Just How Far Do The ADL's Tentacles Reach?
https://www.bitchute.com/video/5hNZYifJavbU/
We all know that the the world's premier Anti-White
hate organization - the ADL - trains federal, state, and
local law enforcement across the United States.
At the federal level, we understand that the FBI acts as
the ADL's secret police - as the Cheka was for the
Bolsheviks.
But what's hard to comprehend is just how much reach
the insidious ADL has at the state and local levels.
Just how surrounded is the average American by the
influence of the ADL?
Let's examine the state of Florida as an example.
Attached is a list of the members of the ADL's "Florida
Hate Crime Coalition."
There are more than 340 government, law
enforcement, legal, and social organizations and
personnel officially partnered with the ADL in the state
of Florida alone.
Among these, we see at least:
~ 107 Government Bodies and Elected Officials
(including 40 mayors)
~ 23 Law Enforcement Agencies and Officials (including
17 police chiefs and sheriffs)
~ 6 State Attorneys
~ 58 Jewish organizations
~ 7 Latino/Hispanic organizations
~ 4 Black organizations
~ 4 Sikh organizations
~ 2 Hindu organizations
~ 2 Muslim organizations
~ 2 Asian organizations
~ 11 'Social Justice' organizations
~ 49 Gender Revolution / genital mutilation / sodomy
enthusiast organizations
There are others not counted in the above breakdown
that serve the interests of multiple groups and sociopolitical
agendas, such as the SPLC, South Florida
People of Color, and many more.
Every entity on this impossibly long list has proudly,
publicly partnered with the number one Anti-White
hate group in the world.
Scan the attached list/link.
It's absolutely surreal.
Everywhere you go... every government office you
pass... every cop you pass... law offices... civil rights
groups... family service centers... disability
organizations...
They all take marching orders from the Anti-White ADL.
And just how directly are those marching orders
received?
Thisa month, a FOIA request proved that Atlantis, FL
Police Chief Robert Mangold - who appears on the
attached list - takes directives straight from the director
of the Florida ADL, Yael Hershfield.
In released texts and emails, the ADL's Hershfield
appears to directly guide Chief Mangold and the
Atlantis Police Department's policing and public
messaging. The available communication is limited,
though, as Chief Mangold provides Hershfield with his
personal cell phone number - a strategy commonly
used by nefarious "public servants" who want to
conceal their actions from FOIA inquiries.
At this point, the question isn't "Who does the ADL
influence?" - it's "Who doesn't the ADL influence?"
Remember, this is the same organization that:
~ Monitors online transactions with full access to
PayPal
~ Monitors online gaming with full access through the
largest gaming companies and reports users to the
police for "hate speech"
~ Partners with and censors Google, YouTube,
Facebook, Twitter, and many more
And, of course, the ADL also:
~ Lists "It's Okay To Be White" as "hate speech"
~ Says that preserving Western Civilization is "racist"
~ Says that opposition to Antifa is "White Supremacy"
~ Promotes Anti-White Critical Race Theory in schools
~ Fights for mentally ill men's "right" to share the
bathroom with your daughter at school
~ Falsifies crime statistics to blood-libel White people
Every aspect of public life in the United States is
infected by the Anti-White "Anti-Defamation League."
When you begin to understand how much influence
such organizations truly have on our society, you begin
to understand why and how our society has turned to
shit; because they want it turned to shit and they have
the power to turn it to shit.
The ADL's reign of terror over the people of the United
States must be faced down and ended.
Their hate-fueled, Anti-White, Anti-American power is
an existential threat to the people of this nation...
...so you can bet your last devalued dollar that you
won't hear a word about it from any politician.
(ADL Florida Hate Crime Coalition:
https://florida.adl.org/hate-crimes/members-of-theflorida-
hate-crime-coalition/)
White people have been taught that White people are
evil, and everyone else is good.
Non-White people have been taught that White people
are evil, and everyone else is good.
That's not "divide and conquer."
That's "Kill Whitey."
What about the GOP/conservatives?
Video 1: A group of Black females attack a White female
at Target.
Video 2: A massive group of Black males attack and
attempt to murder a White male at the mall next door
to the Target where the attack in Video 1 took place
(victim is possibly Asian - conflicting reports).
Both videos are from this past weekend.
These videos are not cherrypicked.
