“There is simply no getting around it, a myth of Anglo-Saxon ‘exceptionalism’ has shaped America’s sense of self. It and the culture of whiteness that sustains it runs deep within the DNA of this country.”
—Kelly Brown Douglas1
“Whiteness is a problem of being shaped to think that other people are the problem.”
—Alexis Shotwell2
“[Race] is, to try another phrasing, a ‘division of species’ effected and maintained by the technologies of violence and sexuality that underwrite the social formation, not a discriminatory manipulation of already existing bodily marks.”
—Jared Sexton3
The ideologies of American exceptionalism and innocence rest on the foundations of white supremacy. Theodore Allen described white supremacy in two volumes of works that explored the “invention of the white race.”4 He argued that “white race” privileges conferred on European Americans were created by the ruling class as a system of social control that led to racial slavery and oppression for “free” Black Americans. White supremacy has been a critical component of American capitalist development. It formed the glue that held together policies such as slavery, land theft, and imperial expansion. In other words, white supremacy has historically rallied white Americans—and non-Black people of color5—of all classes to the side of the oppressor with the promise that, if compliant, they too will bear the fruits of the system. Whether it was the slave patrols in the early colonies or the recruitment of Army volunteers to commit mass murder in Korea, U.S. imperialism has privileged the condition of white America at the expense of the darker masses, which made American exceptionalism synonymous with white exceptionalism and white innocence.
If the systems of American capitalism and imperialism possess white supremacy at the root, then every branch of the American nation-state is a monument to white supremacy. Mainstream discourse in the U.S. has fallen well short of this analysis. Few, if any, institutions condemn white supremacy as a pillar in the architecture of the American way of life. To do so would be to question, if not fully condemn, the creed of American exceptionalism. This is why episodes of racial violence by KKK members bring with them chants from people exclaiming, “This isn’t who we are!” When acknowledged at all by Americans, white supremacy is mostly depicted as a relic of the past or an individual behavior, both of which have long been reformed by the self-correcting nature of American “democracy.”
The Trump presidency has only heightened the contradictions apparent in the American discourse on white supremacy. Donald Trump has been credited with emboldening white supremacist forces in America, forces that were thought to have been buried by an increasingly “color-blind” society. Events in Charlottesville and cities across the country confirmed fears of a white supremacist “backlash.” In August of 2017, white Americans under the banner of “Unite the Right” marched in protest of the removal of a Confederate monument to Robert E. Lee. Counter protesters descended in opposition to the right-wing mob, leading to an eruption of violence that left one counter protester dead and many more injured.
The spotlight that Charlottesville placed on monuments to the Confederacy led to the removal of statues and monuments across the country. In Durham, North Carolina, anti-racist activists pulled down a memorial to Confederate soldiers just days after the protest in Charlottesville. President Donald Trump opposed the removal of statues as a dangerous precedent, claiming that removing Robert E. Lee because of outrage to slavery meant that monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would also need to be taken down. Trump’s comments sparked a renewed conversation about the character of white supremacy in the American mainland. On one side, protesters rightfully pointed to Confederate statues as symbolic celebrations of Black enslavement and racism that continue to hold ramifications for the present. On the other hand, the American corporate media, Democratic Party officials, and even some Republicans in Washington utilized mass opposition to Confederate symbols to clamor for “national unity” and strengthen American exceptionalism. As one Atlantic piece argued, Americans will continue to remove Confederate monuments because “America is still working on the project of constructing a more equal society, and reinvesting in the experiment of a multi-ethnic democracy.”6
This narrative of American exceptionalism and innocence views the United States as a gradual project in perfecting “democracy” and “equality.” The structural roots of white supremacy are effectively erased. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with opposing the Confederacy on the basis that its development was a military response to preserve an agricultural capitalist order based largely on the immense profits plantation owners derived from the enslavement of Blacks. To paint the Confederacy as an aberration, however, turns opposition to white supremacy into a mere clean up crew for the American nation-state. The enormous influence of American exceptionalism ensured that the debate over Confederate monuments was directed in a way so that “the spectacular actually camouflages the routine;” namely, “the normal operation of the law against blacks in all its everyday terror and contempt, its misbehavior, and broken ethicality.”7
Genuine opposition to white supremacy requires that the laws that govern the United States are torn down, root and branch. Law in this context cannot be limited to the enforcement of legislation passed by the ruling class. Law is a fundamental expression of the economic, political, and cultural oppression enforced by the system of white supremacy and American capitalism. It’s true that colonial powers in Europe practiced their own version of racial animus to justify the plunder of African, Asian, and Latin American civilizations. But it was only in the English colonies that would later form the U.S. where “whiteness” would provide the guiding framework for capitalist development and thus seep into each and every institution erected thereafter.
