Scott Rhee's Reviews > The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future

“In the shadow of the Trail of Tears and the murder of Emmett Till, what shall we make of the impotence of Christianity as a moral foundation of American democracy? I believe we have little choice but to acknowledge that, thus far, it has failed to defeat the forces of white supremacy. Worse, it has been pressed into its service.” (p.109)


There are forces at work today (which, sadly, will potentially grow stronger in the next four years) that want us to believe that not only will America be great again but that it was ever, at any point in its roughly 250-year history, great at all. They want us to somehow forget that our country was founded on genocide and enslavement, not equality. They want us to forget that our country was shaped by white supremacy, not egalitarianism. They literally want to rewrite history.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, by the way. The “they” that I’m referring to aren’t some amorphous, evil cabal that wants to take over the world. No, I don’t think that “they” are necessarily evil at all. They are simply scared, and they are misled by wrong thinking that has, unfortunately, become legitimized by a racist, narcissistic president and a party of sycophants. But the legitimization of racist thinking isn’t even a new thing. In this country, it has always been the rationale for racist policies that date back to before the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It has literally been the founding doctrine upon which Western civilization has flourished in this hemisphere.

Robert P. Jones, in his book “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future”, shines a light on this doctrine that has shaped modern history, a doctrine which has been treated as a secret by its adherents, even though it has been hiding in plain sight for centuries.

This doctrine has an official name, by the way. It’s called the Doctrine of Discovery. Created in the 15th-century through a series of papal bulls (Church-sanctioned edicts), the doctrine essentially approved and mandated imperialist conquest of the New World as it stated, unequivocally, that Christians—-and white Europeans in general—-are intellectually and morally superior to all non-Christian (and non-white) civilizations.

American history is a history of conquest backed by this Doctrine of Discovery, from Columbus “discovering” America to the Louisiana Purchase to Hawaii statehood. And don’t mistakenly believe that we live in a more “enlightened” era where the Doctrine of Discovery has been dismissed as a product of a white supremacist past. As recently as 2005, in a Supreme Court ruling (Sherrill v. Oneida) which disallowed the Oneida Nation’s reincorporation of land into their reservation, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (a liberal justice) cited the “Doctrine of Discovery” as justification for her argument against the Native American tribe’s claim.

Jones takes this further by focusing on three horribly tragic incidents in American history in three American cities: Money, Mississippi, Duluth, Minnesota, and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The most notable thing about these three incidents was that the white communities in these three cities all purposefully tried to erase these crimes from the history books, and, for nearly a century in one case, they almost succeeded.

I had heard about Emmet Till’s brutal murder in Mississipi, and I had—-only a year ago—-learned about the Tulsa Massacre, but until reading this book, I had never known about the lynching in Duluth, the largest lynch mobs in history. Reading about these hate crimes against black people makes me wonder—-and Jones himself more than implies—-how many more horrible white supremacist crimes have occurred in our history that were successfully erased from the books.

Jones points a straight line from the Doctrine of Discovery to our government’s genocidal policies against Native American populations to the post-Reconstruction atrocities committed against black people by racist Southerners and Northerners to George Floyd, Charlottesville, and the events of January 6, 2021.

It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s history. And “they” want you—-and, more frighteningly, our children—-to believe that it never happened.