These videos are not rare.
These videos are not random.
These are but two more videos in an endless and
ongoing list of videos that show the world exactly who
commits violence and exactly who suffers violence.
There's no "lack of context" for flying two-footed headstomps
on the skull of a defenseless kid in the fetal
position on a tile floor.
This is reality playing out in front of your eyes, and if
your mind wants to distort that into anything other
than what it is, that's because your psyche has been
head-stomped by Con Inc.
White people - White children - are under the constant
threat of Anti-White violence in America, and not one
politician will say a word in White people's defense.
The GOP has caucuses, community centers, campaigns,
and legislation explicitly for Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and
Jews.
And for White people - the number one victims of
violence and hate?
Silent disdain as we are institutionally disenfranchised
from the top-down and physically attacked from the
bottom-up.
Whistleblowers expose the FBI for framing innocent
White Americans for nonexistent "hate crimes" and
"domestic terror?"
GOP silence.
White elementary schoolers in Ohio are taken hostage
by Black students on their school playground, beaten
and terrorized, and forced to pledge allegiance to
"Black Lives Matter?"
GOP silence.
Whites officially become the number one victims of
violent crimes committed by both Blacks and Latinos
(not interracial violent crimes; total violent crimes) in
America?
GOP silence.
We've seen a concentrated effort by "Conservative
influencers" lately to downplay the nonstop stream of
Anti-White violence videos as some sort of fabricated
"eXtReMiSt pSyOp" meant to "DiViDe uS."
They can't counter the reality of infinity Anti-White
violence videos with videos proving "wHiTe PeOpLe dO
iT ToO!" - because there are no videos of "White people
doing it too." So instead, these phonies simply shout
the catchphrases that got us into this mess - "Muh
colorblindness! Muh MLK!" - and hope it's enough to
make their followers stop sharing - and stop believing -
reality.
Rest assured, if there were videos of "White people
doing it too," no one would have to go looking for them
as they'd be injected into the eyeballs of humanity at a
100% White People Bad vaccination rate.
The lesson here, of course, is that the people
committing Anti-White violence aren't the problem...
Showing the people committing Anti-White violence is
the problem.
When you're a protected class - meaning literally
everyone other than straight White people - that
means you're protected from criticism when you attack
the only legally unprotected, legally targeted class:
straight Whites.
Ironically, the only group you won’t hear Republicans
call natural conservatives is Whites.
Show us ONE instance of ONE politician mentioning
White people as a group in the affirmative. Then we
MIGHT give that guy a chance. Just one.
Case A:
~ Be 16-year-old Somali
~ Live in Minnesota
~ Repeatedly rape a 4-year-old-girl and an 8-year-old
girl
~~ ENTER 'AMERICAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM' ~~
~ Receive plea deal requiring no prison time
~ Be sentenced to no more than 116 days in jail
~ Face no requirement to register as a sex offender
~ Have all charges dismissed and expunged from
criminal record
Case B:
~ Be 14-year-old White American
~ Live in Louisiana
~ Post a video using the most popular word in the
English language
~~ ENTER 'AMERICAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM' ~~
~ Face charges for "Inciting A Riot," "Cyberbullying,"
and "Hate Crimes"
In October 2022, a White American was murdered by
an illegal alien when that illegal alien, unprovoked, split
the White man's skull in half with an axe.
It was caught on home surveillance, and the sight and
sound are utterly sickening (the video will be added as
a comment below this post, behind a content warning).
Yet virtually no one has heard about it.
Because there was no national media coverage of the
shocking murder. Literally none.
On October 17th, 22-year-old Jimi Patterson was at a
friend's apartment in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where 26-yearold
Israel Trejo - an illegal alien from Mexico - came to
purchase an axe that someone living at the apartment
was selling. Patterson and Trejo did not know each
other.
As Israel Trejo stood in the living room handling the axe,
Jimi Patterson sat casually on the couch. No words were
exchanged, and there was no conflict or commotion
before the moment Trejo hauled the axe back with both
hands and swung it straight down through the skull of
Patterson.
Lt. Brandon Watkins of the Tulsa Police Department had
this to say:
“There’s no lessons here. There’s nothing to this."
Go ahead and read that again:
“There’s no lessons here. There’s nothing to this."
Now - you guessed it - we are going to "imagine if the
races were reversed."
