Phillips also was partly responsible for the design of the Republican "Southern Strategy" of the 1970s and 1980s.

An example of this comes from President Lyndon Johnson. As he explainedto an aide in 1960, “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convincethe lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t noticeyou picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’llempty his pockets for you.”25

But commission member Kondratiuk, a heraldic expert who served as a military historian for the National Guard and US Army for more than four decades, said such objections are “a misreading of the heraldry.”“That’s the arm of God protecting the Commonwealth,” he said, referring to the upraised sword. “That symbol has been used in European heraldry for hundreds of years.”He added that the Native figure’s downward-facing arrow indicates “peaceful intent.”“The Native American on there is an homage to the Native Americans,” Kondratiuk said, adding he “voted with the pack” to see what recommendations the commission would produce. As for the motto: “That’s an allusion to the monarch,” he continued. “The Founding Fathers would have been very familiar with that.”

Designed by illustrator Edmund Garrett in 1898, the current seal draws on the original seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which featured a Native American man, naked but for some shrubbery about his groin, saying, “Come over and help us.”

I’ve also learned, thanks to my doctoral training in sociology, that one must expand one’s personal problems into the structural, to recognize what’s rotten at the local level as an instantiation of the institutional. Our best public sociologists, like Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jess Calarco, do this exceptionally well.

First, the majority population in eastern Virginia were enslaved blacks. Whites lived in constant fear of slave insurrection. Everyone knew about the 1739 slave rebellion in Stono, S.C., when blacks broke into a store, decapitated the shopkeepers, seized guns and powder, and marched with flying banners, beating drums and cries of “Liberty!” Up to 100 joined the rebellion before being engaged by a contingent of armed, mounted militiamen. Scores died in the ensuing battle.

Patrick Henry and George Mason: Dave Davies, “Historian Uncovers eRacist Roots of the 2nd Amendment,” NPR, June 2, 2021.

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”

Governor Ronald Reagan, who was coincidentally present on the capitol lawn when the protesters arrived, later commented that he saw "no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons" and that guns were a "ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will." In a later press conference, Reagan added that the Mulford Act "would work no hardship on the honest citizen."

The Mulford Act was a 1967 California bill that prohibited public carrying of loaded firearms without a permit.[2] Named after Republican assemblyman Don Mulford, and signed into law by governor of California Ronald Reagan, the bill was crafted with the goal of disarming members of the Black Panther Party who were conducting armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods, in what would later be termed copwatching.[3][4] They garnered national attention after Black Panthers members, bearing arms, marched upon the California State Capitol to protest the bill.

The proposition that any of this book’s content or its contributors are racist, because they might make people feel uncomfortable, is an increasingly popular strategy employed to silence expert views on politicised ideological grounds.

Published criticisms of this excellent book bear the hallmarks of a style of racism that is extraordinarily difficult to counter, because so few people have the intellectual training to understand the difference between evidence-based accounts of Indigenous Australia and popular mythologies that misrepresent the facts. These criticisms are entirely unreasonable.

A spike in fears about new immigrants and newly emancipated black people reproducing at higher rates than the white population also prompted more opposition to legal abortion.

“Scarcity: WhyHaving Too Little Means So Much” (2013) by Mullainathan andShafir. They investigate how the experience of scarcity has cognitiveeffects and causes changes in decision-making processes.

Several years would pass, and a new editor-in-chief would ascend, before the paper eliminated the automatic race tags, in 1961, under pressure from readers who were sick of them.

At that time, The Sun was still choosing to identify Black people by race in its coverage — and only Black people — placing the tag “Negro” after individual names, even though many other newspapers had long since stopped similar practices. When a Westminster minister and seminary professor asked the paper to discard “this discriminatory practice” in 1955, according to an article in The Afro-American, the editor-in-chief flat out refused, self-righteously declaring that “the Sunpapers will not be a party to such suppression” of fact and that “the matter of what it is now fashionable to call ‘pigmentation’ is important from both the white and the Negro point of view.”

