*In an interview given to The Harvard Gazette in September 2020, Professor Yacovone sees “white supremacy” as invented in the North, instead of the South, by a Canadian established in New York City, and as an existing idea even before the birth of the United States, enabling, at first, white Anglo-Saxons, and then Europeans in general, to see themselves as both equal among themselves and superior to all other races. It also helped develop democracy in America, quite an unpopular form of government at the time.
Excerpts from the interview:
"Americans tend to see racism as a result of Southern slavery, and this thinking has all kinds of problems. First of all, slavery was in the North as well as in the South, and the people who formed the idea of American identity were not Southern slave owners, they were Northerners. The father of white supremacy was not a Southerner; it was John H. Van Evrie, a Canadian who ended up settling in New York City. Van Evrie argued that if no slaves existed, the class-based structure of Europe would have been transferred, kept, and developed in the American colonies. But with the African presence, Van Evrie said, the descendants of white Europeans saw that the difference among white people was virtually insignificant compared to what they perceived as differences between themselves and African Americans. This allowed democracy, which was an unpopular idea in the 17th and 18th century, to flourish and develop.
We always forget that democracy was not an idealized form of government back then. In fact, it was considered an evil. Van Evrie’s argument was that Americans had to reimagine a new kind of government and social order and they could do so because of the African presence. This can also explain why white supremacy has persisted for so long, because it is an identity of oneself in contrast to others, a sort of a self-fulfilling, reinforcing thought about one’s self-perceived superiority. Even people who opposed slavery believed that African Americans could never be absorbed by white society. "
“The main feature of white supremacy is the assumption that people with Anglo Saxon backgrounds are the primacy, the first order of humanity. Van Evrie, however, saw people of African descent as essential to do ‘the white man’s work,’ and were designed to do so ‘by nature and god.’ He wrote about six different books on the subject, and he used a racial hierarchy in which Caucasians were at the top and Africans at the bottom. You’d think that white supremacists were driven mostly by hate, but at the core they were driven by their ideas of racial superiority, which of course were pure fiction and had nothing to do with reality. White supremacy wasn’t developed to defend the institution of slavery, but in reaction to it, and it preceded the birth of the United States.
A lot of the white supremacists in the North didn’t even want an African American presence there. Many Northerners advocated the American Colonization Society, which would export African Americans to Liberia. But there was no unanimity of ideas about white supremacy; the only thing they all agreed upon was the ‘superiority of the white race.’”
*Professor Yacovone's speech during "Teaching Race & Slavery in the American Classroom - Gilder Lehrman Center 2022 Annual Conference"
Panel: History of U.S. Education: What’s Race Got To Do With It?
The book presented: Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity
*Before I started writing this book, I was actually engaged in a different project. I was interested in the legacy of the anti-slavery movement, public memory and the creation of the modern Civil Rights movement. But, after reading through 55 boxes of manuscripts, I decided I needed a break. I went over to the Graduate School of Educations Monroe C. Gutman Library and was confronted with 3000 US history textbooks.
*Now, I know the historiography of race and slavery and abolitionism, but the fact that I was reading what I was reading in textbooks from the 1832 to the 1980s, and that these books were aimed specifically at children washed over me. I abandoned my project and I wrote this book instead. And if it were not for that collection of textbooks and tens of dozens of other books and pamphlets, this couldn’t have happened.
*And I was devastated and shocked when I learned, about a year ago, that the Harvard Graduate School of Education took that whole collection and removed it from the library and stuck it in a warehouse. That room was turned over to administrators, so they could have conferences like this and have teachers come in and make money.
*The fabled 1873 lithograph variously titled “American Progress” or “Manifest Destiny” by the New York publisher and Western travel promoter George Crofutt exalts the divine mission of the United States to expand across the continent. It’s the cover of my book. The illustration’s alluring figure of Columbia with the star of Empire on her forehead floats across the landscape sweeping away indigenous peoples and the wilderness for the expansion of American farms, cities and railroads. Her left hand clutches a telegraph line, the internet of the 19th century, and her right hand cradles not the Bible or a ‘digestive laws’ but, as Crofutt himself wrote, the emblem of education: the school book. Never before or since has any American more graphically unified national identity with white supremacy and education.
*Traditionally, scholarship and popular thought have blamed the legacy of southern slavery and Jim Crow segregation for the distressing persistence of racial inequality. And of course, southern slave owners and the descendants do possess a unique and lethal responsibility for racial oppression and Civil War. But even if slaves had never existed in the South, Northern white theorists, religious leaders, intellectuals, writers, politicians, scientists, lawyers and especially educators would have invented a lesser race, which is exactly what happened, to build white democratic solidarity and in that way make democratic culture and political institutions possible.
