The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy

April 1, 2023

Author of the award-winning White Too Long and The End of White Christian America, Jones tracks white supremacy back to 15th-century Church Doctrine (as stated in Papal Bulls) that sanctioned the European subjugation of non-Christians as enemies of Christ and the brutal conquest of their lands as meant by God for Christians. He then moves on to contemporary communities in Mississippi, Minnesota, and Oklahoma to show how white supremacy can be countered. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from July 24, 2023
In this illuminating and erudite study, historian and religious studies scholar Jones (White Too Long) contends that the origins of American racism can be traced back to 1493, the year when, in response to Columbus’s voyage to the “New World,” the Catholic Church set out the Doctrine of Discovery, which asserted that Christian European culture was innately superior, and therefore Europeans had the right to settle and rule over other lands and their inhabitants. This edict, Jones argues, formed the legal basis for both Indigenous dispossession and African enslavement. Tracing the long arc of this white supremacist worldview, Jones surveys the entire sweep of post-Columbian history at the sites of three acts of 20th-century racial violence—the 1920 lynching of three Black men in Duluth, Minn.; the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma; and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi. He draws parallels between these episodes of anti-Black violence and the earlier history of Native American dispossession at these same sites: the mass execution of 38 Dakota men near Duluth in 1862, the mistreatment of forcibly resettled Indigenous refugees in Oklahoma beginning in the 19th century, and the expulsion of the Choctaw from Mississippi between 1830 and 1850. Arresting and deeply researched, this unique account brings to the fore the deep-rooted sense of “divine entitlement, of European chosenness” that has shaped so much of American history. It’s a rigorous and forceful feat of scholarship.

Starred review from July 1, 2023
A historian reframes the nation's legacy of racial prejudice. In his latest, Jones, the author of White Too Long and The End of White Christian America, argues persuasively that the ideological origins of American racism are best understood in relation to religious edicts dating back to the late 15th century. The Catholic Church's Doctrine of Discovery gave divine sanction to the imperialist ambitions of white Christians and provided rationalizations for centuries of violence directed against nonwhite peoples. In tracing out this history of toxic ideas and their real-world consequences, the author focuses on three representative outrages from the 20th century: the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, the lynching of three Black circus workers in Minnesota in 1920, and the murders of hundreds of African Americans during the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. As Jones shows, rather than isolated events, these explosions of racist aggression and justifications invoking white supremacy form a consistent pattern in each region's history, beginning with the targeting of Indigenous peoples. Through its linking of narratives typically considered separately, the book provides a revelatory view of U.S. history and its guiding assumptions. "If we do the hard work of pushing upriver, we find that the same waters that produced the Negro problem also spawned the Indian problem," writes Jones. "If we dare to go further, at the headwaters is the white Christian problem." In the final sections, the author emphasizes the relevance of ongoing political battles over the interpretation of history and acknowledgements of culpability. "Across the spectrum of issues, and from national presidential elections to local school board meetings," he writes, "the most vehement and visceral fights to come will likely center not on policy but on historical narratives, public rituals, and civic spaces." Jones makes the value of carrying out this conceptual reframing urgently apparent. A searing, stirring outline of the historical and contemporary significance of white Christian nationalism.

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