In Kircher's system, ideograms were inferior to hieroglyphs because they referred to specific ideas rather than to mysterious complexes of ideas, while the signs of the Maya and Aztecs were yet lower pictograms which referred only to objects. Umberto Eco comments that this idea reflected and supported the ethnocentric European attitude toward Chinese and native American civilizations: "China was presented not as an unknown barbarian to be defeated but as a prodigal son who should return to the home of the common father". (p. 69)

China Illustrata emphasized the Christian elements of Chinese history, both real and imagined: the book noted the early presence of Nestorian Christians (with a Latin translation of the Nestorian Stele of Xi'an provided by Boym and his Chinese collaborator, Andrew Zheng),[23] but also claimed that the Chinese were descended from the sons of Ham, that Confucius was Hermes Trismegistus/Moses and that the Chinese characters were abstracted hieroglyphs.

The denial of native parental rights was finally legalized in 1891 and led to the mass forced removal of native children.[32] It wasn't until the 1976 Indian Child Welfare Act that the forceful removal of native children from their parents ended.

It would be just as easy (actually, rather easier) to identify things thatcan be interpreted as the first stirrings of rationalism, legality,deliberative democracy and so forth all over the world, and only thentell the story of how they coalesced into the current global system.24

The earliest legal restrictions on the nighttime activities and movements of African-Americans and other ethnic minorities date back to the colonial era. The general court and legislative assembly of New Hampshire passed "An Act To Prevent Disorders In The Night" in 1714:[6][7] .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}Whereas great disorders, insolencies and burglaries are oft times raised and committed in the night time by Native American, Negro, and Molatto Servants and Slaves to the Disquiet and hurt of her Majesty's subjects, No Indian, Negro, or Molatto is to be from Home after 9 o'clock. Notices emphasizing and re-affirming the curfew were published in The New Hampshire Gazette in 1764 and 1771.

Moving forward, members of the council have advocated different ways for the city to help turn the page on that past. As Councilman Dan Brotman noted on Tuesday night, the council’s vote makes Glendale the third former sundown town in the nation to formally reject that part of its history — and the first in California.

The agenda item did bring in one detractor in resident Mike Mohill, who called it “polarizing” and described the city as being “very fine” in its current era.

With all of this—the desperation of the Jamestown settlers for labor, theimpossibility of using Indians and the difficulty of using whites, the availabilityof blacks offered in greater and greater numbers by profit-seeking dealers inhuman flesh, and with such blacks possible to control because they had justgone through an ordeal which if it did not kill them must have left them in astate of psychic and physical helplessness—is it any wonder that such blackswere ripe for enslavement?

On one occasion, hearing a great noise from belowdecks where the blackswere chained together, the sailors opened the hatches and found the slaves indifferent stages of suffocation, many dead, some having killed others indesperate attempts to breathe. Slaves often jumped overboard to drown ratherthan continue their suffering. To one observer a slave-deck was “so coveredwith blood and mucus that it resembled a slaughter house.”

The state of slavery, among these wild barbarous people, as we esteem them, is much milder than in our colonies

Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used byEuropeans to justify their own slave trade. But, as Davidson points out, the“slaves” of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe—in other words, likemost of the population of Europe. It was a harsh servitude, but they had rightswhich slaves brought to America did not have, and they were “altogetherdifferent from the human cattle of the slave ships and the Americanplantations.”

cultures that are different are often taken as inferior,especially when such a judgment is practical and profitable

ple". The Mexican mineworker had the custom of returning to his village for corn planting and harvest: His lack of initiative, inability to save, absences while celebrating too many holidays, willingness to work only three or four days a week if that paid for necessities, insatiable desire for alchohol - all were pointed out as proof of a natural inferiority. He

ry. The debate provoked by the attempt to impose a tax on all clocks and watches in 1797-8 offers a little evidence. It was perhaps the most unpopular and it was certainly the most unsuccessful of all of Pitt's assessed taxes: I

Middleware would reduce both platforms' own power and their function as levers for unaccountable state power, as governments increasingly pressure platforms to "voluntarily" suppress disfavored speech.2

In our case, a system intended to expand equality has become an enforcer of inequality. Americans are now meritocrats by birth. We know this, but because it violates our fundamental beliefs, we go to a lot of trouble not to know it.