Because if they were, we'd have the Mexican George
Floyd and the incident would be used to justify the
continued open flow of non-White migration across the
southern border of the United States for the explicit
purpose of displacing the inherently evil White
population of this country.
If a calm, quiet, unassuming Mexican national, illegally
in the US, was sitting on a couch in Tulsa, OK, and a
White American man, absolutely out of nowhere,
plunged an axe through that Mexican's skull, killing him
- and it was all caught on video...
~ Would there be a national media blackout or would
the media's spotlight shine brighter than it has since
Saint George of Minneapolis overdosed in proximity to
a White guy?
~ Would there be total Uniparty silence, or would every
grandstanding whore on either side of the aisle rush to
press conferences, TV appearances, and social media
accounts to "condemn the unconscionable and
unprovoked execution of an innocent man who was just
trying to make a better life for himself and his family!"?
~ Would there be total inaction from the FBI and White
House or would their bosses at the ADL have
immediately dispatched them to cook up "hate crime"
charges and recite headline fodder about this
indisputable proof that "wHiTe SuPrEmAcY iS tHe
GrEaTeSt tHrEaT tO tHe HoMeLaNd!"?
~ Would the police reflexively conclude that "there's no
lesson here" or would the world never stop learning the
lesson that "White People Bad!"?
As is so often the case, the system silence from the
Anti-White Industrial Complex is proof positive of their
complicity.
Some White American kid gets his skull split like
firewood by a non-White illegal?
LOL, shhh.
A non-White illegal gets his skull split like firewood
called a name by some White America kid?
FEDERAL HATE CRIME CHARGES.
My objective here isn't to point out some doublestandard
- it's to point out the only standard:
The Anti-White standard.
Because just as frightening as the unrelenting stream of
Anti-White migration and violence is the continued
insistence of so many White Americans that "it's not
about race!"
Of course it's about race.
The entire reason you haven't heard about this is
because the victim is an innocent White kid and the
murderer is an illegal alien from Mexico.
And our Anti-White ruling class wants more illegal
aliens and more dead White people.
Justice in America isn't blind.
It is actively ANTI WHITE ...
And it ain't just the USA these days ... the UK Canada
AUS and NZ are vying for second place in this race ...
Humza Yousaf is a Pakistani Muslim who serves as
Scotland's Secretary for Health and Social Care.
Here he is in front of Scottish Parliament condemning
all of the White people in the government of...
SCOTLAND.
"Not a single Black member of the Scottish Parliament -
to our shame."
"Not a single female woman of color - to our shame."
"The most senior positions in Scotland are filled almost
exclusively by those who are White."
"The Lord President - WHITE! The Lord Justice Clerk -
WHITE! Every High Court Judge - WHITE! The Lord
Advocate - WHITE! The Solicitor General - WHITE! The
Chief Constable - WHITE! Every Deputy Chief Constable
- WHITE! Every Assistant Chief Constable - WHITE! The
Head of the Law Society - WHITE! The Head of the
Faculty of Advocates - WHITE! Every Prison Governor -
WHITE! The Chief Medical Officer - WHITE! The Chief
Nursing Officer - WHITE! The Chief Veterinary Officer -
WHITE! The Chief Social Work Advisor - WHITE!"
"Almost every trade union in this country headed by
people who are WHITE!"
"Every Director General is WHITE!"
"Every chair of every public body is WHITE!"
"That is not good enough."
Let that last line marinate for a moment.
This man - with more power and influence than 99.9%
of Scotland's 96% White population - measures
"goodness" entirely in terms of how non-White
something is.
Now imagine a world in which this Anti-White bag of
shit continues to hold office.
Imagine a world in which this Anti-White bag of shit,
while continuing to hold office, spearheads "Hate
Crime" legislation to hunt down and imprison Scots for
objecting to this Anti-White shitbag's policies of de-
Scottish-ization of Scotland.
Imagine a world in which no mainstream figure stands
up and says: "Listen closely, you Anti-White bag of shit,
the fffucking government of Scotland is White because
the fffucking nation of Scotland is White!"
Imagine a world in which what we see here continues
unabated across Western Civilization, and where
anyone with the integrity to stand up to such unbridled
Anti-White insanity is forsaken from participation in
"polite" society, while Anti-White shitbags like Humza
Yousaf are promoted, pedestalled, and empowered.
