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Black americans using quilting as a method as storytelling

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being intentional with my materials and process, using found materials from baltimore thrift stores

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playing with the idea of institutions of baltimore and the ones that have failed the black community

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Quilting/mending/textile work and woman's work

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Quilting/mending/textile work and woman's work

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using the unifying nature of textile work between women as a way to connect women between underprivileged communities

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exploring power/institutions and how they would have promised slaves/indentured servants something that was never given

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Oldest Church in Baltimore (gothic)

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if you give someone a taste of privilege they will reach for the privilege and away from solidarity

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if you give someone a taste of privilege they will reach for the privilege and away from solidarity

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Archaeology of the Irish Diaspora in Texas, Maryland .

Texas, in present day Baltimore County, is an unincorporated village located 12 miles north of Baltimore City. The site is located in a densely populated and heavily commercial and industrial corridor of Baltimore County (MAAR Associates 1992: I-12-I 13). It is situated in an area called the Limestone Valley because of the rich vein of limestone that is still quarried today. Quarrying was a small-scale production. The completion of the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad in 1832 allowed for better and more efficient means of transporting the limestone and finished marble, which was noted for its exceptional high quality (Brooks et. al. 1979). As a result, its production increased exponentially.

The village of Texas emerged as an Irish community as early as 1847. The increased quarry activities created a demand for skilled and unskilled laborers. This coincided with the arrival of thousands of Irish immigrants to Baltimore City seeking to escape the horrors of the Great Hunger, also known as the Potato Famine. Based on the U.S. Census figures the settlement of Texas began by 1847 and an established Irish enclave by 1860. The limestone quarried by the Irish was used for building projects such as the Washington Monuments in Washington D.C. and Baltimore City, the State House in Annapolis, the porticoes of the Senate and House wings of the Capitol in Washington D.C., and as far as away as St. Patrick's Church in New York City (Anderson 1982).

Drawing from the records of St. Joseph's Catholic Church, built by the Texas Irish immigrants in 1852, and Church's cemetery headstones, the Irish inhabitants hailed from the west of Ireland (Smith 1927). The western provinces were most affected by the failure of the potato, as it was for most rural poor their only means of income and subsistence. The headstones being a unique, informative, and intimate historical resource reveal each individual's parish and townland in Ireland. It is evident that more than half of the population of Texas was made up of individuals from the townland of Ballykilcline in County Roscommon. This represents a unique archaeological context as extensive archaeological work on pre-Famine cabins has been conducted in townland of Ballykilcline (Orser and Hull 1998; Orser et. al. 2000). The comparisons of material in Ireland and Texas will provide for much interesting studies in material changes reflecting shifts in cultural and social behaviors. The work will also bring attention to and study of community formation of diverse Irish groups. Not all of the inhabitants were from Ballykilcline. Several Irish households were from various rural regions of Counties Cork, Mayo, Kerry, and Limerick and each area had distinct cultural traditions. Regardless, all inhabitants were part of the larger history of the Irish Diaspora. The work proposed here will be the first archaeological survey of an Irish immigrant village in the United States.

The vision for this anthropological-based archaeological research is to locate, collect, and interpret the historical, ethnographic, and material context of the Irish of Baltimore County through a site specific study of a mid-19th century Irish immigrant quarry town known as Texas. Little is known, historically, of the daily lives of "quarry-Irish" in Texas, Maryland. Historians of Irish America have only hypothesized the experiences of Irish immigrants being uprooted from their homeland and transplanted in new social and cultural landscapes (Kenny 2000). Maryland has a rich Irish and Irish-American history beginning with the 17th century Irish-Catholic Carroll family and presently Maryland's Irish-American governor, Martin O'Malley. Irish immigrants have come to, and made an impact on the formation of, Maryland. Missing from the historical narrative of immigrants and laborers, however, is a study of their daily lives. The importance of archaeology to the humanities rests with it being a multidisciplinary social science focusing on material and social relations within and between different economic and ethnic collectives (Leone 2005; Mullins 1999; Orser 1996; 2008; Saitta 2007; Shackel 1996). It is the actions of the collective, formed through shared social interests, experiences, cultures, and ideologies, that structure the practice of day to day life and is reflected in archaeologically-recovered material culture (McGuire 2008: 45). Archaeology is not an independent line of inquiry from other disciplines. The advantage of the discipline rests with its abilities to track different or hidden aspects of the historical process, especially at the point of mismatch between objects and documents where artifacts can illuminate social processes, identity formation, and resistance or incorporation into the larger society (Leone 2005).

The archaeology of Texas, in conjunction with the collection of ethnographic, social, and economic histories, will provide the necessary and important data towards understanding the immigrant presence and everyday life not evident by the historical record alone. The data recovered archaeologically will be put on the regional, national, and international stage of the Irish Diaspora and will bolster and create new interpretations concerning the material manifestations of collective identities. The research is framed by questions such as what impacts did the Famine, eviction, and transportation have on rural Irish cultural practices? What kind of social and material life did Irish evictees have after settling in Texas and how was it affected by their traumatic Irish past? What cultural and material practices were adopted in the United States? How does this compare to other Irish immigrant experiences throughout the United States?

The overall importance of this proposed research is its continuing contribution to the scholarship of immigrant life histories and community formation, the transformation of collective identities, labor history and working class identities, and the changing material conditions and experiences of everyday life of immigrant and first and second generation American laborers. Furthermore, the knowledge gained through this survey will shine a much needed light on preservation of historic sites. In 1982 the area of Texas village was nominated to be listed on the Maryland Historical Trust's register as a historical district because it made significant contributions to the historical, architectural, industrial, educational, and religious fabric of Baltimore County, as the village embodies the characteristics of a mid-19th century Irish-Catholic working class community that developed into one of the most important centers of Maryland's quarrying and burning of limestone (Anderson 1982). Since the nomination survey, a good portion of that history and with it the archaeological record has been slowly eroded away by suburban sprawl and commercial development. It is of extreme importance that a long-term, in-depth, and well published community-based archaeological, historical, and ethnographic research program be conducted that highlights and preserves the village's significance to local, national, and international history.

The research design is structured to contribute to the knowledge of and gain support from the local and descendent community. The project will be a collaborative community-driven effort. The main community group is the Ballykilcline Society (www.ballykilcline.com). The group was formed in 1997 and is a somewhat virtual community made up of families and individuals across the United States and Canada who share an interest in and study of their familial connections to Ballykilcline in Ireland as a way of understanding their place and experiences in the United States (Dunn 2008). Texas, Maryland is one of the unique places in the group's history. At this time we are in the process of creating a new group, "The Friends of Texas, Maryland", which will incorporate all interested community members in Baltimore County, and especially descendents of Texas.

The project is teaching and community oriented. The philosophy of the project is to be inclusive and acknowledge the various interest groups and stakeholders. More importantly, the results will be disseminated in numerous and diverse forums. The professional audience will be historians, historical geographers, anthropologists, preservationists, material cultural specialists, and archaeologists who will all be able to draw various threads of evidence to be incorporated into their own diverse studies of the humanities. The scope of the project and the study of the material remains will be geared towards answering some of the community's questions concerning experiences, living conditions, and the material lives of their ancestors, and concerns about preserving their families history. Archaeology or at least the materials recovered from excavations will provide the intimate and real connection to their families past.

References
Anderson, Marion. 1982. "Texas, Maryland, Historic District Nomination." Maryland Historical Trust
State Historic Sites and Inventory Form

Brooks, Neal A., Eric G. Rockel, and Ted M. Payne. 1979. A History of Baltimore County. Friends of
Towson Library, Inc. Towson, MD.

Dunn, Mary Lee. 2008. Ballykilcline Rising: From Famine to Immigrant America. University of
Massachusetts Press. Amherst.

Kenny, Kevin. 2000. The American Irish: A History. Longman, NY.

Leone, Mark P. The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital: Excavating Annapolis.
University of California Press, Berkeley.

McGuire, Randall. 2008. Archaeology as Political Action. University of California Press,
Berkeley.

Mullins, Paul. 1999. Race and Affluence: An Archaeaology of African America and Consumer Culture.
Springer, New York.

Orser, Charles E. 1996. A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World. Plenum Press, New York.

Orser Charles E. 2008. Historical Archaeology as Modern-World Archaeology in Argentina.
International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12: 181-194.

Orser, Charles E., Jr. and Katherine L. Hull. 1998. A Report of Investigations for Archaeological Research at Mulliviltrin, County Roscommon, Ireland: A Tenant Village Destroyed During the Mass Evictions of 1847. Centre for the Study of Rural Ireland, Normal, IL.

Orser, Charles, Jr., David S. Ryder, and Jessica Levon. 2000. A Report of Investigations for the Second Season of Archaeological Research at Ballykilcline Townland, Kilglass Parish, County Roscommon, Ireland. Illinois States University, Normal, IL.

Saitta, Dean. 2007. The Archaeology of Collective Action. University of Florida Press, Gainsville.

Shackel, Paul. 1996. Culture Change and the New Technology: An Archaeology of the Early American
Industrial Era. Springer, New York.

Smith, Albert E. 1927. The Diamond Jubilee of Saint Joseph's Parish, Texas, Maryland (1852-1927). St.
Joseph's Church, Baltimore.

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Archaeology of the Irish Diaspora in Texas, Maryland . Texas, in present day Baltimore County, is an unincorporated village located 12 miles north of Baltimore City. The site is located in a densely populated and heavily commercial and industrial corridor of Baltimore County (MAAR Associates 1992: I-12-I 13).

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Recalling the “Lost” Irish Quarry Town of Texas in Baltimore County

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St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Cockeysville was constructed between 1850-1852 by the Irish arrivals.

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"Mingled Together": Irish and African American Relations in Civil War-Era Philadelphia and Baltimore

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Explore millions of resources from scholarly journals, books, newspapers, videos and more, on the ProQuest Platform.

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Cultural Hegemony & Civilian Responsibility

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Cultural Hegemony & Civilian Responsibility

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The concept of those that are targeted by cultural hegemony and then are either complicity or actively harm populations under themselves, where are they victimized and where are they responsible?

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lower class whites being the foot soldiers of apartheid just so they don't have to classify themselves with non-whites

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lower class whites being the foot soldiers of apartheid just so they don't have to classify themselves with non-whites

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four leaf clover with an american flag inside of it

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four leaf clover with an american flag inside of it

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Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Slavs and other European groups, at the time called “new immigrants,” sought to overcome their subordination by showing, through their behavior, to be deserving of being considered white.

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White immigrants weren’t always considered white — and acceptable

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Who, exactly, is white? The answer sounds obvious — we know a white person when we see one, we think. But when Italians poured into America in the late 1800s an…

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James Baldwin, the celebrated African American writer and critic, recalled in 1965 that “I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history and that neither had I. I was a savage about whom the least said the better, who had been saved by Europe and who had been brought to America.”

