Teaching White Supremacy - America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity

"A powerful, eagerly anticipated exploration (past and present) of white supremacy in the teachings of our national education system, its depth, breadth, and persistence-and how, through generations of our nation's most esteemed educators and textbooks, racism has been insidiously fostered-North and South-at all levels of learning.In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone shows us the clear and damning evidence of white supremacy's deep-seated roots in our nation's education system in a fascinating, in-depth examination of America's wide assortment of texts, from primary readers to college textbooks and other higher-ed course materials. Sifting through a wealth of materials, from the colonial era to today, Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which white supremacist ideology has infiltrated American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity. Yacovone lays out the arc of America's white supremacy from the country's inception and Revolutionary years to its 19th century flashpoint of civil war; to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and today's Black Lives Matter. And, the author argues that it is the North, not the South, that bears the greater responsibility for creating the dominant strain of race theory, inculcated throughout the culture and in school textbooks, that restricted and repressed African Americans and other minorities, even as Northerners blamed the South for its legacy of slavery, segregation and racial injustice"--

List of contents

Introduction xi
 
1. The Contours of White Supremacy 3
 
2. “The White Republic Against the World”: The Toxic Legacy of John H. Van Evrie 40
 
3. From “Slavery” to “Servitude”: Initial Patterns, 1832 to 1866 82
 
4. The Emancipationist Challenge, 1867 to 1883 117
 
5. Causes Lost and Found, 1883 to 1919 163
 
6. Educating for “Eugenocide” in the 1920s 215
 
7. Lost Cause Victorious, 1920 to 1964 236
 
8. Renewing the Challenge 277
 
Epilogue 311

Notes 329

Bibliography of Textbooks 393

Index 403

Illustration Credits 429

About the author

DONALD YACOVONE is a lifetime associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, the author or editor of nine books, the winner (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) of an NAACP Image Award for The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross in 2014, and a recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University in 2013.

Summary

A powerful exploration of the past and present arc of America’s white supremacy—from the country’s inception and Revolutionary years to its 19th century flashpoint of civil war; to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter.
 
“The most profoundly original cultural history in recent memory.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

“Stunning, timely . . . an achievement in writing public history . . . Teaching White Supremacy should be read widely in our roiling debate over how to teach about race and slavery in classrooms." —David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History, Yale University; author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Donald Yacovone shows us the clear and damning evidence of white supremacy’s deep-seated roots in our nation’s educational system through a fascinating, in-depth examination of America’s wide assortment of texts, from primary readers to college textbooks, from popular histories to the most influential academic scholarship. Sifting through a wealth of materials from the colonial era to today, Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which this ideology has infiltrated all aspects of American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity.
 
Yacovone lays out the arc of America’s white supremacy from the country’s inception and Revolutionary War years to its nineteenth-century flashpoint of civil war to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter. In a stunning reappraisal, the author argues that it is the North, not the South, that bears the greater responsibility for creating the dominant strain of race theory, which has been inculcated throughout the culture and in school textbooks that restricted and repressed African Americans and other minorities, even as Northerners blamed the South for its legacy of slavery, segregation, and racial injustice.
 
A major assessment of how we got to where we are today, of how white supremacy has suffused every area of American learning, from literature and science to religion, medicine, and law, and why this kind of thinking has so insidiously endured for more than three centuries.

Product details

• Authors: Donald Yacovone
• Publisher: Pantheon Schocken Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 27.09.2022
• EAN: 9780593316634
• ISBN: 978-0-593-31663-4
• No. of pages: 464
• Dimensions: 172 mm x 242 mm x 30 mm
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Education > General, dictionaries