Now imagine no more - because this is the world that
we live in.
But wait there is more ... Pakis are NOW WHITE TOO ...
as if Whiteness is a club you join.
Jordan Peterson, in his tireless quest to out-Jordan-
Peterson himself, has today informed the world that
Pakistanis are White.
He does this directly beneath a video of a Pakistani
accurately describing himself as "non-White."
Peterson doesn't object to this Anti-White Pakistani
Muslim excoriating the White nation of Scotland's
government for being... full of White people.
Peterson doesn't object to this Anti-White Pakistani
Muslim becoming the leader of the Scottish National
Party.
He simply arrives, acts as a human quaalude to keep
White people sedated, and collects his check for having
done so.
Jordan Peterson's only objection is to White people
waking up and noticing what's actually happening to us.
+++
The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other
Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical
Fitness
A 1922 photo of N.Y.C. officer workers showing off their
weight-lifting skills. (Bettmann Archive)
A 1922 photo of N.Y.C. officer workers showing off their
weight-lifting skills. Bettmann Archive
BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN
UPDATED: DECEMBER 28, 2022 11:56 AM EST |
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: DECEMBER 28, 2022 7:00 AM
EST
How did U.S. exercise trends go from reinforcing white
supremacy to celebrating Richard Simmons? That
evolution is explored in a new book by a historian of
exercise, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of the book
Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise
Obsession, out Jan. 2023.
Nowadays, at the beginning of every New Year, many
Americans hit the gym to work off their holiday feasts.
This momentum usually starts to fade in mid-January,
according to a 2019 analysis of data on fitness tracking
apps by Bloomberg. But such new year’s resolutions are
pretty new—as is the concept of exercise as a way to
improve bodily health.
“It’s really not until the 1980s that you start to have a
consensus that everybody should be doing some form
of exercise,” says Mehlman Petrzela, a professor at the
New School in New York City. That’s partly the result of
the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which
fought for Title IX, allowing girls to play school sports.
That pushed back on notions that girls and women
aren’t capable of doing vigorous exercise because
they’re fragile.
Perfect for reading on the treadmill or stationary bike,
the below conversation with Mehlman Petrzela outlines
the earliest ideas on exercise, delves into the history of
various popular workouts, and the outsize influence of
Richard Simmons.
Your book Fit Nation starts out by talking about how fat
was something to aspire to and that was a sign of
wealth and healthiness. How did Americans go from a
mentality of “fat is good” to “skinny is better?”
One of the things I set out to do in this book is to look
at the change in how we think about our bodies and
what’s considered attractive. Until the 1920s or so, to
be what would be considered today fat or bigger, was
actually desirable and actually signified affluence—
which is like the polar opposite of today, when so much
of the obesity epidemic discourse is connected to socioeconomic
inequality and to be fat is often to be seen as
to be poor.
How did that happen? Well, in a moment when actually
there wasn’t a lot of access to caloric foods, to be fat
showed that you could afford these things that were
out of the reach of most people and also you could
afford to rest, like you weren’t out there doing manual
labor all day. As that caloric food became more
accessible, and as more people were doing sedentary
white-collar work and had access to cars and leisure,
somebody who could resist those caloric foods,
exercise, and have a thin body, was seen as more
desirable.
Read more: The history behind New Year’s resolutions
to exercise more
What’s the most surprising thing you learned in your
research?
It was super interesting reading the reflections of
fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said
we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on
women’s form, and that women should be lifting
weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this
is so progressive.
Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white
women should start building up their strength because
we need more white babies. They’re writing during an
incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved
people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a
white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap”
moment as a historian, where deep archival research
really reveals the contradictions of this moment.
Your book talks about how, at one point, America’s
focus was on exercising so we could have a population
that was ready to go to war. What is health and fitness
culture training us to do? How has that expectation
evolved over time?
During the New Deal [of the 1930s], the Civilian
Conservation Corps would recruit out-of-work or
impoverished, scrawny men to go work in the forest
and on public works projects. One of the ways that they
marketed this was “it puts muscles on your bones.”
That really picked up during the Cold War. Right after
World War II, you start to have more concern about
Americans getting soft, this idea that the things that
made America great—like cars and TV sets—were
actually taking a toll on Americans’ bodies. Presidents
Eisenhower and Kennedy went on a mission to make
exercise look wholesome and patriotic and focus on
shifting the purpose of exercise to being a good citizen
and defending your country.
In the 1980s, there’s a huge boom in the fitness
industry, connected to this “work hard, play hard”
mentality. I was also really moved speaking to gay men
who had lived through HIV/AIDS and talked about how
they exercised to display that they had a healthy body
at a moment when there was so much homophobia.
Some gyms became like community centers, sharing
medical information, almost like mutual aid societies.
Another big turning point is 9/11. You see a boom in
the CrossFit mentality of almost like militarized fitness
and girding yourself and your body for a fight—not
necessarily, by the way, in the 1950s/1960s way of
fighting for the U.S. Army—but more like “you need to
know how to perform functional fitness to protect
yourself if things go wrong.” At the same time, you see
[an emphasis on] wellness, self care and healing and
being meditative in an increasingly traumatic and
unpredictable world.
Read more: The big business of being a Peloton
instructor
What era of fitness are we in now?
Gym usage is rebounding rapidly since the pandemic
[lockdown ordinances], but now it’s also really efficient
for a lot of people to exercise at home. What’s so
unfortunate about the pandemic is how much it
accelerated fitness inequality. You can go home and be
on your Peloton if you can afford it, if you have the
space for it, but not everyone can.
I was meeting with somebody who’s very active in the
New York City pickleball world, and you have all of
these adults who want to do this inclusive recreational
thing, and they’re competing with children who want to
go out and skateboard and do basketball. Those are
wonderful things, and we don’t have the public space
to accommodate them.
Did you find an exercise that people don’t do now, but
they did do in a certain period of history, that’s just
comical to think about?
“Reducing machines” are a really good example of an
exercise machine that just went away. Well into the
1960s, women were not encouraged to do any kind of
strenuous exercise, but they were of course encouraged
to do whatever it took to be beautiful and slim.
So you would either lie down like on a bed or stand
with a belt around you, and the machines would shake
your fat. They were meant to enhance circulation but
also to shake away cellulite. Reducing machines were
everywhere; people would buy them for their houses.
There was one called the “magic couch” that every
woman wanted for Christmas.
The idea that all bodies can exert themselves and work
hard—including women’s bodies— is a really positive
development, and it’s one of the reasons that you don’t
see those passive exercise machines anymore.
In Philadelphia, a woman works out on a machine
designed to roll away fat while boxing champion
"Philadelphia" Jack O'Brien looks on. (George
Rinhart/Corbis—Getty Images)
In Philadelphia, a woman works out on a machine
designed to roll away fat while boxing champion
"Philadelphia" Jack O'Brien looks on. George
Rinhart/Corbis—Getty Images
How did running become a popular exercise in the
1970s? It’s often hailed as a great equalizer, an exercise
everyone can do with hardly any gear required? Did you
find that to be the case?
It became popular among environmentalists, people
who were imagining what it would be like to be in a
culture that was not centered around cars. The
sneakers back then were pretty rudimentary—old work
shoes with rubber soles.
But it’s important to point out that access was never
totally equal, if you lived in a neighborhood that didn’t
have safe streets or streets that were not well lit.
Women were catcalled. People of color were thought to
be committing a crime.
The “running is for everybody” discourse still quite
often leaves out the fact that depending on where you
live and the body that you live in, it can be a very
different kind of experience.
Read more: 3 things you didn’t know about running
Your book has so many interesting stories about the
origins of various workouts. I learned that Pilates can
be traced all the way back to World War I, when its
founder, Joseph Pilates was detained on the Isle of Man
and created resistance contraptions out of hospital
beds to help prisoners of war keep up their muscle
strength. How can the influence of Pilates be seen in
today’s fitness culture?
That sets the foundation for the idea that exercise isn’t
an indulgent little hobby some people have; it’s actually
something that can keep you healthy. Joseph Pilates
came to the United States, developing this system that
he first called “Contrology,” and he became really an
important part of the dance and performance
community. And that did a lot to raise the bar on what
fitness represented because, as I talk about at length, a
lot of the cultural associations with fitness were like
dank gymnasiums and big muscular men heaving
weights.
It sounds like Pilates made exercise seem like
something that could be graceful too.
