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.
A religious studies scholar and president of the Public Religion Research Institute, Jones begins with an impassioned moral charge: Racism predated the arrival of African slaves on the continent, helped to fuel the rise of the United States and still pervades our society. This history is also at the heart of polarized conceptions of American identity, for which presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump provide opposing symbols.
Less focused on racial disparities in income or educational attainment than on cultural forces of resistance, including “white Christian nationalism,” Jones sees within contemporary America a pernicious refusal to accept “remembrance” of the form that Biden has promoted. The nation can never fully achieve its ethical and political aspirations while living with falsehoods about its past, Jones suggests; though American history may constitute a challenging battleground, it provides essential moral guidance.
Given the vastness of his material, he has chosen to focus on three communities grappling with a history of racism: Tallahatchie County, Miss.; Duluth, Minn.; and Tulsa, Okla. In all three places, the removal of Indigenous populations in the 19th century was followed by murders of Black citizens in the 20th. These latter acts have recently become subjects of commemoration by community leaders willing to confront the difficulties of historical “truth-telling.”
Mississippi, Jones’s home state, offers him his most impassioned and extended case study. The killing of Emmett Till, the acquittal of his murderers and the decades-long attempt at a public reckoning over his death are movingly recounted, serving as a distillation of the nation’s troubled race relations. Years of effort in Mississippi have failed to dislodge what Jones terms “the forces of white supremacy,” which hardened in 2022 when the state passed a law to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” — despite “no evidence that anything resembling critical race theory … was being taught in state primary and secondary public schools.”
One of Jones’s boldest suggestions is to locate the “roots” of American racism not in 1619 or other defining moments in the history of American slavery, but much further back, within religious practices developed in the aftermath of the Columbian Encounter. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued an edict praising Columbus for extending European dominion to lands “not previously possessed by any Christian owner.” The declaration was part of what became known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” an enduring if amorphously defined set of proclamations and legalistic rituals created in the late 15th century to validate European appropriation of the territories of the Western Hemisphere and justify colonization — including, in 1541, in what is now Mississippi, by the Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto, who claimed much of the South.
The Doctrine of Discovery has legitimated the expropriation of Native American lands for more than 500 years. Yet, as Jones points out, few know much about this history or its ongoing influence. In 2005, the Supreme Court invoked the doctrine in its ruling in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of N.Y., denying a claim by the Oneida Nation that it should not have to pay taxes on land that once belonged to it as part of a sovereign reservation but that had been sold to the state in 1805 — in violation of a federal treaty — and then, in the late 1990s, reacquired. Writing the majority opinion (and citing the doctrine in a footnote), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued that the tribe could not “unilaterally revive its ancient sovereignty, in whole or in part” since it “long ago relinquished reins of government and cannot regain them through open-market purchases from current titleholders.” The decision was criticized by scholars and Indigenous activists for enlisting the doctrine in a legal argument favoring the land’s colonizer over its original inhabitants.
For many minority communities, history remains simultaneously a sword to wield and a shield to seek out for protection, and myths of cultural superiority continue to impair racial progress. In June, the Supreme Court decided the case of Haaland v. Brackeen, which challenged the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, giving preference to Native American families in cases involving the placement of a Native American child. The court upheld the law in a 7-2 ruling.
But in a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito objected to the act’s prioritizing of tribal affiliation, arguing that it required “a state to abandon the carefully considered judicial procedures and standards it has established to provide for a child’s welfare and instead apply a scheme devised by Congress that focuses not solely on the best interest of the child, but also on ‘the stability and security of Indian tribes.’” During oral argument for the case, Alito had resorted to old myths about Native history, remarking that “before the arrival of Europeans, the tribes were at war with each other often, and they were separated by an entire continent.”
Isolated and warlike in this conceit, Native peoples were presumably neither using their lands appropriately nor justified in keeping them. They were peoples without history, as Hegel argued, far outside the moral universe of “any Christian owner” — and thus rightly subject to dispossession. As Jones demonstrates, the Doctrine of Discovery established the foundation for such value-laden cultural and racial assumptions.
Much is to be gained from Jones’s deep, comparative immersion in local efforts to ameliorate the wounds of the past. He shows how countless Indigenous and African American lives have been irrevocably harmed over the past five centuries and how leaders at every level of government have failed to offer sufficient commemoration, repair or justice. “Christianity,” Jones writes, “has also proven to be more pliant than principled.”
In places in his book, such strident critiques of contemporary political and moral practices risk flattening the textures of the past and reinscribing familiar views of the present. Jones includes few Native voices to counter the claims against them. Instead, European colonialism and slavery, U.S. expansion and Indian removal, and 20th-century violence and segregation appear at times as interchangeable components of a racial regime designed to expropriate Indigenous lands and subordinate African Americans. Nonetheless, “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy” offers uncommon and moving entry into some of the most vexing challenges of our era. It also reminds us that this continent’s unfolding past defies easy or summary judgment.
Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is a professor of history and American studies at Yale. His books include “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.”
THE HIDDEN ROOTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY: And the Path to a Shared American Future | By Robert P. Jones | 387 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $29.99
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