The Long and Gruesome History of the Battle Over American Textbooks
Historian Donald Yacovone did not set out to write a book about white supremacy. A lifetime associate at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Yacovone was working on a project about abolitionism when he encountered the 1832 textbook History of the United States. Despite being written by the celebrated educator Noah Webster, who also wrote the first American dictionary, the history textbook was more fiction than fact.
For starters, it failed to mention slavery, despite the central role it played in the country’s early development. In fact, it hardly discussed African Americans at all, but when it did, it was in gross, derogatory terms. It spoke of whiteness as the supreme race and declared Anglo Saxons as the only true Americans. The disturbing discovery caused Yacovone to abandon his book on abolitionism and get to work on Teaching White Supremacy, out today, which argues that white supremacy isn’t some outlier belief system; it’s a learned principle, endorsed and taught by textbooks for centuries, that still plagues us now.
Esquire called the author to talk about his new book, America’s longstanding and violent coveting of whiteness, and the fight over textbooks that’s unfurling across the country today. This interview has been edited for clarity.
ESQUIRE: You make it very clear from the start that this book is about, among other things, Northerners and the big New England publishers’ roles in creating, disseminating, and sustaining white supremacy.
Donald Yacovone: In my mind, this is the most important part of this study. Most people, at least outside of the South, tend to blame the South for slavery, even though it was in all the colonies. I'm not trying to absolve the South for its role in the suppression of African Americans by any means, but the ideology of white supremacy was far and away created in the North. It grew up alongside the institution of slavery and exists to this very day, as I try to point out in the epilogue of the book. And when you look at all major areas of culture and learning, religion, science, medicine, the law, clearly, it is Northerners who dominate. It was Northerners who created Jim Crow. It wasn't the South.
This might seem like a weird question, but why do white people think they are so great? We weren’t the first people to inhabit the planet. We aren’t the tallest or the best looking. And yet the white person’s sense of superiority has existed for centuries, if not a millennium. As you point out in the book, white supremacy predates the founding of America. Where did it originate?
Well, that's a really good and complicated question. There isn’t one place or event you can point to. The problem is by the time we get to the colonization of North America, it is very clear, and you can see this in Captain John Smith's attitude, that it's already been decided that Africans were an inferior people. The ideology of white supremacy would come later.
What is your definition of white supremacy?
The problem is it changes. It's a malleable commodity because depending upon time, place, and political need, groups of people are included or excluded. For instance, in the 1830s and '40s, as the number of Irish immigrants increased in the United States, they were considered inferior. In fact, the British referred to the Irish as a completely separate race, and that was the dominant American view when the Irish started populating the Northern states, but it changed. They became useful to the dominant white class because they could be used to replace Black workers. They could be used to exclude Africans from society, and so they earned their whiteness by discriminating against Blacks. African Americans used the term “Irish confetti” to refer to the blocks and bricks that the Irishman threw at them.
Donald, you’re describing whiteness, the race, and how it changed, but I asked you about white supremacy, the racist ideology. How do you personally define it? Is it simply the belief that white people are the dominant race and always will be?
It most certainly is that, but you have to step back even further and recognize that there’s no such thing as race. There's no science or genetics to support it. It is a creation of people of European descent based on appearances and assumptions and turned into a science in the 19th century. And now we’re in the almost ludicrous position of having no races, but plenty of racism because people believe in race, even though it doesn't exist.
So, what does white supremacy mean? Well, it means control. It means dominance of the political system, the social system, and of identity. It’s the belief that Americanness means whiteness, and that whites are the dominant and the most numerous. Of course, what we're seeing now is the fear that that identity is being destroyed because in 30 or 40 years, whites will be just one more minority.
Let’s talk about that. You note in your epilogue that textbooks have flared up in public and political discourse before, most notably in the early 2000s when Republicans started warning of “multiculturalism.” But what is it about our current political climate that’s causing another round of hysteria? Or what is it about textbooks?
A history textbook embodies everything that Americans are supposed to value. They embody all the greatness that Americans have achieved, and the whole point of American history or social studies textbooks is to pass on that inheritance from one generation to the next.
In some ways, there aren't any more important books published in the United States if you're looking at it from a cultural, political perspective. I didn't want to use the word Bible, but they are kind of the Bible of American culture. They preserve what has been and they celebrate what will be because of American values and institutions. Therefore, it is perfectly sensible to me that they would be a prime battleground in our current cultural war. And since whatever they say wins the war, they become the battlefield. I anticipate this will go on for quite a while.
Say book banning doesn't happen and that textbooks and teachers aren’t censored. Does it even matter? White supremacy clearly goes well beyond the page. It’s present in popular culture too.
Absolutely. Now we're in the situation where textbooks have, for the most part, been cured of their worst diseases. But two major problems remain: Some textbooks don't say much of anything on these critical issues, and teachers won’t teach the ones that do. Then you have a situation where some schools can avoid the problem altogether by not using the traditional textbook, but going online. And if you go online, you can get anything, virtually anything. You can get textbooks from the 1930s, they're using them from the 19th century. They are available through a lot of the white supremacist websites. It's horrifying. It's simply horrifying.
At some point in the book you quoted Frederick Douglass discussing Reconstruction’s failure to bring about meaningful reform for African Americans. He said, “The miserable dream of the pre-war republic must be debunked if African Americans were to gain full freedom in equality.” Do you think there's any way we can ever accomplish that? I don’t want to let us off the hook, but debunking white supremacy seems impossible. How do we do it?
You're participating in the process. You're doing it. That’s what it takes. It takes all of us to do it. And the fact that we had the Civil Rights movement, yet we're still doing this over and over and over again… However, we elected Barack Obama twice. That was impossible. It wouldn't even have been suggested 20 years ago.
Change happens. It is long, it is painful, but it does happen. Will it turn out the way we hope? Probably not, but there will be change. The 35% of whites who are so distressed, that's why they are so distressed, because they know this is happening. They know it is inevitable. They know they're going to be outnumbered and they won't have the dominance that they have always had.
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