Yes, Pilates’ studio on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan was
[patronized by] opera stars and ballet dancers who are
working on their bodily strength, so that did a lot to
sanitize and upgrade the reputation of fitness. A lot of
people embraced exercise as something that could
make them look like a dancer.
Read more: Here are the health benefits of Pilates
Fitness guru Richard Simmons sings alone with one the
the 60s classic tunes playing during one of his classes at
Slimmons Studio March 9, 2013, in Beverly Hills. (Brian
van der Brug/Los Angeles Times—Getty Images)
Fitness guru Richard Simmons sings alone with one the
the 60s classic tunes playing during one of his classes at
Slimmons Studio March 9, 2013, in Beverly Hills. Brian
van der Brug/Los Angeles Times—Getty Images
Going into this book, the only famous fitness instructor
I had heard of was Richard Simmons. How influential
was he?
He’s really important in terms of shifting who was
welcome in gyms. One of the reasons that he ended up
starting his own studio is that he went to this very
famous studio Gilda Marx, and he absolutely loved
aerobics, but he was asked not to come back because
women didn’t feel comfortable working out with a man
who was singing and so emotive during his workout.
And I think he opened a studio where everybody felt
welcomed there, including fat people, who felt like they
couldn’t step foot into a health club or a studio to take
an aerobics class because no one looked like them
there.
Today, you see quite a few fat people in the fitness
industry, who are operating from a better perspective,
which is that your body size does not necessarily
dictate your fitness level. We should not presume that
because you are fat, that you are not fit or that you
want to lose weight. And I think that we probably
couldn’t have had that without Richard Simmons.
What’s the future of fitness?
I would love for the future of fitness not only to be
about [WiFi] connected treadmills and luxury clubs
where people can go hang out and drink green juice
after their workout, but rather for a collective public
investment in making fitness and recreation available to
everybody and much more accessible than it currently
is. We do agree as a culture, for the most part, that
exercise is good for you, but our policy environment has
not caught up with that. We should acknowledge that
that’s one of the few things that we can agree on in our
culture, and then have a kind of bipartisan shared
investment in better physical education, better
recreation [spaces] for kids and adults.
+++
How textbooks taught white supremacy
A historian steps back to the 1700s and shares what's
changed and what needs to change
Photo by Mary E. Yacovone
BY Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
DATESeptember 4, 2020
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Historian Donald Yacovone, an associate at the
Hutchins Center for African & African American
Research and a 2013 winner of the W.E.B. Du Bois
medal, was researching a book on the legacy of the
antislavery movement when he came across some old
history school textbooks that stopped him cold — and
led him to write a different book.
Yacovone, who co-authored “The African Americans:
Many Rivers to Cross” with Henry Louis Gates Jr. in
2013, is now writing “Teaching White Supremacy: The
Textbook Battle Over Race in American History.”
The Gazette interviewed Yacovone about the origins of
his research, his findings, and why he thinks it’s
necessary to teach the difficult story of slavery and
white supremacy and their legacies.
Q&A
Donald Yacovone
GAZETTE: How did you start examining history
textbooks from the 19th and 20th centuries?
YACOVONE: I had begun a different book about the
legacy of the antislavery movement and the rise of the
Civil Rights era. I had spent several months at the
Houghton Library before it closed down. When I was
nearly finished with one particularly large collection, I
wanted to take a break and find out how abolitionism
had been taught in school textbooks. I thought this was
going to be a quick enterprise: I’d go over to Gutman
Library at the Graduate School of Education, take a look
at a few textbooks, and keep going. Imagine my shock
when I was confronted by a collection of about 3,000
textbooks. I started reviewing them, and I came across
one 1832 book, “History of the United States” by Noah
Webster, the gentleman who’s responsible for our
dictionary. I was astonished by what I was reading so I
just kept reading some more.
In Webster’s book there was next to nothing about the
institution of slavery, despite the fact that it was a
central American institution. There were no African
Americans ever mentioned. When Webster wrote
about Africans, it was extremely derogatory, which was
shocking because those comments were in a textbook.
What I realized from his book, and from the subsequent
ones, was how they defined “American” as white and
only as white. Anything that was less than an Anglo
Saxon was not a true American. The further along I got
in this process, the more intensely this sentiment came
out, I realized that I was looking at, there’s no other
word for it, white supremacy. I came across one
textbook that declared on its first page, “This is the
White Man’s History.” At that point, you had to be a
dunce not to see what these books were teaching.