Anaximander is said to have made the first map of the world. Although this map has been lost, we can imagine what it must have looked like, because Herodotus, who has seen such old maps, describes them. Anaximander’s map must have been circular, like the top of his drum-shaped earth. The river Ocean surrounded it. The Mediterranean Sea was in the middle of the map, which was divided into two halves by a line that ran through Delphi, the world’s navel. The northern half was called “Europe,” the southern half “Asia.” The habitable world (Greek: “oikoumenê”) consisted of two relatively small strips of land to the north and south of the Mediterranean Sea (containing Spain, Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor on the one side, and Egypt and Libya on the other side), together with the lands to the east of the Mediterranean Sea: Palestine, Assyria, Persia, and Arabia. The lands to the north of this small “habitable world” were the cold countries where mythical people lived. The lands to the south of it were the hot countries of the black burnt people.

for some analysts this myth of meritocracy entrenches gender and racial inequality. 

The point here is not to defend the uses of surveillance technology in China, the point is to emphasize that when big tech talks about China they are stoking Sinophobia in order to distract from their own malfeasance. By screeching with nationalistic panic “look what they’re doing over there!” the tech companies shift the conversation from what they themselves are doing over here.

The power to target is the power to discriminate. By definition, targeted ads allow advertisers to reach some kinds of people while excluding others. A targeting system may be used to decide who gets to see job postings or loan offers just as easily as it is to advertise shoes. 

West Virginia’s non-Hispanic white population is 92 percent, much higher than the nation overall (60 percent). I’m not suggesting that Manchin doesn’t care about Black voting rights, but he doesn’t have a huge Black constituency pressing him on this issue, as only 4 percent of West Virginians are Black (compared with 13 percent in the nation overall). 

“The whole point is that we want to take up space,” Ms. Obell said. “Take the time to say black, Latinx and Asian. Say our names. Take the time to learn. Show me that you know the difference.”

“It is lazy to lump us all together as if we all face the same problems,” said Sylvia Obell, a host of the Netflix podcast “Okay, Now Listen.” “When you blend us all together like this, it’s erasure. It allows people to get away with not knowing people of color and our separate set of issues that we all face. It allows people to play it safe and not leave anyone out, and it also allows you to not have to do the work.”

“We understand that under colonialism African and Indigenous people had very different experiences,” Dr. Nelson said. “To conflate everything in one is to erase, which is the very nature of genocidal practice.”

An answer to Mr. Bendetsen's testimony came from Milton S. Eisenhower, former president of Johns Hopkins University, who in 1942 directed the Federal War Relocation Authority.In a written statement, Mr. Eisenhower, who was unable to attend because of illness, called the internment of Japanese-Americans ''an inhuman mistake.'' Moreover, he said, the threat of Japanese forces' invading the West Coast was ''extremely remote.''He said that the relocation furor could have been avoid, ''had not false and flaming statements been dinned into the people of the West Coast by irresponsible commentators and politicians.''

Good intentions, but I doubt there's any relation of the origin of the terms blacklist/whitelist to race. There are many idioms and phrases in the English language that make use of colours without any racial backstories. I haven't met any black person (myself included) who was ever offended by the use of "blacklist".

Bad categories can also artificially exclude data. This frequently happens with crime statistics. The FBI has defined the crime of “rape” in a variety of different ways over time. In fact, they’ve done such a poor job of figuring out what rape is that many criminologists argue their statistics should not be used at all. A bad definition might mean a crime is counted in a different category than you expect or that it wasn’t counted at all. Be exceptionally ware of this problem when working with topics where definitions tend to be arbitrary, such as race or ethnicity.

