding the deep structure of the European political and religious worldviews we have inherited in this country. The Doctrine of Discovery furnished the foundational lie that America was “discovered” and enshrined the noble innocence of “pioneers” in the story we white Christian Americans have told about ourselves. It animated the religious and cultural worldview that delivered Europeans to these shores far before 1619. Ideas such as Manifest Destiny, America as a city on a hill, or America as a new Zion all sprouted from the seed that was planted in1493. This sense of divine entitlement, of European Christian chosenness, has shaped the worldview of most white Americans and thereby influenced key events, policies, and laws throughout American history.
The white male leaders of the thirteen British colonies began their 1776 Declaration of Independence from the British Crown with these inspirational words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” But just thirty lines down – in this document marking the year Trump and many conservatives want to hold up as exemplary of the nation’s character at its origin – the Doctrine of Discovery rears its head. The British colonists complain that King George III has encouraged slave rebellions (“domestic insurrections amongst us”) and speak of Native Americans as “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and condition.” As for self-evident truths, and the rights following from them, these principles were compatible at the time not only with such views of Indigenous people but also with the continued enslavement of African Americans and the exclusion of women from democratic participation.