“Americans tend to see racism as a result of Southern
slavery, and this thinking has all kinds of problems.”
GAZETTE: What are the roots of white supremacy? How
is white supremacy connected to the history of slavery?
YACOVONE: White supremacy precedes the origins of
the United States. Every aspect of social interaction,
particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, was
dominated by white identity, and white supremacy
became an expression of American identity.
Americans tend to see racism as a result of Southern
slavery, and this thinking has all kinds of problems. First
of all, slavery was in the North as well as in the South,
and the people who formed the idea of American
identity were not Southern slave owners, they were
Northerners. The father of white supremacy was not a
Southerner; it was John H. Van Evrie, a Canadian who
ended up settling in New York City. Van Evrie argued
that if no slaves existed, the class-based structure of
Europe would have been transferred, kept, and
developed in the American colonies. But with the
African presence, Van Evrie said, the descendants of
white Europeans saw that the difference among white
people was virtually insignificant compared to what
they perceived as differences between themselves and
African Americans. This allowed democracy, which was
an unpopular idea in the 17th and 18th century, to
flourish and develop.
We always forget that democracy was not an idealized
form of government back then. In fact, it was
considered an evil. Van Evrie’s argument was that
Americans had to reimagine a new kind of government
and social order and they could do so because of the
African presence. This can also explain why white
supremacy has persisted for so long, because it is an
identity of oneself in contrast to others, a sort of a selffulfilling,
reinforcing thought about one’s self-perceived
superiority. Even people who opposed slavery believed
that African Americans could never be absorbed by
white society. Samuel Sewall, who wrote the first
antislavery pamphlet in 1700, condemned slavery, but
he also characterized people of African descent as “a
kind of extravasate Blood,” always alien. His idea
remained central to the American mind for the next
200 years.
GAZETTE: Some historians say that white supremacy
ideology served to justify the enslavement of African
Americans.
YACOVONE: The main feature of white supremacy is the
assumption that people with Anglo Saxon backgrounds
are the primacy, the first order of humanity. Van Evrie,
however, saw people of African descent as essential to
do “the white man’s work,” and were designed to do so
“by nature and god.” He wrote about six different
books on the subject, and he used a racial hierarchy in
which Caucasians were at the top and Africans at the
bottom. You’d think that white supremacists were
driven mostly by hate, but at the core they were driven
by their ideas of racial superiority, which of course were
pure fiction and had nothing to do with reality. White
supremacy wasn’t developed to defend the institution
of slavery, but in reaction to it, and it preceded the
birth of the United States.
A lot of the white supremacists in the North didn’t even
want an African American presence there. Many
Northerners advocated the American Colonization
Society, which would export African Americans to
Liberia. But there was no unanimity of ideas about
white supremacy; the only thing they all agreed upon
was the “superiority of the white race.”
“White supremacy is a toxin. The older history
textbooks were like syringes that injected the toxin of
white supremacy into the mind of many generations of
Americans.”
GAZETTE: I once heard a Harvard historian say that the
Founding Fathers were white supremacists. Is that a fair
characterization?
YACOVONE: Of course. Thomas Jefferson is the classic
example. He is the individual responsible for giving us
the phrase that embodies the democratic promise —
“All men are created equal” — and set the trend to
exclude slavery from newly acquired territory. Yet, he
refused to free his own slaves, considered people of
African descent inherently inferior, and when he wrote
those famous words in the Declaration of
Independence he thought only of white men.
GAZETTE: What did the textbooks published in the 20th
century teach about slavery in comparison to those
written in the 19th century?
YACOVONE: For the most part, the textbooks from the
pre-Civil War period through the end of the century
followed a basic format: They would go from
exploration to colonization to revolution to creation of
the American republic, and then every succeeding
presidential administration. Anything outside of the
political narrative was not considered history and was
not taught.
During the brief period of Reconstruction (1863-1877),
the story emphasized the fulfillment of democracy, and
the ideology of freedom suffused many books. This was
a dramatic change. I even came across a couple of
books that contained pictures of African Americans,
and I was flabbergasted when I discovered one that had
a picture of Frederick Douglass — that was unheard of.
