From “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future” by Robert P. Jones
This book began with my interest in the ways the Black Lives Matter movement, which erupted into virtually all areas of American public consciousness in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, was strengthening the work of historical truth-telling, healing, and justice at the local level. But as I spent time in Mississippi, Minnesota, and Oklahoma, I came to realize that a full understanding of the contemporary currents could only come from a clearer knowledge of the tributaries that have fed them. Upstream from the stories of violence toward African Americans, in all three communities, were the legacies of genocide and removal of the land’s Indigenous peoples. Each of these communities – one in the heart of the South, one in the North, and one in the West – has a history of brutal exploitation of and violence toward the Indigenous people who were the original inhabitants of their region.
The murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Tallahatchie County flows from the killing and expulsion of Choctaws forced to walk the Trail of Tears from Mississippi. The lynching of three Black circus workers in Duluth is downstream from the mass executions of thirty-eight Dakota men and the exile of the Dakota people from Minnesota. The massacre of African American residents and the conflagration in Tulsa emanates from the murder and exploitation of both the Indigenous people of Oklahoma and the systematic oppression of the more than eighty thousand Native American refugees arriving from the Southeast during the “Indian removal” policies of the early 1880s.
This longer, interconnected perspective presents a better understanding of who and where we are. It eschews the naive innocence of 1776. And it avoids the myopic Black/white binary of 1619. Most importantly, by illuminating the different ways our communities have been fractured by the logic of the Doctrine of Discovery, it inverts the gaze. Rather than focusing on the oppression of African Americans or Native Americans, whose siloed histories in our telling rarely intersect, the focus turns to white Americans, a people whose story, at least in this part of the world, begins with an audacious claim that God intended America to be a new Euro-Christian promised land; and its corollary: that the systemic violence we have wielded to seize it is justified.