After school, he returned home and thought, “Of course, that this was an act of God. You belonged where white people put you.”

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DateSeptember 19, 2022September 19, 2022

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How white supremacy became part of nation’s fabric

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Historian Donald Yacovone chronicles racist values, historical falsehoods woven through textbooks in his new book.

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How did immigrants to the United States come to see themselves as white? , Roediger continues that history into the twentieth century. He recounts how ethnic groups considered white today-including Jewish-, Italian-, and Polish-Americans-were once viewed as undesirables by the WASP establishment in the United States. They eventually became part of white America, through the nascent labor movement, New Deal reforms, and a rise in home-buying. Once assimilated as fully white, many of them adopted the racism of those whites who formerly looked down on them as inferior. From ethnic slurs to racially restrictive covenants-the real estate agreements that ensured all-white neighborhoods-Roediger explores the mechanisms by which immigrants came to enjoy the privileges of being white in America.
David R. Roediger has been in the vanguard of the study of race and labor in American history for decades. He first came to prominence as the author of The Wages of Whiteness , a classic study of racism in the development of a white working class in nineteenth-century America. In Working Toward Whiteness Working Toward Whiteness uses the past to illuminate the present.
A disturbing, necessary, masterful history,

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Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs

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Amazon.com: Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs: 9780465070749: Roediger, David R.: Books

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Reservation Mathematics:
Navigating Love in Native America

Tailyr Irvine

Blood quantum requirements for tribal enrollment pose many challenges for Native Americans. The concept of using so-called "blood quantum"-or amount of tribal affiliation in a person's ancestry-to determine tribal enrollment eligibility has no basis in Native American traditions. In early 1900s, the U.S. government began imposing this system on tribes as a means of defining and limiting citizenship. While some tribes still use this method for determining eligibility for tribal enrollment, other Native nations use documentation of a person's descent from an enrollee on a designated tribal roll or census records.

Many scholars argue that blood quantum requirements were calculated to reduce tribal enrollment over time. Moreover, they call attention to the U.S. government's detrimental use of the term "blood quantum" during the 19th century and early 20th century to associate a Native person's level of intelligence with their supposed amount of Native versus Euro-American or other blood.

For Reservation Mathematics: Navigating Love in Native America, photojournalist Tailyr Irvine interviewed Indigenous residents in Missoula and on her Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana. They share their deep personal, social and political concerns about the blood quantum system, which can impact Native Americans' most personal decisions-including with whom they have children. Through seven intimate stories, Irvine shows how blood quantum requirements are increasingly putting pressures on Native Americans' lives.

All images courtesy and copyright of Tailyr Irvine.

What is Blood Quantum?

The notion of "blood quantum" sprang from U.S. colonial and racial biases. Non-Native people devised this way to define Native American identity by degree of affiliation to a tribe in their family ancestry. For example, if a person has ancestors who all descended from one American Indian tribe and has a child with someone who is not a member of that tribe, their child would have a blood quantum of 1⁄2. If this child grows up and becomes a parent with someone who is not a citizen of his or her tribe, their offspring would have a blood quantum of 1⁄4. For those tribes that use blood quantum as a criterion for tribal enrollment, the minimum blood quantum requirements vary and have ranged from 1⁄2 to 1⁄16.

Tiana Antoine and Nathan Drennan

Tiana Antoine, 25, and Nathan Drennan, 28, are both tribal members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. They began dating in July 2017, and are living on the Flathead Indian Reservation. To be an enrolled member of the tribes, an individual must have 1⁄4 of Salish and Kootenai blood. With a blood quantum of 113⁄128, Antoine has enough to enroll her child in the tribes regardless of her partner's race. Drennan, however, is only 1⁄4 Salish and Kootenai and so chose to date only women from his tribe. "I wanted my kid to be enrolled for cultural reasons," he says.

Prairie Cocowee Antoine, Wrapped in a Cradleboard

Prairie Cocowee Antoine's maternal grandmother made her this cradleboard. Prairie's middle name, Cocowee, is the original last name of her mother's family before in the early 1800s a Jesuit priest changed a relative's first name to Antoine, which his children adopted as their last name. Her parents, Tiana Antoine and Nathan Drennan, decided that Prairie's last name should be Antoine because they wanted their daughter's name to reflect her family history; Drennan is the name of Nathan's adopted mother and doesn't reflect Salish and Kootenai culture.

Cole Moran and Brandy Koivu

High school students Cole Moran and Brandy Koivu-both 15 years old and living on the Flathead Indian Reservation-began dating in November 2019. Moran is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes with a blood quantum of 3⁄4, and Koivu identifies as Caucasian. Moran says he first became aware of blood quantum in elementary school, when his cousins compared their individual blood quantum to those of him and his brother.

Cole Moran and Brandy Koivu Playing Video Games

Moran says when he gets older, dating other tribal members may be more important to him to keep his culture alive. He is faced with less pressure to partner with another member of his tribe than some other young Native Americans, however, because he can enroll his child from his blood quantum alone. "I've never felt pressure from my family," he says. "My mom says I don't have to worry about this."

D'Shane Barnett and Jason Begay

D'Shane Barnett and Jason Begay, both 43 and living in Missoula, began dating in 2018. Barnett is a 7⁄32 member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota, and Begay is a full-blooded member of the Navajo Nation. Both men agree that how a child is raised and what experiences the child has defines his or her Native identity-not blood quantum.

Barnett works in the Indian health care field and says he has seen the flaws with the blood quantum system. "I had a friend whose daughter was 3⁄4 Native but 1⁄8 of six different tribes, and none of those tribes would let her be enrolled," he says. "She would not qualify for the same health services that I do. That's ridiculous."

Both Barnett and Begay describe blood quantum as a tool the federal government uses to complete the genocide of Native people. Begay says, "The math can be sinister."

Tailyr Irvine

Tailyr Irvine is a Salish and Kootenai photojournalist born and raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana. She graduated from the University of Montana with a bachelor's degree in journalism in 2018. Her work focuses on providing in-depth representations of the lives and complex issues within the diverse communities that make up Native America. Irvine worked in newsrooms across the United States before beginning her career as an independent photojournalist and documentary photographer in 2019.

Photographer's Statement

My goal is to document the world around me. While I naturally gravitate toward topics involving my community, pursuing Indigenous narratives is not a conscious decision. To me, these aren't Native stories; they are stories about my life.

As a child, I knew that because my father and mother were from different tribes, I would eventually have to navigate blood quantum requirements when I started dating. When I was older, I began to question the limitations put upon my partner choices, which led me to this project. While interviewing and photographing members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, I chose to include the voices of my siblings as they were each expecting a child who would be impacted by the blood quantum system. My siblings' comments and those of the others in this story show contemporary views on a generations-old issue.
-Tailyr Irvine
Curator Interview with Tailyr Irvine

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The National Museum of the American Indian

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Developing Stories - Native Photographers in the Field

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Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field is a series of three photo essays created by Native photojournalists Donovan Quintero, Tailyr Irvine, and Russel Albert Daniels in collaboration with the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. These photographers share the same desires: to break down stereotypes of Native peoples and to portray the diversity and complexity of their contemporary lives.

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As the Black scholar Charles H. Wesley reported in 1925, through textbooks and classroom instruction, the Black student quickly realized that “his badge of color in America is a sign of subjugation, inferiority and contempt.”

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who brought the slaves in? the wealthy

who lost "capital" when slaves were freed? the middle class farmers

who fought slaves for jobs on the job market? the lower class

African Americans/Black Americans were never the issue and were never to blame, so why are we blaming them. Again and again the issue goes back to the wealthy pulling the strings and pitting communities against each other.

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The Baltimore Colored High School was renamed the Frederick Douglass High School. He attended the school before it was renamed in his honor. Prior to desegregation, Douglass and Paul Laurence Dunbar High School (which opened in 1919) were the only two high schools in the city that accepted Black students, with Douglass allowing students from West Baltimore and Dunbar allowing students from East Baltimore.

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Desegregation Timeline - Wide Angle Youth Media

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EVENTS Programs Resources Our Shared Language Emergency Funding Why Black Lives Matter Curriculum Media Current Classes Program Pathway Community Voices Baltimore Speaks Out MediaWorks High School Wide Angle Productions Standards

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After three decades of emancipation, the gains made by African-Americans, those that existed at all, presented a decidedly mixed picture about the state of racial progress in the country. The political obstacles were voluminous, with the failure of Reconstruction still lingering, and Jim Crow institutional racism ascendant. In 1897, the United States Supreme Court would rule in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate was indeed equal. All the while, new generations of African-Americans found ways to uplift themselves, despite discrimination, through grassroots efforts in education, work and community building.

After graduating with a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, W.E.B. Du Bois, the prominent African-American intellectual, sought a way to process all this information showing why the African disapora in America was being held back in a tangible, contextualized form. "It is not one problem," as Du Bois wrote in 1898, "but rather a plexus of social problems, some new, some old, some simple, some complex; and these problems have their one bond of unity in the act that they group themselves above those Africans whom two centuries of slave-trading brought into the land."

To accomplish this goal, Du Bois turned to the burgeoning field of sociology. Sociology's scope in history, statistics, and demographics held the potential to quantifiably reveal "life within the Veil," as Du Bois called the structural forces of oppressions that separated black and white populations, whether that came to educational attainment, voting rights or land ownership.

And so, almost two decades before Robert E. Park and the Chicago school were conducting ethnographic field work and statistical analysis, Du Bois pioneered a new way to use sociology: to use those methodologies to contextualize the historical realities resonating among African-Americans.

After embarking on a sprawling sociological study of African-Americans living in Philadelphia, he was hired as a professor at the historically black Atlanta University in 1897. There, he established a sociology program, now recognized as the first school of American sociology. It was in this capacity that a former classmate of Du Bois, Thomas Junius Calloway, approached Du Bois to ask if his old friend would contribute a social study about African-American life to the Exposition Universelle, the Paris World Fair of 1900.

Calloway, an educator, journalist and lawyer, had petitioned the U.S. government for space to display the progress made by African-Americans since slavery in the American display. The federal government's department of education and social economy agreed to sponsor the exhibit, and in January 1899, it appointed Calloway a special agent to complete the task. With a short window of time before the fair, Calloway approached the leading African-American thinkers of the day to include their work in the upcoming exhibit, which was called "The American Negro."

For Du Bois, the show presented both an opportunity and a challenge. Part of his contribution was carefully curating 500 photographs to show a nuanced snapshot of what life was like for black Americans. While he wanted to use the photographs to undercut racist stereotypes about African-Americans, the images alone did not relay the underlining ways that the institution of slavery continued to impact African-American progress in the country. So he set about making approximately 60 carefully handmade data visualizations, to dictate, in full, vibrant color, the reasons why black America was being held back.

