Listen to Scene on Radio: "On Crazy We Built a Nation" (Seeing White, Part 4)
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John Biewen: Before we pick up where we left off in the last episode, post-1776, let’s dip back into Colonial America for just a couple minutes…
Suzanne Plihcik: In 1613, a very famous marriage takes place in Virginia. Who got married?
John Biewen: …with Suzanne Plihcik of the Racial Equity Institute, at that anti-racism workshop.
Suzanne Plihcik: Pocahontas? John Smith marries Pocahontas? Well, it was Pocahontas but it wasn’t John Smith, who was it? John Rolfe. Yeah, don’t get your history from Disney. So, John Rolfe marries Pocahontas. Now, is this the great love story Disney tells? No. What’s John looking to do? What’s his goal here. He’s making an alliance as one might have made in Europe, in order…? [Voices in distance.] Power’s always right. If I ask a question, just say power. [Laughter.] And yes, it is about power but it’s specifically about obtaining land, so that he might build wealth. Now, how does John turn out? Does he turn out fairly well economically? He does. He’s our first tobacco magnate. John turns out very well.
John Biewen: Suzanne mentions this marriage so she can connect it to something that happens decades later. When the Virginia House of Burgesses, in 1680, effectively defines a white man for purposes of colonial citizenship.
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Suzanne Plihcik: So their first definition, and I paraphrase grossly, this is the essence, was, a white man is someone with no blood whatsoever that is Negro or Indian, as they would have said, and we will assign the following rights and privileges. Now what would be the problem with such a definition?
John Biewen: The problem was, that definition would have excluded the descendants of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. And by then, those descendants were big shots, rich landowners. Suzanne Plihcik: So we have a problem. We have a conundrum in the colony of Virginia.
John Biewen: What to do?
Suzanne Plihcik: What we didn’t do is even more illustrative than what we did. What we didn’t do is say “a white man is someone with no blood whatsoever, etc. etc., however, we will allow these Indian people,” as they would have said, “to maintain their wealth and maintain their land as Indians.” Uh-uh. That’s not what we do. That’s not how this goes. What we said is, a white man is someone with no blood whatsoever, etc., except for the descendants of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. We made them white. Is that the power to define reality?
John Biewen: All right, but that’s just some 17th century weirdness, right? Well, two and a half centuries later, the now Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States of America, was passing its Racial Integrity Act of 1924, amidst the eugenics craze – trying to prevent “race mixing.” The Act adopted the one-drop rule for black people, declaring those with any African ancestry “colored.” But the state held on to the Pocahontas Exception. It defined as white people with up to 1/16th Native American ancestry, keeping John Rolfe’s and Pocahontas’s aristocratic descendants inside the white people tent.
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Suzanne: Is this a little bit crazy? It gets crazier. It gets crazier, and we need to understand that. Because, folks, on crazy we built a nation. We did. We did.
John Biewen: I’m John Biewen, it’s Scene on Radio, part four of our series, Seeing White. We’re turning the lens, exploring race by looking straight at white America and whiteness itself, where it came from and how it works. Most Americans, including, I think, most of us who’ve come to be called white, will agree: the country has a long and painful history of racism. But in the mainstream of our culture, in our schools and movies and certainly in our political talk, we frame that history as a blemish. Maybe a big blemish. But a blemish, nonetheless, on our overarching national story, which is … great. Really great.
Barack Obama: Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation.
John Biewen: Here’s Barack Obama, looking so much younger, in that 2004 Democratic Convention speech that propelled him toward the presidency.
Barack Obama: Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over 200 years ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. [Cheer, applause.] That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That is the true genius of America. [Applause.]
John Biewen: This is the story we tell ourselves: we’re the first nation in the world not formed around an ethnic tribe that’s lived in a place forever. Our country was built on a revolutionary idea. Yes, there were contradictions, especially early on. Lots of the founding fathers owned people. And they said all men were created equal except those who were three-fifths of a person. And we did commit near-genocide against Native Americans in the process of taking their land. And yes, it was ‘all men are created 4 equal’ and women didn’t even get to vote for almost 150 years. But that’s how the world was back then. Look how far we’ve come. That founding idea was genius and we’ve been working things out ever since, striding relentlessly toward that Jeffersonian ideal. That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it, apparently. But how true is it? In the last episode, we saw that fourteen years after we declared to the world, “We hold these truths,” the U.S. Congress made its first actual laws, and those laws said something different: this is a white man’s country. So, which is it? We have two national characters, not one, and they’re always fighting it out. Which side has done most of the winning? Of course, right at the start, one man embodied the national contradiction almost ridiculously well all by himself. We know Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration and owned people. But, turns out, it’s deeper than that.