Think about why U.S. people, especially White people, have trouble seeing systemically. Explain the myth of meritocracy: that the unit of society is the individual and that whatever one ends up with must be whatever that individual wanted, worked for, earned, and deserved. Why do you think this myth survives so successfully, suppressing knowledge of systemic oppression and especially of its "up-side,"systemic privilege?

whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow “them” to be more like “us.”

One important note for white people: When people of color share their experiences with white supremacy, believe them. Life Kit 'Me And White Supremacy' Helps You Do The Work Of Dismantling Racism "I can't tell you how many people I've seen who claim to be anti-racist and care about building anti-racist organizations," Singh says. "But when people of color speak, they're like, 'Oh, well, they're doing it wrong.' Or 'That's one (person's experience).' You have an opportunity in that moment to believe what that person is saying."

Which might explain why, for people dedicated to fighting racism, simply saying you're "not racist" doesn't feel like quite enough. To effectively defeat systemic racism — racism embedded as normal practice in institutions like education and law enforcement — you've got to be continually working towards equality for all races, striving to undo racism in your mind, your personal environment and the wider world.

a system of explicit group privilege that, in the name of “social justice,” demands equal results and explicitly sorts citizens into “protected classes” based on race and other demographic categories.

Those forms of preferential treatment built up in our system over time, first in administrative rulings, then executive orders, later in congressionally passed law, and finally were sanctified by the Supreme Court

Among the distortions was the abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of “group rights” not unlike those advanced by Calhoun and his followers.

composed of people from different races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions

Yet the damage done by the denial of core American principles and by the attempted substitution of a theory of group rights in their place proved widespread and long-lasting. These, indeed, are the direct ancestors of some of the destructive theories that today divide our people and tear at the fabric of our country.

that first began in the United States

at which time Congress immediately outlawed the slave trade

Many Americans labor under the illusion that slavery was somehow a uniquely American evil.

Thomas Jefferson also held slaves

The three-fifths compromise was proposed by an antislavery delegate to prevent the South from counting their slaves as whole persons for purposes of increasing their congressional representation.

By as early as the sixteenth century,“negros”were deemed to be people“without honor and faith”and described asugly, barbarous, and savage. Hell itself was associated with blackness. As atutor to the prince of Portugal explained in 1535, when he arrived inPortugal he felt he had been“transported to a city in hell; indeed, every-where [he] looked [he] saw nothing but blacks.”

In 1977, Mary Ann Jenkins, a 22-year-old Black woman, was found naked but for her jewelry; officials in Illinois incorrectly concluded that she had been killed in a lightning strike.

In 2018, according to the Pew Research Center, ninety-seven per cent of all tweets posted by American adults about national politics were posted by ten per cent of tweeters. A disproportionate number of the people in Twitter’s town hall are the sorts of people who were eligible to vote in 1820, before the first, Jackson-era expansion of the electorate: the wealthy, the educated, and the hyperpartisan. Twitter isn’t the future of American democracy; it’s the past.

I n 1808, New York physician John Augustine Smith, a disciple of Charles White, r ebuked Samuel Stanhope Smith as a minister dabbling in sci-ence. “ I hold it my duty to lay before you all t he facts which are rele-vant,” J ohn Augustine Smith announced in his circulated lecture. The principal f act was t hat t he “ anatomical s tructure” of t he European was “superior” t o that of t he other races. As different species, Blacks and Whites had been “placed at t he opposite extremes of t he scale.” The polygenesis l ecture l aunched Smith’s academic career: he became edi-tor of t he Medical and Physiological Journal, t enth president of t he Col-lege of William & Mary, and president of t he New York College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Pearson, the publisher whose Texas textbook raises questions about the quality of Harlem Renaissance literature, said such language “adds more depth and nuance.”

Slave labour cannot be obtained without somebody being enslaved. At his estate at Monticello, Jefferson invented many ingenious gadgets - including a 'dumb waiter' to mediate contact with his slaves. In the late twentieth century, it is not surprising that this liberal slave-owner is the hero of those who proclaim freedom while denying their brown-skinned fellow citizens those democratic rights said to be inalienable.

Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett), the first enslaved African American to sue for her freedom in the courts based on the law of the 1780 constitution of the state of Massachusetts, which held that "all men are born free and equal." The Jury agreed and in 1781 she won her freedom. Her lawyer had been Theodore Sedgwick.

As African-American businessman Ishmael Trone said last week, the reform has to go beyond policing in order for there to be equality in this country, including banking reform, mortgage reform and business loan reform.

focuses on hardworking Americans and Small Business

The modern practice of the committee questioning nominees on their judicial views began with the nomination of John Marshall Harlan II in 1955; the nomination came shortly after the Supreme Court handed down its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, and several southern senators attempted to block Harlan's confirmation, hence the decision to testify.[1][8]

In American folklore, the nation was built out of a wilderness by free-booting individuals - the trappers, cowboys, preachers, and settlers of the frontier. Yet this primary myth of the American republic ignores the contradiction at the heart of the American dream: that some individuals can prosper only through the suffering of others. The life of Thomas Jefferson - the man behind the ideal of `Jeffersonian democracy' - clearly demonstrates the double nature of liberal individualism. The man who wrote the inspiring call for democracy and liberty in the American declaration of independence was at the same time one of the largest slave-owners in the country.

Keenan calls the practice of drawing arbitrary lending boundaries around areas of perceived environmental risk “bluelining,” and indeed many of the neighborhoods that banks are bluelining are the same as the ones that were hit by the racist redlining practice in days past. This summer, climate-data analysts at the First Street Foundation released maps showing that 70% more buildings in the United States were vulnerable to flood risk than previously thought; most of the underestimated risk was in low-income neighborhoods.

Access and representation in tech isn't a pipeline or qualification problem. It's a white supremacy problem.

There are other mathematical models of institutionalized bias out there! Male-Female Differences: A Computer Simulation shows how a small gender bias compounds as you move up the corporate ladder. The Petrie Multiplier shows why an attack on sexism in tech is not an attack on men.

Schelling's model gets the general gist of it, but of course, real life is more nuanced. You might enjoy looking at real-world data, such as W.A.V. Clark's 1991 paper, A Test of the Schelling Segregation Model.

1. Small individual bias → Large collective bias. When someone says a culture is shapist, they're not saying the individuals in it are shapist. They're not attacking you personally. 2. The past haunts the present. Your bedroom floor doesn't stop being dirty just coz you stopped dropping food all over the carpet. Creating equality is like staying clean: it takes work. And it's always a work in progress. 3. Demand diversity near you. If small biases created the mess we're in, small anti-biases might fix it. Look around you. Your friends, your colleagues, that conference you're attending. If you're all triangles, you're missing out on some amazing squares in your life - that's unfair to everyone. Reach out, beyond your immediate neighbors.

These three strands collided throughout the twentieth century, as the prosperity gospel came into being. It started — like the “work ethic” Max Weber described — as a way to justify why, during the Gilded Age, some people were rich and others poor. (One early prosperity gospel proponent, Baptist preacher Russell H. Conwell, told his mostly-destitute congregation in 1915: “I say you ought to be rich; you have no right to be poor.”) Instead of blaming structural inequality, Conwell and those like him blamed the perceived failures of the individual.

What if, as in the case of anonymous résumés, the DA had no clue about the race of the accused? For that matter, what if you also removed identifying information on the victim and even the location of the crime? In 2019, the San Francisco DA’s office began anonymous charging, removing potentially biasing information from crime reports DAs use to decide whether or not to bring charges (http://bkaprt.com/dcb/02-30/). It’s too soon to tell the outcome of that experiment but, again, the removal of a decisive element may enhance an experience rather than detract from it.

One of DiAngelo’s favorite examples is instructive. She uses the famous story of Jackie Robinson.

White Fragility is, in the end, a book about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves. DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think—or, better, stop thinking. Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.

Nor should anyone dismiss me as a rara avis. Being middle class, upwardly mobile, and Black has been quite common during my existence since the mid-1960s, and to deny this is to assert that affirmative action for Black people did not work.

white and Black people

John McWhorter

Now when police cross the line, holding them accountable is virtually impossible. The judge-made doctrine of qualified immunity makes suing the police for damages incredibly difficult. The exclusionary rule, which says that evidence seized by the police in the course of an unconstitutional search or seizure should be excluded from trial, is virtually a dead letter. And individuals harmed by unconstitutional policing policies, such as choke holds of the sort used to kill Floyd and Garner, cannot sue to prevent these policies from being enforced.

The editors and the elite Blacks they represented often focused, however, on the conduct of t he “lower classes of our people,” whom they blamed for bringing the race down. Class r acism dotted the pages of the Freedom’s J ournal, with articles pitting l ower-income Blacks against upper-income Blacks, and the former being portrayed as i nferior to the latter.

Free B lacks r emained o verwhelmingly a gainst colonization. T heir resistance to the concept partly accounted for t he identifier “Negro” replacing “African” in common usage in the 1820s. Free Blacks theorized that i f t hey called themselves “ African,” t hey would be giv-ing credence t o the notion that t hey should be sent back to Africa. Their own racist i deas were also behind the shift i n terminology. They considered Africa and its cultural practices to be backward, having accepted r acist n otions o f t he c ontinent. S ome l ight-skinned B lacks preferred “colored,” t o separate t hemselves f rom dark-skinned Negroes or Africans.

Protestant organizations started mass-producing, mass-marketing, and mass-distributing i mages of J esus, who was always depicted as White. Protestants saw all t he aspirations of t he new American identity in the White Jesus—a racist idea that proved to be i n their cultural s elf-interest. As pictures of t his White J esus s tarted to appear, Blacks and Whites s tarted to make con-nections, c onsciously and unconsciously, between the White God the Father, his White son Jesus, and the power and perfection of White people.

Jefferson adamantly came to believe that Black freedom should not be discussed in the White halls of Congress, and that southern-ers should be left alone to solve the problem of s lavery at t heir own pace, in their own way. In his younger years, he had considered grad-ual emancipation and colonization to be the solution. His gradualism turned into procrastination. I n his final years, J efferson said that “ on the subject of emancipation I have ceased to think because [it i s] not to be the work of my day.” Slavery had become too lucrative, t o too many slaveholders, f or emancipation to be Jefferson’s work of t hose days.

On October 29, 1822, Charleston Times editor E dwin Clifford Holland released the first proslavery treatise by a native southerner.

Until 1 822—until Denmark Vesey—northerners h ad p roduced most of the racist books and tracts defending slavery. Writers l ike Charles Jared Ingersoll, J ames Kirke Paulding, and Robert Walsh—all f rom the North—defended slavery from British onslaughts i n the 1810s.

. “ It i s . . . t he con-crete universal, self-determining thought, which constitutes the prin-ciple and character of Europeans,” Hegel once wrote. “ God becomes man, r evealing himself.” I n contrast, African people, he said, were “a nation of children” i n the “first stage” of human development: “ The negro is an example of animal man in all his s avagery and lawlessness.” They could be educated, but t hey would never advance on their own. Hegel’s foundational racist idea justified Europe’s ongoing coloniza-tion of Africa. European colonizers would supposedly bring progress to Africa’s residents, j ust as European enslavers had brought progress to Africans i n the Americas.