The project presented Du Bois with a way to further test the possibilities of visualizing the empirical data he and his Atlanta University students and alumni were collecting, says Britt Rusert, associate professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Rusert and Whitney Battle-Baptiste, associate professor of anthropology at U-Mass and director of its W.E.B. Du Bois Center, are the editors of a newly published book, W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. It is, somehow, the first time that Du Bois' groundbreaking data visualizations from the Paris World Fair have been collected together in color in a book format.

While they are known as Du Bois' infographics, he wasn't working alone; it took an interdisciplinary team of black students and alumni spread across the South to create them. Likewise, Rusert, Battle-Baptiste and book designer Silas Munro combined their areas of expertise to tease out just what made these works such a landmark achievement of their day.

"[Du Bois and his team] had a set of questions, and they knew they needed to use different tools and different methods in order to represent the data and to grapple with those questions," Rusert says.

While Aldon Morris, professor of sociology at Northwestern University-who resurrected Du Bois' rightful place at the birth of sociology in his 2015 text, The Scholar Denied (and also contributed a chapter for W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits)-detailed how the black students of Du Bois' program were practicing and engaging in sociological work decades before their counterparts in the Chicago school, much remains to be learned about the work being done in Du Bois' sociology laboratory.

"The more that you look at the [visualizations], you start to see more and more hands," Rusert says. Correspondences suggest, for instance, that William Andrew Rogers, an alumnus of Atlanta University who had a degree in sociology, played a major role in creating the infographics. "At least once Du Bois identifies him as being the point person, or the sort of lead person in this project," says Rusert.

But Du Bois wasn't just using his own students in the sociology lab at Atlanta University; he was also drawing data and relying on surveys, which were "conducted by a sort of extended network of field researchers across the South," according to Rusert. That included students who graduated from Atlanta University and moved elsewhere, showing evidence of a network of black sociologists throughout the region.

One set of infographics explored life for African-Americans in Georgia-which at the time had the largest black population in the U.S.-breaking down the number of black children enrolled in public schools, family budgets, income and expenditure, occupations, and even the value of household and kitchen furniture owned. The second set of infographics had a more expansive purview, comparing national and international data sets, such as examining the literary rate of black Americans in comparison to other nations, as well as looking at what the occupations of black Americans were, where they lived in the U.S., and how much land they held.

The way DuBois wielded this data to convey these realities was pioneering, but so, too, were the visual aesthetics of the infographics. Munro, who wrote the captions for each of the plates, came to see Du Bois as an innovator in design. In the book, he positions the data visualizations as "infographic activism" in their ability to get to the heart of inequities of the day. But he also points out that the compelling art, which was done in ink, gouache watercolor, graphite and photographic prints, deserves to be considered in its own right. The team's Modernist use of shape, color and structure, created just before the rise of Europe's avant-garde movements, he argues, makes the work nothing less than visionary.

For Rusert's part, as she worked through the archival history, she saw Du Bois as a curator, observing his intentionality of detail, which included carefully positioning the large-scale color data visualizations on the walls of the exhibit hall. "He clearly had these ideas about how and where he wanted these images to be installed, and how he wanted them to be presented," she says. Du Bois was so determined to travel to Paris and install the works himself, she says, that he scrounged up the money to pay for passage in steerage. It was a degrading means of travel that he could not have taken without some irony, knowing he was on his way to extrapolate why African-Americans continued to be treated as second-class citizens in the U.S.

The data graphics were designed to appeal to both an international and stateside audience. They included French typography and writing to reach Europeans, says Rusert. However, she adds, the team also had an eye to U.S. audiences when they worked, as they knew the exhibit would eventually travel back home, going on view at Buffalo's Pan-Am Exposition, along with other stops around the country.

When the tour of the exhibit was finally finished, all of the materials-photographs, essays, research, the data visualizations, and more-were packed up and sent to the Library of Congress. There, they've stayed for decades. It wasn't until the Library digitized the holdings that the vibrant, bold historical visualizations of Du Bois and his Atlanta team became widely available for view. With their dissemination came renewed interest in their work.

"It really speaks to our own moment in which people are thinking about race and data and thinking about visual design and thinking about data visualization," says Rusert. Today's technological advancements opens up a bold new frontier for the possibilities of using data visualization to demonstrate inequities embedded in today's society. Take, for instance, MacArthur genius grant award-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones' work utilizing data to reveal the rampant school segregation in play today. Or the Los Angeles Times' thought-provoking " Mapping L.A." project. In an especially out-of-the-box example, Jillian Crandall, an architect and researcher, uses data visualization in a video game format.

Certainly, the means of collecting and displaying information today far surpass what Du Bois and his Atlanta University team were working with in 1900. Yet their findings remain compelling today. Just last year, the 's data editor was inspired to recreate the visualizations to reflect the realities of inequality in today's world.

W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits was published on the sesquicentennial year of the Du Bois' birth, and it further reaffirms the scholar's place as a founding figure in American sociology. The recirculation of Du Bois' data portraits offer a new opportunity to marvel at the forward-thinking work being done at Atlanta University.

It seems safe to say Du Bois would have been happy to see his work retain such relevance. Even in 1900, it appears he had other plans for his data visualizations than being quietly stored away in the Library of Congress. When Rusert and Battle-Baptiste were working on the book, they found Du Bois had written a letter to Callaway requesting whether it was possible for him to get the images back. Callaway, in turn, told Du Bois to write directly to the Library of Congress. As the infographics never left the Library, it appears he was not successful.

What was he hoping to do with them? Rusert believes there's definitely a possibility he was interested in using them to teach his disciples at Atlanta University. "If so," she says, "we can think about them as sort of like visual aids for classroom learning."

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W.E.B. Du Bois' Visionary Infographics Come Together for the First Time in Full Color

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After three decades of emancipation, the gains made by African-Americans, those that existed at all, presented a decidedly mixed picture about the state of racial progress in the country. The political obstacles were voluminous, with the failure of Reconstruction still lingering, and Jim Crow institutional racism ascendant.

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We are in the middle of one of the most inspiring protest upsurges in the United States in decades. Mass demonstrations against racist police violence have swept the country since the police murder of George Floyd, demanding an end to state murders of unarmed black people and racial inequality more generally.

Protesters have persisted in the face of vicious police rioting and repressive curfews. The number of protests has waned in recent weeks, as all protest upsurges eventually do. But they are still going strong throughout much of the country and have produced a massive ideological shift, making defunding the police a mainstream policy proposal. Elected officials in some cities, with varying degrees of sincerity, are arguing for or have already pledged to cut police budgets.

The protests have inspired many white Americans to reflect on the persistence of racism in the United States and their role in changing it. One common framework for reflection involves asking how white people can be good allies to people of color.

This framework seems to suggest that, while white people have a moral obligation to assist people of color in anti-racist struggles, we who are white have no interests of our own at stake in these struggles. So white people must be moved to anti-racist action through feelings of obligation, guilt, or sympathy. At its worst, the white allyship framework promotes introspection and quasi-spiritual self-improvement as political action.

Black people in the United States have faced and continue to face horrible forms of oppression that white people don't. Yet thinking of white people's role in anti-racist struggle solely in terms of allyship is myopic. White people have sometimes taken part in significant black freedom struggles in the past not just out of altruism or a sense of moral duty. They saw the moral imperative to fight racial oppression as bound up with broader projects of collective liberation - projects in which they, too, had a stake. They were moved, in other words, by solidarity.

Take the story of the Haitian Revolution, as an example, recounted by C. L. R. James in his classic The Black Jacobins and dramatically illustrating the power of solidarity. The revolution in the French colony of Haiti (then called Saint-Domingue) began with an uprising of the enslaved in August 1791. This revolt took place against the context of the ongoing revolution in France.

The enslaved black people of Saint-Domingue won their freedom through years of protracted, bloody struggle against the white plantation owners, as well as French, British, and Spanish troops who attempted at different points to crush the rebellion.

Given the forces they were up against, the Haitian slaves' victory over so many European imperial colonizers and invaders is one of the most incredible achievements of recent history. The slaves themselves were the principal protagonists in overthrowing slavery. As James writes, the "revolutionary troops" led by Touissant L'Ouverture, and not the "perorations in the Legislative [France's governing body] would be decisive in the struggle for freedom."

But the victory of the Haitian revolutionaries was also aided by the revolutionary action of the French masses. In 1792, the internally divided French government, which had not yet entered its more radical, Montagnard phase, sent armed forces to Saint-Domingue to help quell the enslaved peoples' rebellion. By early 1793, these forces had nearly crushed the uprising.

But in the meantime, the French masses had deposed and executed the King, provoking Britain and Spain to declare war on the revolutionary regime. These events helped turn the tide. They forced a diversion of French troops away from their assault on L'Ouverture's army to defend the coasts against British and Spanish invaders, and they allowed L'Ouverture to make an alliance with the Spanish against the French.

In the course of these events, the cause of the Haitian rebels and that of the French revolutionaries came to be fused in the minds of the more radical militants. As a Jacobin-aligned governor of the colony said: "The slaves of the New World are fighting for the same cause as the [revolutionary] French armies."

Local French authorities in Saint-Domingue were forced to declare the abolition of slavery, in an attempt to win the formerly enslaved to their side in the struggle against the counterrevolutionary powers. The abolition of slavery was finally made official and extended to all colonies by the French government on February 4, 1794.

Robespierre and the left-wing Jacobins (the Montagnards) had won control of the National Convention, and their voting for abolition reflected not only longstanding personal convictions, but the revolutionary mood of the French people. James writes:

It was not Paris alone but all revolutionary France. 'Servants, peasants, workers. the labourers by the day in the fields' all over France were filled with a virulent hatred against the 'aristocracy of the skin.' There were many so moved by the sufferings of the slaves that they had long ceased to drink coffee, thinking of it as drenched with the blood and sweat of men turned into brutes ... At that time slavery had been overturned only in [Saint-Domingue] of all the French colonies, and the generous spontaneity of the Convention was only a reflection of the overflowing desire which filled all France to end tyranny and oppression everywhere.

The revolutionary French masses came to fight for the abolition of slavery - not out of a sense of pity or disinterested moral obligation, but because they had come to see their own destiny as tied up with the enslaved. As James says, the poor and working classes of France "felt towards them [enslaved Saint-Dominguans] as brothers, and the old slave-owners, whom they knew to be supporters of the counter-revolution, they hated as if Frenchman themselves had suffered under the whip."