Nell Irvin Painter: Yeah, Jefferson was a Saxonist, an Anglo-Saxonist. That was something I didn’t know until I started my research.
John Biewen: Nell Irvin Painter, the Princeton History Professor Emerita, author of seven books including The History of White People. She studied Jefferson’s lesser-known writings, in which he extolled “our Saxon ancestors.” The notion of the Anglo-Saxon people is more popular in America than anywhere else, Painter says. It refers to the English, more or less, but includes other northern Europeans who migrated to Britain before the 5th century. Painter says the British themselves don’t use the term much and it’s almost never heard in the supposed original homeland of the Saxons.
Nell Irvin Painter: This sort of nether-netherworld between the Netherlands and Denmark, kind of in there, or Hannover in Germany. They don’t use those words. They don’t use “Anglo-Saxon.”
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John Biewen: Jefferson did. At the Continental Congress of 1776, the very moment when the founders were adopting his stirring Declaration, Jefferson proposed including in the great seal of the United States images of Hengist and Horsa. They were “the Saxon Chiefs from whom we,” he said, “claim the honor of being descended.” We? Seems Jefferson was comfortable defining the United States as a Saxon country. The proposal was not approved. Nell Painter says Jefferson’s notions about his Saxon forebears were romanticized and just cockamamie.
Nell Irvin Painter: He has some strange ideas about British history in which the Romans leave no imprint, not only on the British population but also on the language. And the Normans leave no imprint on the language or the people. But he wanted purity. Racial purity was really important for Jefferson. As he was in there fornicating! [Laughs.]
John Biewen: And fathering six children with the biracial young woman he owned, Sally Hemings. Whatever Jefferson meant by “all men are created equal,” he apparently was not talking about people from Africa. Because on another day he wrote, “The blacks … are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.”
John Biewen: So, so I think we often let people off the hook by saying, well, that person was a man of his time and everybody….
From CBS News:
John Biewen: That’s me putting a question not to Nell Painter but to Ibram Kendi, the University of Florida historian we’ve been hearing from. He says it’s just not accurate to say that in Jefferson’s time, everybody thought like he did.
Ibram Kendi: Jefferson in particular was constantly receiving letters from people in the United States and even in Western Europe who were challenging the ideas, the racist ideas, he put forth in his famous Notes on the State of Virginia. I mean, that was almost a regular thing. And he had these stock messages that he would send back to these 6 people. That “oh, I’m hoping that one day the races will become equal,” or “that’s something that I’m looking for,” or “I do oppose slavery, but….” Because he had to constantly, you know, respond to anti-racists who were challenging him.
John Biewen: In his award-winning book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Kendi also writes a rich chronicle of anti-racist ideas and the people who tried to spread them, from Colonial times to the present day.
Ibram Kendi: Because clearly, these racist ideas have always been challenged by antiracist ideas. But then it also, as you stated, it prevents apologists of these people to basically say they were products of their time, which basically means everybody was saying it, everybody was thinking that, so why would you criticize this person for thinking that way. Well actually, no, not everybody was thinking it.
John Biewen: The first antiracist tract that Kendi found in colonial America was published in 1688 by Mennonite immigrants from Germany and Holland: The Germantown Petition Against Slavery. Kendi also writes of John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker who launched a traveling ministry and abolitionist campaign in the 1750s. “No one is inferior in God’s eyes,” Woolman wrote. Eventually, Woolman even found his way to what Kendi argues is a central lesson of race history: that racist ideas and beliefs result from oppression, not the other way around. I’m gonna say that again: racist ideas do not lead to oppression, they result from it. John Woolman put it this way in the 1760s, quote: “Place on Men the ignominious Title SLAVE, dressing them in uncomely Garments, keeping them to servile Labour, tends gradually to fix a Notion in the mind, that they are a Sort of People below us in Nature.” He went on to say that, for white people, “Where false Ideas are twisted into our Minds, it is with Difficulty we get fair disentangled.” Thomas Jefferson heard arguments like these, and he sometimes voiced them. He referred to the “deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites.” But his thinking was 7 all over the place. He couldn’t imagine white and black people living together as equals. One very telling reason in his mind: all the abuse white people had dished out to black people, “the injuries they have sustained,” as he put it. Nell Painter sums up that part of Jefferson’s thinking:
Nell Irvin Painter: It’s too hard. [Laughs.] I can’t figure out how to get out of this. Jefferson said, we have a lion by the ears—a wolf by the ears. You know, we can’t hold on and we can’t let go.
