Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity by Donald Yacovone (review)

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• Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity by Donald Yacovone
• Harry L. Watson

Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity. By Donald Yacovone. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2022. Pp. xxiii, 431. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 978-0-593-46716-9; cloth, $32.50, ISBN 978-0-593-31663-4.)

In an era of resurgent white nationalism and intense political pressure on schools, the appearance of Donald Yacovone’s Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity is [End Page 420] especially welcome. Mixing educational, intellectual, and cultural history, Yacovone reviews the changing messages in America’s history textbooks to trace “the origins and development of the idea of white supremacy, how it has shaped our understanding of democratic society, and how generation after generation of Americans have learned to incorporate that vision into their very identity” (p. xiv). He demonstrates convincingly that racist and nationalist pressures on history textbooks are nothing new, for schools have long taught collective identities and group cohesion. In the United States, assumptions of white superiority over time have been central to both, ever since teaching American history began in the early republic.

More profoundly, Yacovone also insists that racist texts have done more than inculcate prejudice and national identity. By encouraging white Americans to replace class hierarchy with racial solidarity, he argues, white supremacy has created an imaginary mudsill from people of color that supports democracy for whites alone. Yacovone thus joins authors as disparate as John C. Calhoun, James Henry Hammond, William Gilmore Simms, Edmund S. Morgan, and Nikole Hannah Jones, who suggest, in one way or another and with wildly differing intentions, that what should be best about America might only exist because of its worst, because, as he puts it, “American democracy depended on Black inequality to sustain white equality” (p. xv). Far more than his documentation of textbook racism, this contention makes Yacovone’s work both provocative and problematic.

Teaching White Supremacy begins with a brief overview of American racism, followed by an exposition of the life and thought of John H. Van Evrie, a now-obscure figure whom Yacovone dubs “the father of white supremacy” (p. 7). Yacovone then introduces the earliest American history textbooks and the proslavery campaign to soften their portraits of the South. For the most part, northern authors complied, revealing their deep longing for national unity (and national sales). They used the same tricks to create this unity as northern citizens and politicians did: evasion, denial, self-delusion, and of course, racist stereotypes. The abolitionist movement responded with an emancipationist vision of American history that persisted through Reconstruction and afterward, only to falter before reconciliationism by the nineteenth century’s end. Social Darwinism and eugenics followed next, bolstering the era’s imperialist ethos. Led by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, militant supporters of the South’s Lost Cause likewise campaigned to ensure that northern and southern books were equally friendly to white southerners’ aspirations. In the book’s last and most heartening chapter, Yacovone details how renewed respect for abolitionism and the rise of Black history finally (but only recently) overcame decades of distortion to bring a more truly democratic vision of America’s past to the nation’s classrooms. His review is comprehensive and largely persuasive, especially in his contention that northern scholars and teachers have been even more active than southerners in advocating white Americans’ superior historical mission.

No matter how convincing overall, Yacovone’s account may vex punctilious scholars in some aspects. The endnotes are hard to use and lack a standard format. The tone is often polemical, expressing values laudably common among modern historians but usually silent in professional writing. We thus [End Page 421] read of Louis Agassiz’s “foul gurgling” (p. xix), the “serpent of white supremacy” and “its venom” (p. xx), the “vile and unrepentant assertion of white supremacy” of John H. Van Evrie and his publishing partner Rushmore G. Horton (p. 84), the “abominable 1857 Dred Scott decision” (pp. 132–33), the “revolting conduct” of the Ku Klux Klan (p. 227), and so forth. Many...