The white slave owners of Saint-Domingue had always opposed the French Revolution, which represented an assault on their property rights and political power. In 1793, they actually took the side of the invading British - who had promised to restore slavery - against the revolutionary French government. These counterrevolutionary efforts incited the French masses against the "the aristocracy of the skin," which the common people associated with the hated French nobility they had just deposed.

Thus the slave owners' opposition to the revolution made it easy for the French masses to see the connection between their own liberty and that of enslaved Saint-Dominguans. And as James notes, the planters' counterrevolutionary conspiracy also gave the Montagnards strategic reasons to abolish slavery.

"[The] [abolition] decree, by ratifying the liberty which the blacks had won," James writes, "was giving them a concrete interest in the struggle against British and Spanish reaction." France's revolutionary leaders (rightly) predicted that the formal abolition of slavery would recruit the former slaves to their side.

It was up to the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue to make the legal abolition of slavery a reality on the ground, through several more years of war with European armies who wanted to return them to bondage. Facing the possibility of death or torture at the hands of a vicious enemy, the formerly enslaved freed themselves through courageous armed struggle. But they also weren't alone.

At the high point of the French Revolution, the French masses joined the Haitians to push forward the fight for abolition. And they did so because they saw their freedom and that of the black people of Saint-Domingue linked together by the struggle to defeat their common enemies.

Multiracial solidarity is a big part of the story of slavery's destruction in our own country, too. As in Haiti, it took a violent war to end slavery, during which the actions of black people themselves were central to the process that led to their emancipation.

As W. E. B. Du Bois famously argued, the Union victory was hastened by a "general strike" of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in the South, who deserted their plantations to assist and join the Union war effort.

But understanding why the Civil War occurred in the first place requires us to look to the mass antislavery movement that brought Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party to power. It was the Republican capture of the federal government that provoked Southern secession, and as historian Matt Karp writes, the party achieved this "[by] linking the moral battle against slavery to the material concerns of millions of Northern voters."

The ideological connection that the antislavery movement and Republican Party forged between the material interests of ordinary white Northerners and the freedom of enslaved black people helped make it possible for many Northern whites to find common cause with the enslaved and, again, to perceive a common enemy.

Republicans' mass appeal rested in large part on developmental and egalitarian economic policies that ran counter to the interests of the slave-owning class, including tariffs and federal infrastructure spending. Their central economic proposal, Karp says, was "a homestead act by which the government would give away millions of acres of land for free."

This policy, opposed by the pro-slavery Democratic Party, was justified by its advocates with the argument that citizens should be able to live on and work their own land for themselves, as "free laborers," rather than be subject to the domination of landowners or industrial capitalists.

As Karp notes, it also depended, wrongly, "on an assumption that the North American West rightly belonged to Euro-American settlers, not its indigenous inhabitants." The denial of prior inhabitants' rights to the land was a justification for a different racist monstrosity - the displacement and mass murder of indigenous peoples, which could never be justified.

Southern opposition to the Act, led by the region's enormously wealthy oligarchs, allowed Republicans to portray the slave owners as proponents of land monopoly and plutocracy, and hence as opponents of liberty for both white and black people. In doing so Republicans provided a material basis for Northern white solidarity with enslaved black people against the "slave aristocracy."

Many Northerners also saw the pro-slavery laws passed by Congress as direct attacks on their own freedom, revealing the dominance of the slaveholding class over the political system. The House of Representatives passed a " gag rule " in 1836 barring from consideration any petition or resolution regarding slavery. Many viewed the law as an attack on their political liberties; it encouraged antislavery activism and actually resulted in a significant increase in petitions to Congress.

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which forced private citizens to aid in the capture and return of enslaved fugitives. Defiance of the act was punishable by fine or imprisonment. The law was met with outrage and civil disobedience in the North: even many who had been less sympathetic to the abolitionist cause saw the act as the product of a "slave power conspiracy" to subject Northern whites as well as enslaved blacks to the power of the slave owners. Like the gag rule, the Fugitive Slave Act heightened antagonism to slavery.

Republican appeals to white Northerners' economic and political freedom went hand-in-hand with increasingly strong moral denunciations of slavery and its perpetrators. Partly through the party's electoral campaigns and propaganda efforts, both a sense of shared interests with enslaved people and a moral hatred of slave owners came to be established in the minds of millions of Northern voters.

Ohio Governor Salmon P. Chase's comments during the 1856 election were typical of Republican rhetoric, which made the continued existence of slavery a threat to the freedom of all Americans:

[T]he popular heart is stirred as never before, for the issue is boldly made between Freedom and Slavery - a Republic and a Despotism! ... The chain-gang and Republicanism cannot coexist, and you must now elect whether you will vindicate the one at whatever cost, or whether you will yield to the other.

Sentiments like these led to the election of an antislavery government. That election in turn put the country on the road to a social revolution, in which black and white Americans fought side-by-side to defeat the Confederacy and abolish slavery.

The movements which brought about abolition in Haiti and the United States provide particularly dramatic examples of the power of solidarity. But we don't need to look so far back in time to make the point. The US Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century was led by many activists, including socialists and labor organizers, who connected the struggle for black liberation with wider fights for economic justice.

Black workers led the struggle for civil rights in the 1940s, through participation in militant unions belonging to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and especially the most left-wing unions, led by members of the Communist Party. Radical unions like the United Public Workers of America fought against discrimination and for full rights for their black workers.

Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America fought against racist police and voter disenfranchisement in Jim Crow-era North Carolina. Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union of San Francisco also fought racial discrimination against its black workers in the 1940s.

Many of these Communist-led unions were destroyed by McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the 1950s, significantly setting back struggles for racial justice. Even so, many leading activists of the Civil Rights Movement later on continued working to forge multiracial coalitions, by connecting anti-racism with broader redistributive demands. Paul Heideman writes:

At the grassroots, organizers like Ella Baker or Bayard Rustin came out of the Old Left, and knew full well that legal equality without redistribution would be a hollow victory. The 1963 March on Washington was built with crucial assistance from the United Autoworkers, and the march's full title was "The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom." The policy objectives of this tendency in the movement were summed up in the Freedom Budget, a proposal that attempted to translate the Civil Rights Movement into a campaign for full employment and public works.

Martin Luther King Jr, best remembered for his passionate moral speeches against racism, was a supporter of the Freedom Budget. Toward the end of his life, King declared the need for " democratic socialism " and began organizing a Poor People's Campaign to demand economic justice. (He was assassinated before the campaign began, when he traveled to Memphis to support a strike of black sanitation workers.)

In the late '60s and early '70s, radical activists like those involved in Detroit's League of Revolutionary Black Workers also sought to reconnect anti-racist struggle to workplace militancy. The League fought racism in the auto plants and within their own union, while building multiracial solidarity with other workers around their shared interests.

Civil rights activists of various stripes refused to separate anti-racist struggle from class struggle. Many of the movement's successes in fact depended on linking struggles against racism with economic demands, within the workplace or outside of it. And movement leaders like King realized that the movement for racial equality would not make further progress without tackling economic equality. That vision of anti-racism linked the interests of black Americans with poor and working-class whites.

White people have a moral obligation to help dismantle white supremacy. But it would be wrong to see anti-racism only as a moral imperative. Now, as in the past, poor and working-class white people have a shared interest in fighting racism and destroying its material infrastructure.

Policies and institutions responsible for the severe oppression of black people and other people of color hurt the entire working class. Our massive, heavily militarized police forces kill black people at higher levels than whites, but kill the poor of all races at higher rates than the rich; mass incarceration locks up black people at much higher rates than whites, but it also locks up an enormous number of white people and represses labor organizing; xenophobic immigration restrictions also make it harder for workers to organize. That means working people of all races have a material stake in defunding the police, dismantling mass incarceration, and ending repression of immigrants.

The emancipatory potential of anti-racist demands for the working class as a whole is nothing new, of course. As Jamelle Bouie documents, the black freedom struggle in America has long been bound up with struggles against the dominance of capital and for economic redistribution.

Those who participated in great freedom struggles of the past did not lose sight of their common plight and common enemies. Neither should we. White people can act in solidarity with people of color to fight racial oppression and to work toward collective liberation.

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Solidarity Should Be the Basis of White Anti-Racism, Not "Allyship"

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The great black freedom struggles of the past have been joined by many white people - not just out of a sense of moral obligation or sympathy for the oppressed, but out of a sense of shared interest and a desire for collective liberation. That spirit of solidarity should be central to anti-racist struggle today.

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Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, admits that he never visited Rust Belt cities devastated by NAFTA. Displaced White workers "weren't heavily on our radar screen," he said, noting that the Democratic Party base is a "coalition of cosmopolitan elite and diversity."

Summers' "cosmopolitan elite" are highly educated, affluent people who travel the world, live in ethnically diverse cities, and are in constant global communication. For them, the benefits of globalization are myriad, and the downsides invisible. But for those whose idea of the good life is more slow-paced and parochial, global economic and communication networks are a threat to their livelihoods, their way of life, and their communities, which have been ravaged by foreclosures, offshoring, and automation.

Our economy is being rocked by hugely disruptive enterprises that have reduced many workers to precarious, underpaid piecework in the gig economy and Amazon fulfillment centers. Artificial intelligence breakthroughs will only elevate the level of disruption.

Successful technocrats sometimes sneer at others' failure to get with the program. Though many affluent liberals have compassion for poor folks, others lean into the myth of the meritocracy to rationalize their wealth, glossing over the intrinsic inequality of a meritocracy in which, by definition, there are winners and losers. "You're all fucking welfare cases!" a protestor yelled at Trump rally goers in Albuquerque. "You just don't want anyone else getting any!" A heartwarming moment of working-class solidarity it was not.

Fewer than half of Americans born in 1980 will earn as much as their parents, compared to 79% of those born in 1950 and 92% of those born in 1940. Low-wage White workers have seen their pay stagnate or decrease for decades. (Black and Latinx workers' wages have risen but still lag far behind Whites'.) Since 1971, the percentage of middle-class households has fallen by 10%-half of those households joined the upper class and half the lower. Little wonder then that the middle class looks with hopeful anticipation upon the rich and with anxious dread upon the poor.

In The Limousine Liberal, historian Steve Fraser traces the rise of right-wing populism to the Nixon presidency when blue-collar Whites realized that "their social contract with New Deal liberalism was expiring." Structural unemployment and wage stagnation were taking their toll, but the Democrats offered no solutions. Nixon offered no help to the working class either; instead, he celebrated their folkways, initiating a culture war steeped in noble traditions like hard work and humility and pernicious ones like patriarchy and White supremacy. Reagan and George W. Bush carried on in this vein, with Bush going so far with the plutocratic populist ruse as to provide hard hats to the corporate lobbyists who populated his campaign rallies.

Nixon voters' discontent was not only financial. They bemoaned the atomistic quality of modern life writ large. On that score, the situation has only deteriorated. The social fabric is weak, civic participation is anemic, and poor people are regarded as losers, when they're regarded at all. The bipartisan myth of the meritocracy has effectively displaced altruistic values of community and care, resulting in social conditions shitty enough to impel nearly 5% of Americans to try to take their own lives.

Coincident with economic precarity and incohesion are several significant demographic and cultural shifts: The proportion of Whites in America has decreased from 88% in 1970 to 72% in 2010. Today, women compete with men in the work-place, gender identities are in flux, multiculturalism is the norm, marriage equality is the law of the land, and there's a new lexicon for discussing race and gender-and impatience toward those who aren't yet hip to it. Whites are, on the whole, overrepresented in higher education, politics, corporate management, and prestigious professions like law, medicine, and journalism. But not working-class Whites. While people of color and middle-class White women are slowly gaining representation, poor Whites' stars are not rising. On the contrary, their well-being, as measured by life expectancy, health, educational attainment, and income, is declining.

These deteriorating social conditions set the stage for race hustlers to forge a counterfeit bond between rich and nonrich Whites-a bond that tends to suppress any claims the have-nots might make on the wealth of the haves. As Briahna Joy Gray astutely argues, absent a class analysis, calling out Trump's racism can perversely bolster his position as the great White savior who has the best interests of White Americans at heart (thereby obscuring his avaricious allegiance to crony capitalism).

Racist precepts were constructed to justify the slave trade and have served handily ever since to pit poor Whites against Blacks in the capitalist rat race. As economic inequality hits new extremes, oligarchs are more than happy to have nonrich Whites blame immigrants and people of color for their inability to get ahead. Those who are down-and-out have one of three explanations for their circumstances-the system is flawed; they're losers who have only themselves to blame; or it's the fault of scapegoats and their liberal coddlers. To the extent that economic elites seal off door No. 1, our democracy is imperiled by the temptation to enter door No. 3.

Most liberals understand that gender equality and racial and ethnic diversity are not the cause of economic decline, but put yourself in the shoes of a White conservative living in an area undergoing rapid diversification. Ku Klux Klan leader Rachel Pendergraft says that hate groups' numbers are swelling with new members who feel like "strangers in their own country." Even if one isn't experiencing downward mobility themselves, seeing others in their community struggle-and mistakenly linking those struggles to racial diversity and liberal immigration policy-makes them worry about what the future holds for them as the White minority.

Liberal professionals look upon nationalism with unmitigated horror, because all they see is the racist aspect. What they're missing is how nationalism is a reaction to the detrimental impacts of globalization. Two-thirds of working-class Whites and three- quarters of Trump primary voters see trade deals as harmful to American workers, and there's plenty of evidence that they're right (and that foreign laborers are being exploited in the bargain as well). When Trump tells them he will bring back their jobs by shredding unpopular trade and climate deals, that sounds pretty damn good.

After NAFTA passed, the president of the electrical workers' union vowed revenge: "Clinton screwed us and we won't forget it." Twenty-four years and a few dozen Trump anti-NAFTA jeremiads later, rank-and-file electrical union members welcomed Trump to their Philadelphia job site. Minnesota iron and steel workers, too, say they've never forgiven President Clinton for NAFTA and that Trump won them over with his outspoken commitment to killing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trade deals, they say, are their No. 1 issue and the reason the once-solidly blue North Star state is turning red.

Liberal Democrats are right: We're not going back to the closeted, corseted, Jim Crow 1950s. But we're not going back to the Clintonian 1990s, either. That much was made evident in 2016.

City University of New York sociologist Charlie Post summed up the 2016 debacle like this: "Traditionally Democratic working-class voters were faced with the choice between a neoliberal who disdained working people and a right-wing populist who promised to bring back well-paying manufacturing jobs. Many stayed home, and a tiny minority shifted their allegiances from the first African-American president to an open racist and xenophobe." Or, to put it in Michael Moore's less academic terms, Trump's victory was "the biggest fuck you ever recorded in human history."

Post's conclusion aligns with the views of Trump voters in blue-collar Howard County, Iowa, which Obama won by 20 points and Trump won by a staggering 41. Pat Murray, a press-brake operator and Democratic member of the county Board of Supervisors, said, "Democrats always say we're going to fight for the working people. The last few elections, we haven't shown that at all." Murray didn't vote for Trump, but his brethren did. And in interview after interview, the reason they gave was Clinton's elitism. They caucused for Sanders and, when he lost the primary, turned a desperate eye on Trump.

Blue-collar Whites weren't Clinton's only detractors. Civil rights scholar Michelle Alexander argued during the primary that Clinton didn't deserve Black people's vote; evidently, she wasn't alone. Eleven percent of Black 2012 Obama voters stayed home in 2016, representing a loss of 1.6 million votes, many of them in swing states that Trump won by razor-thin margins. Some Black Milwaukee residents told reporters they were disillusioned with how little their lives had improved after eight years of Obama and couldn't bring themselves to vote for Clinton. As pollster and strategist Stanley Greenberg notes, "The Democrats don't have a 'White working-class problem.' They have a 'working-class problem,'" borne of decades of alignment with the economic interests of the elite.

To hear political analyst Thomas Frank tell it in Listen, Liberal, too many Democrats have stood by and watched-if not cheerleaded-as the invisible hand of the market grabbed Black, brown, and White middle-Americans' wealth and handed it over to oligarchs. Democrats in the Clinton mold have, as Open Markets Institute Policy Director Matt Stoller puts it, "replaced a New Deal-era understanding of economic and political democracy with an ideology that justified the pillaging of working-class Americans by a new group of political and economic elites." The Democratic Party has moved so far to the right on economic issues that Bernie Sanders' 2016 platform looked like Dwight Eisenhower's! Having hewed to a centrism that has skewed so far to the right, and having made little effort to reposition the center further to the left, Democrats' working-class mantle was, by 2016, threadbare.

In becoming the party of upper-middle-class professionals that, as Frank puts it, "no longer speaks to the people on the losing end of a free-market system that is becoming more brutal and more arrogant by the day," an opening has been created for the right-wing to co-opt class and for Trump to disingenuously inveigh against the establishment. What's more, Frank laments, "The task of deploring and denouncing the would-be dictator Trump has entirely crowded out the equally important task of assessing where the Democratic Party went wrong...They don't need to persuade anyone. They need only to let their virtue shine bright for all to see."

You may not agree that neoliberal economic free trade and de-regulatory policies are to blame for our country's economic woes, and my task here isn't to convince you to reject market capitalism or to see the meritocracy as mythical and arbitrary. I'm suggesting that there are social and political conditions, other than or in addition to bigotry, that make many working- and lower-middle- class people feel "left behind." If they hired Trump to blow up a system they see as rigged, campaigns that promise to return to the good ol' days of 2015-before Trump ruined everything-will not inspire, nor will conversations that refuse to acknowledge how the good ol' days were rife with cynicism and despair. Trump's solutions to complex problems are dangerous, simplistic, and cruel, but the problems are real.

This excerpt from Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide by Erica Etelson appears with permission of New Society Publishers. A fully referenced version appears in the book.

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How Liberals Left the White Working Class Behind

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White working-class anger has been simmering for decades, due to globalization, wage stagnation, and the myth of meritocracy.

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Recognizing white privilege begins with truly understanding the term itself.

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The last few weeks have subjected Americans to images of atrocities that Black Americans, sadly, are all too familiar with: killings at the hands of police and horrendous but routine instances of racial discrimination. These injustices have been going on for decades, with Black people staging protests largely alone. This time feels different, because anti-police brutality and anti-racist demonstrations have occurred in all 50 states, in small towns as well as big cities, and indeed around the world. The demonstrators are not solely Black this time; they display a beautiful range of races and ethnicities, in the streets together to proclaim that Black lives matter.

That history includes white people who think of themselves as individuals without a meaningful racial identity as well as white nationalists and Klansmen.

Demands arise now for cultural change, for education that imparts the history of white supremacy in America and the history of Black Americans as citizens and creators. Please don't think those two are the same thing. Black history, on the one hand, and anti-Black injustice, on the other, are two distinct histories, even though African American history includes the devastating toll of anti-Black atrocity.

I'm delighted to see so many flocking to the histories of Black Americans and white supremacy, two subjects that every American should be familiar with. Because we need to know that the construction of whiteness has its own history. That history includes white people who think of themselves as individuals without a meaningful racial identity as well as white nationalists and Klansmen parading around in theirs. There's so much more to the history of white people.

Americans still struggle to understand that race is an ideology, not a biological fact, more like witchcraft than empirical science. Just as difficult to grasp, it seems, is the idea that our idea of one big white race, which you're either in or out of, is less than a century old.

White identity didn't just spring to life full-blown and unchanging, which is what most people assume. Whiteness is severely under theorized, leaving millions unaware of a history whose constant characteristic is change. Whiteness has changed over time, over place, and in the myriad situations of human ranking.

Let me say it again: Whiteness has a history whose meanings change. Neither scholars nor ordinary people have been able to agree upon the definition of white people - who is white and who is not - nor on the number of races that count as white. Disagreement reigns and has reigned since the modern scientific notion of human races was invented in the 18th-century Enlightenment. Nota bene: invented in the 18th century.

Before the Enlightenment, people classified themselves and others according to clan, tribe, kingdom, locale, religion and an infinity of identities dependent on what people thought was important about themselves and others. Before the Enlightenment, Europeans could see human difference, they could see who was tall, who short, who light-skinned, who dark, differences they explained according to religion, cultural habits, geography, wealth and climate, among the most usual characteristics, but not race.

But Enlightenment scholars started to classify humanity into groups that came to be called races, defined according to bodily measurements such as eye color, skin color, height, and skull dimensions. The most enduring classification came from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), a professor in the German University of Göttingen. Blumenbach based his classification on skull measurements and divided humanity into five "varieties," which he laid out according to his aesthetic preferences.

At the two extremities Blumenbach placed the skulls he considered ugly, the African and the Asian. Next to the African was the Tahitian. Next to the Asian was the Native American. In the middle was Blumenbach's "most beautiful skull" - of a young Georgian woman who had been a sex slave in Moscow, where she died of venereal disease. Her beautiful skull became the basis for the name given to white people; a native of the South Caucasus (between the Black and Caspian Seas), she inspired the label "Caucasian."

The history of American whiteness since the Enlightenment bristles with an abundance of fascinating figures. Everyone from Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Franz Boas, Malcolm X, Michael Novak and Toni Morrison have influenced our thinking about whiteness. I have written a whole long book about how this thinking evolved, conveniently entitled "The History of White People," which elaborates on what I just said.

It's too easy to think of Irish, Italian, Slavic, or Greek immigrants and their children as "becoming" white. But that rhetorical construction ignores how Americans thought about whiteness before the 1940s. Then, race scientists and ordinary people thought there were several white races, such as the Celtic (Irish) race, the Northern Italian Race, the Eastern European Hebrew race, the Southern Italian race, and so on, which were ranked high to low beneath the Anglo-Saxon/Saxon/Teutonic/Nordic white race on top, depending on when you were speaking and to whom. Adult male immigrants of these supposedly inferior white races could vote when Black men born in the U.S. could not.

Why were the 1940s such a turning point? Because Nazis in Germany were committing racist crimes while arguing that Jews were different racially from Germans.

Why were the 1940s such a turning point? Because Nazis in Germany were committing racist crimes while arguing that Jews were different racially from Germans, that Jews were not Aryans, which an embarrassingly large proportion of Americans also believed, e.g., Henry Ford, an ardent anti-Semite.

In the 1940s, with another world war looming and national unity a top priority, experts taught Americans that whiteness was unitary, a key point used to prop up anti-Black segregation.

Unitary whiteness held up until the late 20th century, when immigrants from Latin America and Asia complicated the classification of American races. We now live in an age where race (Black, white, etc.) coexists with ethnicity (Hispanic, non-Hispanic). Who knows what classifications the future will bring? Some things we can see already, that whiteness was most valuable when laws and customs of exclusion protected it, laws no longer enforceable and customs falling by the wayside as Americans trample color bars and marry whomever they wish, regardless of race. At the same time, whiteness continues to reconstitute itself, as Hispanic Americans increasingly declare themselves to be white, along with a constellation of Americans who boast mixed races and a kaleidoscope of skin tones.

Whiteness isn't done with us yet, but it need not be the same whiteness as two or three generations ago, as a generation ago, despite the heroic efforts of white nationalists to shore it up with guns. This is a good thing. Since the George Floyd protests, fewer and fewer white Americans are now able thoughtlessly to think of themselves as unraced individuals with no role to play in undoing white supremacy. May their embrace of human rights, especially Black rights, change yet again the meanings of American whiteness.

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Opinion | How the real history of whiteness undermines the myth of white supremacy

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The last few weeks have subjected Americans to images of atrocities that Black Americans, sadly, are all too familiar with: killings at the hands of police and horrendous but routine instances of racial discrimination. These injustices have been going on for decades, with Black people staging protests largely alone.

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In 2008, a satirical blog called Stuff White People Like became a brief but boisterous sensation. The conceit was straightforward, coupling a list, eventually 136 items long, of stuff that white people liked to do or own, with faux-ethnographic descriptions that explained each item's purported racial appeal. While some of the items were a little too obvious - indie music appeared at #41, Wes Anderson movies at #10 - others, including "awareness" (#18) and "children's games as adults" (#102), were inspired. It was an instant hit. In its first two months alone, Stuff White People Like drew 4 million visitors, and it wasn't long before a book based on the blog became a New York Times bestseller.

The founder of the blog was an aspiring comedian and PhD dropout named Christian Lander, who'd been working as an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles when he launched the site on a whim. In interviews, Lander always acknowledged that his satire had at least as much to do with class as it did with race. His targets, he said, were affluent overeducated urbanites like himself. Yet there's little doubt that the popularity of the blog, which depended for its humour on the assumption that whiteness was a contentless default identity, had much to do with its frank invocation of race. "As a white person, you're just desperate to find something else to grab on to," Lander said in 2009. "Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they'd grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language."

Looking back at Stuff White People Like today, what marks the site's age is neither the particularities of its irony nor the broad generalities of its targets. There are still plenty of white people with too much time and too much disposable income on their hands, and plenty of them still like yoga (#15), Vespa scooters (#126), and "black music that black people don't listen to any more" (#116).

What has changed, however - changed in ways that date Stuff White People Like unmistakably - is the cultural backdrop. Ten years ago, whiteness suffused mainstream culture like a fog: though pervasive to the point of omnipresence, it was almost nowhere distinct. When the sorts of white people for and about whom Lander was writing talked about being white, their conversations tended to span the narrow range between defensiveness and awkwardness. If they weren't exactly clamouring to dispense with their racial identity, and the privileges that came with it, they were also not eager to embrace, or even discuss it, in public.

In the years since, especially among the sort of people who might have once counted themselves fans of Lander's blog, the public significance of whiteness has undergone an almost wholesale re-evaluation. Far from being a punchline for an anxious, cathartic joke, whiteness is now earnestly invoked, like neoliberalism or populism, as a central driver of cultural and political affairs. Whereas Lander could score a bestseller in 2008 with a book mocking whiteness as a bland cultural melange whose greatest sin was to be uninteresting, just nine years later Ta-Nehisi Coates would have his own bestseller that described whiteness as "an existential danger to the country and the world".

Much of the change, of course, had to do with Donald Trump, for whom, as Coates put it, "whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic, but is the very core of his power". But it was not only Trump. Whiteness has been implicated in events on both sides of the Atlantic, including Brexit; mass shootings in Norway, New Zealand and the US; the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings; and the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol. Alongside these real-world incidents, a bumper crop of scholarship, journalism, art and literature - by Coates, Nell Irvin Painter, Jordan Peele, Eric Foner, Ava DuVernay, Adam Serwer, Barbara and Karen Fields, Kevin Young, David Olusoga, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Colson Whitehead and Claudia Rankine, among many others - has spurred the most significant reconsideration of racial whiteness in 50 years.

This reckoning, as it is sometimes called, has had measurable effects. In a Pew poll last October, nearly a third of white Americans said that the recent attention to racial issues signified a "major change" in American attitudes about race - another 45% said it was a "minor change" - and nearly half believed that those changes would lead to policies that would ameliorate racial inequality. In the UK, a YouGov poll from December suggested that more than a third of Britons reported that they were having more discussions about racism than they had previously.

At the same time, this new focus on whiteness has prompted much confusion and consternation, especially among white people not used to thinking of themselves in racial terms. The Pew poll found that half of white Americans thought there was "too much" discussion of racial issues, and a similar proportion suggested that seeing racism where it didn't exist was a bigger problem than not seeing racism where it did.

What these recent debates have demonstrated more than anything, perhaps, is how little agreement still exists about what whiteness is and what it ought to be. Nearly everywhere in contemporary society "white" is presumed to be a meaningful index of identity that, like age and gender, is important enough to get mentioned in news accounts, tallied in political polls, and recorded in government databases. Yet what that identity is supposed to tell us is still substantially in dispute. In many ways, whiteness resembles time as seen by Saint Augustine: we presume we understand it as long as we're not asked to explain it, but it becomes inexplicable as soon as we're put to the test.

A little more than a century ago, in his essay The Souls of White Folk, the sociologist and social critic WEB Du Bois proposed what still ranks as one of the most penetrating and durable insights about the racial identity we call white: "The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed."

Though radical in its time, Du Bois's characterisation of what he called the "new religion of whiteness" - a religion founded on the dogma that "of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness and tan" - would have a profound effect on the way historians and other scholars would come to understand racial identity. In part this had to do with his insistence that a racial category like whiteness was more akin to a religious belief than a biological fact. Du Bois rejected the idea, still common in his day, that the races reflected natural divisions within the human species - as well as the nearly inevitable corollary that the physical, mental and behavioural traits associated with the white race just happened to be the ones most prized by modern societies.

That had been the view, for instance, of Thomas Jefferson, who had attemptedto delineate "the real distinctions which nature has made" between the races, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1781. It was also the view that would appear, at least in attenuated form, two centuries later in Charles Murray and Richard J Herrnstein's Bell Curve, which was published in 1994. Murray and Herrnstein argued that "the most plausible" explanation for the differences between Black and white populations recorded on IQ tests was "some form of mixed gene and environmental source" - in other words, that at least some of the discrepancy owes to natural differences.

By the time The Bell Curveappeared, Du Bois's assertion that racial categories were not biologically grounded was widely accepted. In the years since, the scientific evidence for that understanding has only become more overwhelming. A 2017 study examined the DNA of nearly 6,000 people from around the world and found that while some genetic differences among humans can be traced to various ancestral lineages - for example, eastern African, southern European or circumpolar - none of those lineages correspond to traditional ideas about race.

If it's easy enough for many people today to accept that whiteness is a purely sociological phenomenon - in some quarters, the idea that "race is a social construct" has become a cliche - the same cannot be said for Du Bois's suggestion that whiteness is a relatively new thing in human history. And yet just as in the case of genetic science, during the second half of the 20th century a number of historians demonstrated that while Du Bois was off by a few hundred years, he was correct that it was only in the modern period that people started to think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race.

Of course, it's important not to overstate the case: the evolution of the idea of whiteness was messy and often indistinct. As the historian Nell Irvin Painter has cautioned, "white identity didn't just spring to life full-blown and unchanging". It had important antecedents that included a growing sense of a pan-European identity; longstanding cultural associations that saw white as a symbol of purity and virtue; and bog-standard ethnocentrism.

Still, with only slightly exaggerated precision, we can say that one of the most crucial developments in "the discovery of personal whiteness" took place during the second half of the 17th century, on the peripheries of the still-young British empire. What's more, historians such as Oscar and Mary Handlin, Edmund Morgan and Edward Rugemer have largely confirmed Du Bois's suspicion that while xenophobia appears to be fairly universal among human groupings, the invention of a white racial identity was motivated from the start by a need to justify the enslavement of Africans. In the words of Eric Williams, a historian who later became the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, "slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery".

If you asked an Englishman in the early part of the 17th century what colour skin he had, he might very well have called it white. But the whiteness of his skin would have suggested no more suitable basis for a collective identity than the roundness of his nose or the baldness of his head. If you asked him to situate himself within the rapidly expanding borders of the known world, he would probably identify himself, first and most naturally, as an Englishman. If that category proved too narrow - if, say, he needed to describe what it was he had in common with the French and the Dutch that he did not share with Ottomans or Africans - he would almost certainly call himself a Christian instead.

That religious identity was crucial for the development of the English slave trade - and eventually for the development of racial whiteness. In the early 17th century, plantation owners in the West Indies and in the American colonies largely depended on the labour of European indentured servants. These servants were considered chattel and were often treated brutally - the conditions on Barbados, England's wealthiest colony, were notorious - but they were fortunate in at least one respect: because they were Christian, by law they could not be held in lifetime captivity unless they were criminals or prisoners of war.

Africans enjoyed no such privilege. They were understood to be infidels, and thus the "perpetual enemies" of Christian nations, which made it legal to hold them as slaves. By 1640 or so, the rough treatment of indentured servants had started to diminish the supply of Europeans willing to work on the sugar and tobacco plantations, and so the colonists looked increasingly to slavery, and the Atlantic-sized loophole that enabled it, to keep their fantastically profitable operations supplied with labour.