John Biewen: Jefferson could not, or would not, let go of the 130 people who ran things for him at Monticello. His argument with himself raged but his self-interest won out. He still owned those people when he died in 1826, famously, 50 years to the day after the publication of his words about the equality of all men. I’m pretty sure they didn’t use the term “thought leader” back then, but Thomas Jefferson? One of the towering Founding Fathers, our third president, founder of the University of Virginia. And, Ibram Kendi says, Jefferson’s book espousing his ideas about the superiority of White people, and Anglo-Saxons in particular, Notes on the State of Virginia, was the most-read nonfiction book in America well into the mid-19th century. The man who was perhaps the most towering intellectual figure in American life during the 1800s as a whole has a more uncomplicated, less tainted reputation than Thomas Jefferson. But maybe he shouldn’t.
John Biewen: Now, I, I didn’t know a lot about Ralph Waldo Emerson, I confess….
Nell Irvin Painter: Yeah!
John Biewen: But that was really, that really stood out for me. I thought wow, he’s the transcendentalist and he’s kind of a groovy guy….
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Nell Irvin Painter: Yeah.
John Biewen: In her History of White People, Nell Painter writes at length about Emerson, who is known as a critic of slavery.
Nell Irvin Painter: Emerson was infinitely better educated, more sophisticated and more eloquent than 99.99% of other American authors. So he was the go-to man for knowledge. I did not know about the book English Traits until I started writing the book, as I was trying to figure out what the path was from Blumenbach into American thought.
John Biewen: Meaning the German scientist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. We mentioned him a couple of episodes ago. In the late 1700s, Blumenbach theorized five human races, with white people, or Caucasians, as he named us, at the top of the heap. Emerson cites Blumenbach by name in his now-mostly-forgotten book dealing with race, which came out in 1856.
Nell Irvin Painter: English Traits is a racial tract. It has fallen out of favor and nobody reads it.
John Biewen: But that doesn’t mean its ideas weren’t spread widely in their time. The book pulled together themes from lectures Emerson gave for decades, lectures with titles like, “Permanent Traits of English National Genius.” For Emerson, the real Americans, and the most admirable by far, were New Englanders of a certain “stock,” as he would have put it.
Nell Irvin Painter: Well, the best race was Saxons. Like him. Descendants of the Northmen, the beautiful, virile, vicious Northmen. And then below that were the others, and he didn’t talk about them that much. But it would have been, notably, the Celts. He takes for granted that the black people are not in the running. He was not viciously anti- 9 black, but he thought, you know, black people are enslaved because basically they’re kind of a slavish race. But mostly it’s about how admirable the Saxons are.
John Biewen: Emerson saw Anglo-Saxons as intelligent and freedom-loving, but also beautiful. “The English face,” he wrote, combines “decision and nerve” with “the fair complexion, blue eyes and open florid aspect. Hence the love of truth, hence the sensibility, the fine perception, and poetic construction.” He went on like this. And on. Nell Painter says when doing public talks about her book, she sometimes gets pushback from admirers of Emerson, including scholars.
Nell Irvin Painter: ‘You are just so wrong!,’ as people are wont to say these days. ‘That’s not the Emerson I know.’
John Biewen: She says that’s because most people know Emerson criticized slavery but they haven’t read English Traits, or his journals. In his private writings, Emerson made clear he did not oppose slavery out of concern for enslaved people. He wrote, “The captivity of a thousand negroes is nothing to me.” Emerson thought slavery was bad for the enslavers, too barbaric for people like him. Nell Painter traces a parade of elite Americans who trumpeted a romanticized Anglo-Saxon identity. From Jefferson and other Founding Fathers through Emerson, to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the country’s second-best-selling book in the 19th century after the Bible. To suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Into the 20th Century with Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Ford….
Nell Irvin Painter: It’s the idea that this is a Saxon nation or Anglo-Saxon nation, or this is a white man’s country, Manifest Destiny, all bound up with Anglo-Saxons. Those were very, very prevalent ideas, to buttress or to explain or even to advance geographical capture. Or to feel good about oneself.
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John Biewen: Fast-forward for now past the twists and turns of race thinking in the 20th century: eugenics and its downfall, the acceptance of the Irish and Slavs and Italians and Jews into mainstream Whiteness, the Civil Rights Movements. We’ll get to some of that later in the series.
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Key sources for this episode:
Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People
Ibram Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning
