When we ask a question about, “Where are the origins

of white supremacy? Where are the origins of racism?”

They are very much in the founding of the nation itself,

in our earliest stories.

Slavery and race in North America

grow up together.

Part of what colonial law makers are deeply invested

in is creating categories, boxes,

and keeping people separate from one another as a tactic

to then organize society,

subject some people to wholesale exclusion.

A story is going to be told about Africans

as particularly suited to do the kinds of agricultural

labor that colonial officials imagine will bring prosperity —

the production, for example, of tobacco.

They’re telling those stories and developing these

ideas because they believe it’s an effective technique,

it might be an effective technique for making

the colony an economically productive enterprise.

That’s all racism is, is a set of ideas, wrong ideas,

but powerful ideas

about why people of African descent

are especially suited to do the work.

Out of the colonial period,

out of the American Revolution there emerges a question.

Slavery might end. It might not end for some years,

perhaps some decades,

but it appears that slavery is going to end,

certainly in the North and perhaps throughout

the country over time. It’s one observation.

And the second observation is that as slavery comes

to an end slowly and gradually,

there will emerge communities of free people

of color who are going to build institutions and families,

become part of the economic fabric of life in these cities.

What to do if you have a growing community of free

people of color,

and yet your vision is one of a White man’s country.

Enter colonizationists.

And what colonizationists propose is that they will

raise money,

they will found a colony in West Africa that comes

to be called Liberia.

And they will, by the offering up of resources,

they will try and persuade free people

of color to leave the country.

This is a movement that gets formalized

in the 1810s

the American Colonization Society

gives a kind of institutional home to colonizationist ideas.

Colonization becomes the most popular political

movement of the early 19th Century.

Ordinary Americans sign on to this idea that the future

of the country is governed by, dominated by,

run by White Americans,

and free African-Americans have no future.

There’s only probably less than 10,000 people of African

descent who even seriously entertain the notion

of colonization,

no less board a ship for a place like Liberia.

The numbers are small.

But for thinking about the long history of White Supremacy,

what we have to appreciate is that even as people

of African descent remain in place,

they live in a world where the majority of white people

around them have signed on to a political movement

that says they shouldn’t be there,

that is committed to White Supremacy,

whether people of African descent are literally removed,

or whether they remain under subordinated circumstances.

This is a world in which colonization has given

everybody a language, an organization,

a political movement around which White Supremacy

as we know it coalesces.