The plantation owners understood very well that their cruel treatment of indentured Europeans, and their even crueller treatment of enslaved Africans, might lead to thoughts - or worse - of vengeance. Significantly outnumbered, they lived in constant fear of uprisings. They were particularly afraid of incidents such as Bacon's Rebellion, in 1676, which saw indentured Europeans fighting side-by-side with free and enslaved Africans against Virginia's colonial government.

To ward off such events, the plantation owners initially sought to protect themselves by giving their "Christian" servants legal privileges not available to their enslaved "Negroes". The idea was to buy off the allegiance of indentured Europeans with a set of entitlements that, however meagre, set them above enslaved Africans. Toward the end of the 17th century, this scheme witnessed a significant shift: many of the laws that regulated slave and servant behaviour - the 1681 Servant Act in Jamaica, for example, which was later copied for use in South Carolina - began to describe the privileged class as "whites" and not as "Christians".

One of the more plausible explanations for this change, made by Rugemer and the historian Katharine Gerbner, among others, is that the establishment of whiteness as a legal category solved a religious dilemma. By the 1670s, Christian missionaries, including the Quaker George Fox, were insisting that enslaved Africans should be inducted into the Christian faith. The problem this posed for the planters was obvious: if their African labourers became Christians, and no longer "perpetual enemies" of Christendom, then on what legal grounds could they be enslaved? And what about the colonial laws that gave special privileges to Christians, laws whose authors apparently never contemplated the possibility that Africans might someday join the faith?

The planters tried to resolve the former dilemma by blocking the conversion of enslaved Africans, on the grounds, as the Barbados Assembly put it in 1680, that such conversion would "endanger the island, inasmuch as converted negroes grow more perverse and intractable than others". When that didn't work (the Bishop of London objected) they instead passed laws guaranteeing that baptism could not be invoked as grounds for seeking freedom.

But the latter question, about privileges for Christians, required the colonialists to think in a new way. No longer could their religious identity separate them and their servants from enslaved Africans. Henceforth they would need what Morgan called "a screen of racial contempt". Henceforth, they would need to start thinking of themselves as white.

As late as 1694, a slave-ship captain could still question the racial logic newly employed to justify his trade. ("I can't think there is any intrinsick value in one colour more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think it so because we are so," Thomas Phillips wrote in his diary.) But whiteness quickly proved itself a powerful weapon that allowed transatlantic capitalism to secure the labour - "white" and African - it needed. As the historian Theodore Allen put it, "The plantation bourgeoisie deliberately extended a privileged status to the white poor of all categories as a means of turning to African slavery as the basis of its system of production."

The economic utility of the idea of whiteness helped spread it rapidly around the world. Du Bois was not wrong to call it a religion, for like a religion, it operated at every psychological, sociological and political scale, from the most intimate to the most public. Like a religion, too, it adapted to local conditions. What it meant to be white in British Virginia was not identical to what it would mean in New York before the American civil war, in India during the Raj, in Georgia during Jim Crow, in Australia after Federation, or in Germany during the Third Reich. But what united all these expressions was a singular idea: that some group of people called white was naturally superior to all others. As Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian prime minister and one of the most committed race ideologists of his time, put it, "race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance".

The idea of whiteness, in other words, was identical to the idea of white supremacy. For the three centuries that preceded the civil rights movement, this presumption was accepted at the most refined levels of culture, by people who, in other contexts, were among the most vocal advocates of human liberty and equality. It is well known that Immanuel Kant argued we should treat every other person "always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means". Less well known is his proposal, in his Lectures on Physical Geography,published in 1802, that "humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites", or his claim, in his notes for his Lectures on Anthropology, that native "Americans and Negroes cannot govern themselves. Thus, serve only as slaves". Even Gandhi, during the early part of his life, accepted the basic lie of whiteness, arguing that "the English and the Indians spring from a common stock, called the Indo-Aryan" and that "the white race in South Africa should be the predominating race".

As though aware of their own guilty conscience, the evangelists of the religion of whiteness were always desperate to prove that it was something other than mere prejudice. Where the Bible still held sway, they bent the story of Noah's son Ham into a divine apologia for white supremacy. When anatomy and anthropology gained prestige in the 18th and 19th centuries, they cited pseudo-scientific markers of racial difference like the cephalic index and the norma verticalis. When psychology took over in the 20th, they told themselves flattering stories about divergences in IQ.

For all their evident success, the devotees of the religion of whiteness were never able to achieve the total vision they longed for. In part, this was because there were always dissenters, including among those who stood to gain from it, who rejected the creed of racial superiority. Alongside those remembered by history - Elizabeth Freeman, Toussaint Louverture, Harriet Tubman, Sitting Bull, Franz Boas, Haviva Reik, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela - there were millions of now-forgotten people who used whatever means they possessed to resist it. In part, too, the nonsense logic that regulated the boundaries of whiteness - the one-drop rule in the US, which said that anyone with Black ancestry could not be white; the endless arguments over what "caucasian" was supposed to mean; the "honorary Aryan" status that Hitler extended to the Japanese - was no match for the robust complexities of human society.

Yet if the religion of whiteness was never able to gain acceptance as an unchallengeable scientific fact, it was still hugely successful at shaping social reality. Some of this success had to do with its flexibility. Thanks to its role in facilitating slavery, whiteness in the US was often defined in opposition to blackness, but between those two extremes was room for tactical accommodations. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin could claim that only the English and Saxons "make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth", and nearly 80 years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson would insist that the Irish, like the Chinese and the Native American, were not caucasian. Over time, however, the definition of who counted as culturally white expanded to include Catholics from southern Europe, the Irish and even Jews, who for centuries had been seen as quintessential outsiders.

The religion of whiteness also found success by persuading its adherents that they, and not the people they oppressed, were the real victims. In 1692, colonial legislators in British Barbados complained that "sundry of the Negroes and Slaves of this island, have been long preparing, contriving, conspiring and designing a most horrid, bloody, damnable and detestable rebellion, massacre, assassination and destruction". From there, it was a more or less straight line to Woodrow Wilson's claim, in 1903, that the southerners who started the Ku Klux Klan were "aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation", and to Donald Trump's warning, when he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, that Mexican immigrants to the US were "bringing drugs. And they're bringing crime. And they're rapists."

Where the religion of whiteness was not able to win converts with persuasion or fear, it deployed cruder measures to secure its power, conscripting laws, institutions, customs and churches to enforce its prerogatives. Above all, it depended on force. By the middle of the 20th century, the presumption that a race of people called white were superior to all others had supplied the central justification not just for the transatlantic slave trade but also for the near-total extinction of Indians in North America; for Belgian atrocities in Congo; for the bloody colonisation of India, east Africa and Australia by Britain; for the equally bloody colonisation of north and west Africa and south-east Asia by France; for the deployment of the Final Solution in Nazi Germany; and for the apartheid state in South Africa. And those are merely the most extreme examples. Alongside those murdered, raped and enslaved in the name of whiteness, the total number of whom runs at least to nine figures, are an almost unthinkable number of people whose lives were shortened, constrained, antagonised and insulted on a daily basis.

It was not until the aftermath of the second world war that frank endorsements of white supremacy were broadly rejected in Anglo-American public discourse. That this happened at all was thanks largely to the efforts of civil rights and anti-colonial activists, but the war itself also played a role. Though the horrors of the Nazi regime had been more acute in their intensity than anything happening at the time in the US or the UK, they supplied an unflattering mirror that made it impossible to ignore the racism that was still prevalent in both countries. (A New York Times editorial in 1946 made the connection explicit, arguing that "this is a particularly good year to campaign against the evils of bigotry, prejudice and race hatred because we have recently witnessed the defeat of enemies who tried to found a mastery of the world upon such a cruel and fallacious policy".)

Political appeals to white solidarity diminished slowly but certainly. In 1955, for example, Winston Churchill could still imagine that "Keep England White" was a winning general-election theme, and even as late as 1964, Peter Griffiths, a Conservative candidate for parliament, would score a surprise victory after endorsing a nakedly racist slogan. By 1968, however, when Enoch Powell delivered his "Rivers of Blood" speech - in which he approvingly quoted a constituent who lamented that "in 15 or 20 years' time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man" - he would be greeted by outrage in the Times, which called it an "evil speech", and expelled from the Conservative shadow cabinet. In the US, too, where a century of racial apartheid had followed a century of slavery, open expressions of racism met with increasing public censure. Throughout the 60s and into the 70s, Congress passed a series of statutes that rendered explicit racial discrimination illegal in many areas of public life.

This gradual rejection of explicit, government-enforced white supremacy was hugely consequential in terms of public policy. Yet it did not mean that whiteness, as a political force, had lost its appeal: in the weeks after Powell's speech, to take just one example, a Gallup poll found that 74% of Britons supported his suggestion that brown-skinned immigrants ought to be repatriated. It also left unresolved the more difficult question of whether whiteness was truly separable from its long history of domination.

Instead of looking too hard at the sordid history of whiteness, many white people found it easier to decide that the civil rights movement had accomplished all the anti-racism work that needed doing. The result was a strange détente. On the one hand, whiteness retreated as a subject of public attention, giving way to a new rhetoric of racial colour-blindness. On the other hand, vast embedded economic and cultural discrepancies allowed white people to continue to exercise the institutional and structural power that had accumulated on their behalf across the previous three centuries.

Similarly, while blatant assertions of white power - such as the 1991 gubernatorial campaign of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, in Louisiana - met with significant elite resistance, what counted as racist (and therefore subject to the taboo) was limited to only the most flagrant instances of racial animus. Among liberals and conservatives, racism was widely understood as a species of hatred, which meant that any white person who could look into his heart and find an absence of open hostility could absolve himself of racism.

Even the phrase "white supremacy", which predates the word "racism" in English by 80 years and once described a system of interlocking racial privileges that touched every aspect of life, was redefined to mean something rare and extreme. In 1923, for example, under the headline White Supremacy Menaced, the New York Times would print an article which took at face value a Harvard professor's warning that "one of the gravest and most acute problems before the world today" was "the problem of saving the white race from submergence in the darker races". In 1967, the US supreme court invalidated a law that prevented whites from marrying people who were not white, on the grounds that it was "obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy", and two years later, the critic Albert Murray would use the phrase to describe everything from anti-Black prejudice in police departments to bigoted media representations of Black life to influential academic studies such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family.

By the 80s and 90s, however, at least in white-dominated media, "white supremacy" was reserved only for the most shocking and retrograde examples of racism. For many people who grew up at that time, as I did, the phrase evoked cross burnings and racist hooligans, rather than an intricate web of laws and norms that maintained disparities of wealth, education, housing, incarceration and access to political power.