*American educators played a critical role in sustaining white supremacy. James Baldwin, the celebrated African-American author and critic, recalled in 1965 that “I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history and that neither had I. I was a savage about whom the least said, the better, who had been saved by Europe and who had been brought to America.” This was, his education taught him, “an act of God. You belonged where white people put you.”
*In the 1920s, if an African-American student had asked the teacher why no black people appeared in his history textbook, and they didn’t, the answer would be that African-Americans “had done nothing to merit inclusion.” As the black scholar Charles A. Wesley reported in 1925, through textbooks and classroom instruction, the black student quickly realized that “his badge of color in America is a sign of subjugation, inferiority and contempt.”
*In 1939, the NAACP surveyed popular American history textbooks and, as one Black student concluded from the association’s findings, since textbooks “drilled” white supremacy “into the minds of growing children, I see how hate and disgust is motivated against the American Negro.” Textbooks, as I discovered, became cultural syringes that injected these poisons directly into the minds of American students, Black and white.
* History texts serve as reservoirs of values, patriotism and national ethos, which we proudly treasure in our republic. In particular, history textbooks sought to create unity through storytelling, creating a national identity that could serve as a roadmap to the future, as training for citizenship in the broadest sense. But what was the nature of that unity that they aimed to create?
*Thomas Maitland Marshall’s 1930 textbook embodied the ideals, assumptions and aims that characterized nearly all history American textbooks published before the 1960s. The very first page of his book shrieks in capital letters: “the story of the white man.” As so many other 20th century textbooks inculcated, Marshall taught that - and this is in the textbook - “the Negro of plantation days was usually happy. He was fond of the company of others and liked to sing, dance, crack jokes, and laugh; he admired bright colors and was proud to wear a red or orange bandana. He was never in a hurry, and was always ready to let things go until the morrow.” Most planters, he asserted, learned that loyalty based on pride, kindness and rewards, like wine – he didn’t say that, another book did - not the whip, brought the best return.
*At the advent of the 20th century, the overwhelming majority of American textbooks began with Marshall’s assumption that the history of the United States was the history of the white man, his struggles against Native Americans, which were usually rendered as red savages, and his need to control the lives of African Americans. As a 1918 text explained to students, whatever non-English people had done to create the United States, “the forces that have shaped that life have been English.” In 1856, Emerson had proclaimed that so-called truth in his book English Traits. The nation had a fixed identity, authors asserted, one inherited exclusively from Great Britain. Most textbooks variously presented African Americans as a foreign, repellent element, an unwanted presence, a necessary evil, or a threat. And always, as one 1914 textbook asserted, “a problem that it took many years to solve.” How would they solve that problem?
*Well into the 1960s, scholars and textbooks they produced insisted that anything beyond vocational training for African Americans was a waste of time. They taught children “that Negroes were unfit to rule.” It had been a terrible mistake, textbooks proclaimed, to prevent the intelligent white people from governing after the Civil War. Authors assured readers that “men of intelligence and property will not submit to the rule of the ignorant very long.” And of course, by ignorant, they meant African-Americans. As Professor Marshall had concluded, “white robes and fiery crosses had the desired results.”
*Well, today, the worst features of our textbooks have been eliminated. The problem that James Baldwin had identified in the 1960s remains. Teachers from Florida to Vermont and West to Washington staged damaging slave auctions in their classrooms, what one black Vermont parent rightly labeled curricular violence. The influential New York Times journalist Charles Blow explained that when he was young ,“I was led to believe blackness was inferior. We had been trained in it, bathed in it, acculturated to hate ourselves at every turn, and at every moment. I was being baptized in the narrative that everything white was right, good, noble, and beautiful, and everything black was not.” The bitter influence lay everywhere, he wrote, even in the blue-eyed white Jesus hanging over your bed.
*The experience of Black high-school students in my own Boston suburb in 2020 reinforced Blow’s account. A local branch of the NAACP along with students protested school curriculum and the punishments handed out to African-American students. “I am not going to lie,” one of the female students explained, “going to high school made me hate being black.”
* But clearly slavery and race, Professor Jeffries wrote, isn’t in the past. It’s in the headlines. However taught in schools, history is far from a dead thing, we carry it with us, James Baldwin memorably remarked in his essay, “The White Man’s Guilt.” We are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to our history that we owe our frame of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.
You may see the entire panel here
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