In 1816, Finley sat down and wrote the colonization movement’s manifesto, Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks. “ What s hall we do with the free people of color?” he began the pamphlet.

On November 19, 1814, P arisians s trolled i nto t he Vaudeville Theater a cross from the Palais-Royal to view the opening of La Venus Hottentote, ou Haine aux Fran-cais (or the Hatred of French Women). I n the opera’s plot, a young Frenchman does not find his s uitor s ufficiently exotic. When she appears disguised as t he “Hottentot Venus,” he falls i n love. Secure i n his attraction, s he drops t he disguise. The Frenchman drops t he ridiculous attraction to the Hottentot Venus, comes t o his s enses, and the couple marries. The opera revealed Europeans’ i deas about Black women. After all, when Frenchmen are seduced by the Hottentot Venus, t hey are acting like animals. When Frenchmen are attracted to Frenchwomen, t hey are acting rationally. While hypersexual Black women are worthy of s ex-ual a ttraction, a sexual F renchwomen are worthy of l ove and marriage.

Londoners were captivated by Sarah Baartman, or r ather, her enormous buttocks and genitalia.Baartman’s Khoi people of s outhern Africa had been classified as the lowest Africans, t he closest t o animals, f or more than a century. Baartman’s buttocks and genitals were i rregularly large among her f el-low Khoi women, n ot t o mention African women across t he continent, or across the Atlantic on Jefferson’s plantation. And yet Baartman’s enormous buttocks and genitals were presented as r egular and authen-tically African.

“ I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable t han the best man on the f arm,” J efferson once explained to a friend.

abolitionist and sci-entist Henri Gregoire for sending him a copy of An Enquiry Concern-ing the I ntellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes on February 25. Gregoire offered travel “ testimony” of glorious Black nations to refute what “ Jefferson tells us, t hat no nation of t hem was ever civi-lized,” he wrote. “ We do not pretend to place the negroes on a level” with Whites, Gregoire explained in assimilationist f orm, but only to challenge those who say “that t he negroes are i ncapable of becoming partners i n the store-house of human knowledge.”

“ The PENIS of an African is l arger t han that of an European,” White t old his readers. Most anatomical museums i n Europe preserved Black penises, and, he noted, “ I have one i n mine.”

English physician Charles White, t he well-known author of a trea-tise on midwifery, entered the debate over species i n 1799. Unlike Scotland’s Lord Kames, White circled around religion and employed a new method of proving the existence of separate race species—comparative anatomy. He did not want t he conclusions i n his Account on the Regular Gradation in Man to “be construed so as t o give the small-est countenance to the pernicious practice of enslaving mankind.”

Master/slave sex fundamentally acknowledged the humanity of Black and biracial women, but it simultaneously reduced that human-ity to their sexuality. I n the Christian world, s exuality was believed to be the animal t rait of humans.

.” Jefferson may have privately justified his r elations with Sally Hemings by reminding him-self t hat everyone did it, or t ried to do it. F rom teens ending their ( and their victims’) virginity, t o married men sneaking around, t o single and widowed men having their longtime liaisons—master/slave rape or i ntercourse seemed “natural,” and enslaving one’s children seemed normal i n slaveholding America.

Rush inserted a note in Philadelphia’s American Daily Advertiser in September telling Black people they had immunity to yellow fever, a conclusion he had reached based on his belief i n their animal-like physical s uperiority. Quite a few Black nurses s uffered hor-ribly before Rush realized his gross error. I n all, 5,000 people per-ished before the epidemic subsided in November and federal officials returned to the city.

When Black people rose, r acists either violently knocked them down or i gnored them as extraordinary. When Black people were down, r ac-ists called it t heir natural or nurtured place, and denied any role in knocking them down in the first place.