Prior to Reconstruction, textbooks had a few pictures,
some engravings. But they disappear pretty quick once
we get into the 20th century, because the “Lost Cause”
mythology takes over academia and white supremacy
reappears with full force.
“We’re not teaching students the true American history
because African American history is American history.”
During the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1940s, it was
astonishing to see positive assessments of slavery in
American history textbooks, which taught that the
African American’s natural environment was the
institution of slavery, where they were cared for from
cradle to grave. There was a legacy of African American
writing about freedom, but the white power structure
simply wouldn’t accept it as legitimate. They dismissed
the slave narratives as propaganda, downplayed the
history of Africans before slavery, and ignored the work
of African American scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois and
others.
GAZETTE: A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center
found that schools failed to teach the “hard history” of
African enslavement. What role have the textbooks
played in the miseducation of many generations of
Americans?
YACOVONE: This is the problem. We’re not teaching
students the true American history because African
American history is American history. I’ve been
lecturing about this project, and every time I ask
students what they learn about the history of slavery,
they all said, “Not much.” But even if there are
textbooks that deal with those issues in a more
accurate way, white teachers are so intimidated that
they won’t teach it.
GAZETTE: You mentioned in an article in the Chronicle
of Higher Education that while doing your research, you
found the history book you read when you were a fifth
grader. What did that book teach you about the history
of slavery?
YACOVONE: That was one of the great revelations of
this research. Like so many of these books, “Exploring
the New World” by O. Stuart Hamer and others, which
was published repeatedly between 1953 and 1965, said
almost nothing. All these books, particularly from 1840
for the next 25 years, go out of their way to not discuss
slavery. Some would say that slavery began in 1619, but
most said it began in 1620 because those who are
writing this narrative are New Englanders, and 1620 is
when the Pilgrims sailed on the Mayflower. Half the
books from this early period got the date wrong. If the
textbooks wrote about slavery, it was only one
sentence and would never discuss the nature of slavery
or include any descriptions. When American politics
became absorbed by the debate over slavery, they
could not avoid that, and would mention the 1820
Compromise [that admitted Maine to the union as a
free state and Missouri as a slave state] and the 1850
Compromise [that abolished the slave trade -but not
slavery- in Washington, D.C.]. None of the textbooks
published prior to the Civil War would ever talk about
the abolitionist movement, which began in the late
1820s. It wasn’t until 1853, when the educator Emma
Willard published her massive history of the United
States, that she mentioned the abolitionists, but she
didn’t say who they were or what they were about,
except that they were tools of Great Britain dedicated
to destroying the republic.
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GAZETTE: What did the textbooks published after the
1960s teach about slavery? Has there been any
progress over the past few years?
YACOVONE: In the mid 1960s, textbooks began
noticeably to change because attitudes and scholarship
were changing in the wake of the Civil Rights
Movement. Scholars such as Kenneth Stampp
reimagined Reconstruction, and it had a dramatic
effect. There was a gradual reintroduction of the
African American element in history textbooks. And
now, many history teachers don’t even use textbooks.
They’re using online resources. Some of the best work
is being produced by the Zinn Education Project, the
Gilder-Lehrman Center, and the Southern Poverty Law
Center.
But even when textbooks are accurate, teachers have
to be willing to teach it. We know there are many white
teachers who are afraid of doing it. And you have to
have school systems, both public and private,
committed to doing this work and not to punish
teachers for doing so, which is happening. The
resources are endless. But it’s complicated because in
many states there are institutionalized approval
processes that determine what textbook will be used.
And as far as the publishing industry is concerned, this
is huge money. Texas and California dominate and they
determine what gets published and what doesn’t.
GAZETTE: What are the risks of not teaching the full
story of slavery and its legacy?
YACOVONE: This is essential work that has to be done.
If America is to be a nation that fulfills its democratic
promise, the history of slavery and white supremacy
have to be taught in schools across the country. We
need to acknowledge that white supremacy remains an
integral part of American society and we need to
understand how we got to where we are. The
consequences of not doing so are lethal. White
supremacy is a toxin. The older history textbooks were
like syringes that injected the toxin of white supremacy
into the mind of many generations of Americans. What
has to be done is teach the truth about slavery as a
central institution in America’s origins, as the cause of
the Civil War, and about its legacy that still lives on. The
consequences of not doing so, we’re seeing every day.
This interview has been condensed and edited for
length and clarity.