Perhaps most perverse of all was the charge of "reverse racism", which emboldened critics of affirmative action and other "race-conscious" policies to claim that they, and not the policies' proponents, were the true heralds of racial equality. In 1986, Ronald Reagan went so far as to defend his opposition to minority-hiring quotas by invoking Martin Luther King Jr: "We want a colour-blind society," Reagan declared. "A society, that in the words of Dr King, judges people not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Of course not everyone accepted this new dispensation, which scholars have variously described as "structural racism", "symbolic racism" or "racism without racists". In the decades following the civil rights movement, intellectuals and activists of colour continued to develop the Du Boisian intellectual tradition that understood whiteness as an implement of social domination. In the 80s and 90s, a group of legal scholars that included Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris and Richard Delgado produced a body of research that became known as critical race theory, which was, in Bell's words, "ideologically committed to the struggle against racism, particularly as institutionalised in and by law".

Alongside critical race theory, and in many ways derived from it, a new academic trend, known as whiteness studies, took shape. Historians working in this subfield demonstrated the myriad ways in which the pursuit of white supremacy - like the pursuit of wealth and the subjection of women - had been one of the central forces that gave shape to Anglo-American history. For many of them, the bill of indictment against whiteness was total: as the historian David Roediger put it, "it is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false."

In the fall of 1992, a new journal co-founded by Noel Ignatiev, one of the major figures in whiteness studies, appeared in bookstores around Cambridge, Massachusetts. Called Race Traitor, the magazine wore its motto and guiding ethos on its cover: Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity. The issue opened with an editorial whose headline was equally provocative: "Abolish the white race - by any means necessary." This demand, with its echoes of Sartre by way of Malcolm X, was not, as it turned out, a call for violence, much less for genocide. As Ignatiev and his co-editor, John Garvey, explained, they took as their foundational premise that "the white race is a historically constructed social formation", a sort of club whose membership "consists of those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society".

For Ignatiev and Garvey, whiteness had been identified with white supremacy for so long that it was folly to think it was salvageable. "So long as the white race exists," they wrote, "all movements against racism are doomed to fail." What was necessary, in their view, was for the people called "white" - people like them - to forcefully reject that identification and the racial privileges that came with it. Whiteness, they suggested, was a fragile, unstable thing, such that even a small number of determined attacks - objecting to racist educational programmes at a school board meeting, say, or capturing racist police behaviour on video - ought to be able to unsettle the whole edifice.

But while whiteness studies produced much work that still makes for bracing, illuminating reading, it was soon mocked as one more instance of the very privilege it meant to oppose. "The whole enterprise gives whites a kind of standing in the multicultural paradigm they have never before enjoyed," Margaret Talbot wrote in the New York Times in 1997. "And it involves them, inevitably, in a journey of self-discovery in which white people's thoughts about their own whiteness acquire a portentous new legitimacy." Even Ignatiev would later say he "wanted nothing to do with" it.

By the mid-2000s, the "colour-blind" ideological system had become so successful that it managed to shield even the more obvious operations of whiteness - the overwhelming numbers of white people in corporate boardrooms, for instance, or in the media and tech industries - from much censure. In the US, when racial disparities could not be ignored, it was often suggested that time was the only reliable remedy: as the numerical proportion of whites dwindled, so too would their political and economic power diminish. (Never mind that whiteness had managed to escape predictions of demographic doom before, by integrating groups it had previously kept on its margins.)

Meanwhile, younger white liberals, the sort of people who might have read Bell or Crenshaw or Ignatiev at university, tended to duck the subject of their own racial identity with a shuffling awkwardness. Growing up white in the decades after the civil rights movement was a little like having a rich but disreputable cousin: you never knew quite what to make of him, or the extravagant gifts he bought for your birthday, and so you found it easier, in general, just not to say anything.

The absence of talk about whiteness was so pervasive that it became possible to convince yourself that it constituted one of the central obstacles to racial progress. When I was in graduate school during the early 00s, toward the end of the whiteness-studies boomlet, I often heard - including from my own mouth - the argument that the real problem was that white people weren't talking enough about their racial identity. If you could get people to acknowledge their whiteness, we told ourselves, then it might be possible to get them to acknowledge the unfair ways in which whiteness had helped them.

The trouble with this notion would become clear soon enough, when the presidency of Barack Obama offered the surest test to date of the proposition that whiteness had separated itself from its supremacist past. Though Obama's election was initially hailed by some as proof that the US was entering a new post-racial phase, it took just a few months for the Tea party, a conservative movement ostensibly in favour of small government, to suggest that the opposite was closer to the truth.

In September 2009, Jimmy Carter caused a stir by suggesting that the Tea party's opposition was something other than a principled reaction to government spending. "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man," Carter said. (Carter's speculation was later backed up by research: the political scientist Ashley Jardina, for instance, found that "more racially resentful whites are far more likely to say they support the Tea party and rate it more positively.")

The white backlash to Obama's presidency continued throughout his two terms, helped along by Rupert Murdoch's media empire and the Republican party, which won majorities in both houses of Congress by promising to obstruct anything Obama tried to accomplish. Neither project kept Obama from a second term, but this does not mean that they were without effect: though Obama lost white voters by 12% in 2008, four years later he would lose them by 20%, the worst showing among white voters for a successful candidate in US history.

At the same time, Obama's victory suggested to some observers the vindication of the demographic argument: the changing racial composition of the US appeared to have successfully neutralised the preferences of the white electorate, at least as far as the presidency was concerned. ("There just are not enough middle-aged white guys that we can scrape together to win," said one Republican after Obama's victory.)

What's more, the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests, which attracted international attention in the summer of 2014, prompted a torrent of demonstrative introspection among white people, especially online. As the critic Hua Hsu would write, half-teasingly, in 2015, "it feels as though we are living in the moment when white people, on a generational scale, have become self-aware".

Not for the first time, however, what was visible on Twitter was a poor indicator of deeper social trends. As we now know, the ways in which whiteness was becoming most salient at mid-decade were largely not the ways that prompted recent university graduates to announce their support for Rhodes Must Fall on Instagram. Far more momentous was the version of white identity politics that appreciated the advantages of whiteness and worried about them slipping away; that saw in immigration an existential threat; and that wanted, more than anything, to "Take Back Control" and to "Make America Great Again".

It was this version of whiteness that helped to power the twin shocks of 2016: first Brexit and then Trump. The latter, especially - not just the fact of Trump's presidency but the tone of it, the unrestrained vengeance and vituperation that animated it - put paid to any lingering questions about whether whiteness had renounced its superiority complex. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who more than any other single person had been responsible for making the bumbling stereotype of whiteness offered up by Stuff White People Like seem hopelessly myopic, understood what was happening immediately. "Trump truly is something new - the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president," Coates wrote in the autumn of 2017. "His ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power."

In 1860, a man who called himself "Ethiop" published an essay in The Anglo-African Magazine, which has been called the first Black literary journal in the US. The author behind the pseudonym was William J Wilson, a former bootmaker who later served as the principal of Brooklyn's first public school for Black children. Wilson's essay bore the headline, What Shall We Do with the White People?

The article was meant in part meant to mock the white authors and statesmen who had endlessly asked themselves a similar question about Black people in the US. But it was not only a spoof. In a tone that mimicked the smug paternalism of his targets, he laid out a comprehensive indictment of white rule in the country: the plunder and murder of the "Aborigines"; the theft and enslavement of Africans; the hypocrisy embodied by the American constitution, government and white churches. At the root of all this, he wrote, was "a long continued, extensive and almost complete system of wrongdoing" that made the men and women who enabled it into "restless, grasping" marauders. "In view of the existing state of things around us," Wilson proposed at the end, "let our constant thought be, what for the best good of all shall we do with the White people?"

Much has changed since Wilson's time, but a century and a half on, his question remains no less pertinent. For some people, such as the political scientist Eric Kaufmann, whiteness is what it has always pretended to be. Though he acknowledges that races are not genetically defined, Kaufmann nevertheless sees them as defensible divisions of humanity that have some natural basis: they emerge, he suggests, "through a blend of unconscious colour-processing and slowly evolved cultural conventions". In his 2019 book Whiteshift, Kaufmann argues that the history of oppression by white people is "real, but moot", and he advocates for something he calls "symmetrical multiculturalism", in which "identifying as white, or with a white tradition of nationhood, is no more racist than identifying as black". What shall we do with the white people? Kaufmann thinks we should encourage them to take pride in being white, lest they turn to more violent means: "Freezing out legitimate expressions of white identity allows the far right to own it, and acts as a recruiting sergeant for their wilder ideas."

From another perspective - my own, most days - whiteness means something different from other racial and ethnic identities because it has had a different history than other racial and ethnic identities. Across three-and-a-half centuries, whiteness has been wielded as a weapon on a global scale; Blackness, by contrast, has often been used as a shield. (As Du Bois put it, what made whiteness new and different was "the imperial width of the thing - the heaven-defying audacity.") Nor is there much reason to believe that whiteness will ever be content to seek "legitimate expressions", whatever those might look like. The religion of whiteness had 50 years to reform itself along non-supremacist lines, to prove that it was fit for innocuous coexistence. Instead, it gave us Donald Trump.

Yet even this does not fully answer Wilson's question. For if it's easy enough to agree in theory that the only reasonable moral response to the long and very much non-moot history of white supremacy is the abolitionist stance advocated in the pages of Race Traitor - ie, to make whiteness meaningless as a group identity, to shove it into obsolescence alongside "Prussian" and "Etruscan" - it seems equally apparent that whiteness is not nearly so fragile as Ignatiev and Garvey had imagined. Late in his life, James Baldwin described whiteness as "a moral choice", as a way of emphasising that it was not a natural fact. But whiteness is more than a moral choice: it is a dense network of moral choices, the vast majority of which have been made for us, often in times and places very distant from our own. In this way whiteness is a problem like climate change or economic inequality: it is so thoroughly imbricated in the structure of our everyday lives that it makes the idea of moral choices look quaint.

As with climate change, however, the only thing more difficult than such an effort would be trying to live with the alternative. Whiteness may seem inevitable and implacable, and Toni Morrison surely had it right when she said that the world "will not become unracialised by assertion". (To wake up tomorrow and decide I am no longer white would help no one.) Even so, after 350 years, it remains the case, as Nell Irvin Painter argues, that whiteness "is an idea, not a fact". Not alone, and not without much work to repair the damage done in its name, it still must be possible to change our minds.

This article was amended on 20 April 2021 to correct a reference to Eric Williams being the first president of Trinidad and Tobago. He was in fact the first prime minister.

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The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea

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The long read: Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world

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modern day segregation at the hands of liberal white folks (unintentionally)

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modern day segregation at the hands of liberal white folks (unintentionally)

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look up nice white parents podcasts

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strannge fruit - billie holiday