To believe that the negative ways of B lack people were responsible for r acist i deas was t o believe that t here was some truth in notions of Black inferiority. To believe t hat t here was some truth i n n otions o f Black i nferiority was t o hold racist i dea

Periodically, t he convention published and cir-culated advice tracts for free Blacks. Abolitionists urged free Blacks to attend church regularly, a cquire English literacy, l earn math, a dopt trades, avoid vice, l egally marry and maintain marriages, evade law-suits, a void expensive delights, a bstain from noisy and disorderly con-duct, a lways act i n a civil and respectable manner, and develop habits of industry, sobriety, and frugality. I f Black people behaved admirably, abolitionists reasoned, t hey would be undermining justifications for slavery and proving that notions of t heir i nferiority were wrong.9This strategy of what can be termed uplift s uasion was based on the idea that White people could be persuaded away from their rac-ist i deas i f t hey saw Black people improving their behavior, uplifting themselves from their l ow station in American society. The burden of r ace relations was placed squarely on the shoulders of Black Ameri-cans. Positive Black behavior, a bolitionist s trategists held, undermined racist i deas, and negative Black behavior confirmed them.

Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1 793, bestowing on slaveholders t he right and legal a ppa-ratus t o recover escaped Africans and criminalize those who harbored them.

Samuel Stanhope Smith joined those preeminent i ntellectuals i n Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society in attacking polygenesists, i n reviv-ing climate theory in America. His scholarly defense of s cripture was quickly printed in Philadelphia, i n London, and in Lord Kames’s back-yard, Edinburgh. By the time he sat down in Princeton’s presidential chair i n 1795, he had amassed an international s cholarly reputation.

Notes on the State o f Virginia would become t he most c onsumed American nonfiction book u ntil well i nto t he mid-nineteenth c entury

The ambitious politician, maybe fearful of a lienat-ing potential f riends, maybe torn between Enlightenment antislavery and American proslavery, maybe honestly unsure, did not pick sides between polygenesists and monogenesists, between segregationists and assimilationists, between slavery and freedom. But he did pick the side of r acism

Notes on the State of Virginia was replete with other contradictory ideas about Black people. “ They are at l east as brave, and more adven-turesome” than Whites, b ecause they lacked the forethought to s ee “danger t ill i t be present,” J efferson wrote. Africans f elt l ove more, but they felt pain less, he said, and “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” That i s why they were disposed “to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course.” But on the previous page, J ef-ferson cast Blacks as requiring “less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight.” I n Jefferson’s vivid imagination, l azy Blacks desiredto sleep more than Whites, but, as physical s avants, t hey required l ess sleep.

With Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson emerged a s the preeminent American authority on Black intellectual i nferiority. This status would persist over t he next fifty years.

With no intention to publish, J efferson unabashedly expressed his views on Black people, and in particular on potentially freed Black people. “ Incorporating the [freed] blacks i nto the state” was out of the question, he declared. “ Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; t en thousand recollections, by the blacks, of t he injuries they have sustained; new provocations; t he real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us i nto parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of t he one or t he other r ace

What it starts with is a fundamental centering of white maleness. And the goal is the ascension of white maleness. People of color can aid it, they can mimic it, or they’re in the way, to be overcome. There’s this argument in tech that anyone can prosper in this space. They’ve removed all the boundaries to prosperity. But the truth is, they’ve moved their own personal boundaries, and left all the boundaries to people of color and women in place because they just don’t exist in these origin stories, as anything other than props.

and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.

DiAngelo sets aside a whole chapter for the self-indulgent tears of white women, so distraught at the country’s legacy of racist terrorism that they force people of color to drink from the firehose of their feelings about it.

and it’s centrality to the white population of the whole state:

It was the degree of centrality to the white population of the state which alone then constituted the important point of comparison between these places

rude uncultivated tribes,

When respondents do not choose a race, the Census Bureau assigns them one, based on factors like the racial makeup of their neighborhood, inevitably leading to a less accurate count.

Many Latinos argue that the country’s race categories — indeed, the government’s very conception of identity — do not fit them.