Tracing the Origins of American Racism as a Path to Healing
In “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy,” Robert P. Jones explores the harmful legacy of a 15th-century Christian doctrine used to justify expansion and colonization in the New World.
Published Sept. 5, 2023Updated Sept. 6, 2023
THE HIDDEN ROOTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY: And the Path to a Shared American Future, by Robert P. Jones
When Joe Biden became the first sitting U.S. president to use the term “white supremacy” — in a 2021 speech commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre — he gave voice to the views of countless other Americans who share his concern about the country’s often forgotten histories of racial violence.
“As painful as it is,” Biden said, “only in remembrance do wounds heal. We just have to choose to remember.” Coming one year after the killing of George Floyd, Biden’s remarks — like much of his presidency — have encouraged national reflection and reassessment.
Robert P. Jones’s stimulating new book, “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy,” examines a series of such reckonings. In lucid prose and evocative detail, he contextualizes these attempts at racial healing within a broader, and much older, history of injustice and moral failure, suggesting that in order “to understand who and where we are, we need our ‘in the beginning’ to start much earlier.”
To his credit, Jones centers both African American and American Indian oppression, avoiding “the myopic Black/white binary” that silos much contemporary scholarship. “Upstream from the stories of violence toward African Americans,” he writes, “were the legacies of genocide and removal of the land’s Indigenous peoples.” Full of urgency and insight, his book is a compelling and necessary undertaking.
No comments:
Post a Comment