A great challenge exists, then, to expose just how pervasive white supremacy remains in the structure of American society. The structural role white supremacy played in the development of the U.S. has left nothing untouched by the laws of whiteness. White Americans are often oblivious to the manifestations of white supremacy because the institutions of society operate in their favor. Racially “innocent” white people might admit that they benefit from white supremacy, or even that they might be complicit in white supremacy—perhaps in an unintentional, unconscious, passive manner—but they rarely admit all the ways they actively, consciously, and even proudly participate in it. As Katie Grimes notes,
they figure white supremacy more like a shady friend from high school who comes around every now and then and lures you into committing various acts of mischief, or like a slightly unsavory businesswoman with whom you occasionally collaborate and from whose questionable ethics you frequently reap profits. In truth, whites do not simply collaborate with and benefit from racial evil; it lives within them, and they enact it directly with their bodies and not just through their interactions with structures.8
Kirstine Taylor similarly argues that “racial innocence” operates as a way for wealthy Americans to point the finger at a certain class or geographic region—namely “the poor” and “the South”—for the country’s racism.9 In other words, it’s the “white trash” using racial slurs and burning crosses who represents white supremacy, not the owner of my favorite football team, my financial adviser, or that suburban neighbor who runs my homeowner association. Even more troubling, here, racism is still largely perceived as an individual’s attitude or belief and not, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore more accurately describes, “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”10 Whiteness and American exceptionalism are thus deeply interrelated. American exceptionalism consumes whiteness under the banner of the state. It ensures that even as poor white Americans are labeled “white trash” by their elite counterparts, the crimes against peoples of color embedded in the fabric of American society remain broadly unchallenged.
If American society itself is a monument to white supremacy, then the economic, cultural, and legal manifestations of white supremacy must take precedence over individual attitudes. No better example exists of a legal and political monument to white supremacy than the U.S. prison regime. As of 2017, the United States possessed twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners despite having only five percent of the world’s total population. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 40 percent of all prisoners are Black American despite Black Americans making up just 13 percent of the U.S. population.11 Black Americans make up over fifty percent of those serving life sentences. Nearly one-third of all young Black males are either incarcerated or under criminal justice supervision while Black women represent one of the fastest growing prison populations in the nation.12 Outside of prison, another 840,000 are serving parole and 3.7 million are serving probation, with these numbers reflecting the same racial disparities that exist in the prison system.
Both Angela Davis and Stephen Dillion agree that the prison regime, often termed the “prison industrial complex,” serves to reimpose slavery in the context of present day American political economy. “The spirit of slavery animated the bars of prison cells and the coldness that surrounded captured black bodies,” Dillion writes as he chronicles the experience of formerly incarcerated Black liberation activist Assata Shakur. “[It] seeped past the razor wire and the concrete walls of the prison, structuring poverty on the street, regulatory violence in the welfare office and the unfreedom that governs an antiblack world.”13 The U.S. carceral state has its roots in the Thirteenth Amendment of the American Constitution, which outlawed slavery except as a means of criminal punishment. 14 Wealthy planters and capitalists were thus legally empowered to enforce a prison regime of terror in the post-Reconstruction period. Between 1882 and 1946, there were at least 5,000 recorded cases of lynchings involving the killing of Black Americans by white Americans. Many more freed Black Americans were forced to work for little to nothing in the “convict-lease” system enforced by Black Codes. Today, prisoners, many of whom are Black, are similarly forced to work for slave wages while behind bars. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce slavery to a practice that was merely reshaped or adopted by the criminal legal system during the postbellum period. This would entail that the state’s system of anti-Black domination narrowed—rather than expanded—as a result of so-called emancipation. “What we’re dealing with,” writes Tryon Woods, “ is not the winnowing of slavery to the purview of criminal justice, but rather the socialization of slavery—no plantations, no auction blocks, no prisons, no laws necessary.”15
In a neoliberal era characterized by the increasing disposability of Black labor, the United States has placed high importance on the criminalization of Black life to fill prison beds. The proliferation of Blacks and people of color (19 percent of the prison population is identified as “Hispanic”) behind the prison walls is a consequence of multiple, interrelated developments.16 Neoliberal policies such as “welfare reform,” the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and harsh sentencing laws included in bills like the Violent Crime Control Act of 1994, placed an increasingly deadly target on Black lives. The rise in Black poverty and unemployment was complemented by the racist demonization of Black Americans as “welfare queens” and “super predators,” all of which justified the enormous increase in the number of prisoners in America.
It is from these conditions that the U.S. prison regime became a monument to white supremacy and the police became the armed body that filled prison beds. The disposability of Black life under American neoliberal capitalism helped spark the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement and its protest of the daily murder and terror which police departments impose on Black Americans. Without the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests in the U.S. against racist symbols such as Confederate statues may not have proven to be so significant. However, conversation about the structural foundations of white supremacy during these protests has been limited. American capitalism, founded upon enslavement and genocide, has developed into an imperial powerhouse dominated by finance capital. And finance capital is no less a monument to white supremacy than the country’s Confederate statues.
Finance capital is most commonly referred to as FIRE or Finance and Real Estate, much of which is controlled and administered on Wall Street. Finance capital was also the backbone of the nascent slave trade in the early years of the American Republic. Slave traders faced great challenges accessing credit to finance their long-distance expeditions in the sale of enslaved labor. Traders demanded liquid assets and buyers wanted financing to help lower the costs of the trade. As Calvin Schermerhorn explains, “In the Chesapeake, slave traders routinely advertised ‘CASH FOR NEGROES.’ But buyers demanded financing. When selling bondspersons in the lower Mississippi Valley, traders were forced to extend credit and accept bills or promissory notes that had little interregional mobility.” Thus, slave-trading firms required external financing to maximize the profitability of the sale of enslaved Black labor.17
Bank capital was dependent upon the enslavement of Blacks as much as slave traders were dependent on bank capital to ensure profitability from the enterprise. Wall Street itself formed out of the enormous growth of the slave trade experienced in the American nation-state in the 18th and 19th centuries. In fact, New York’s first slave market was established on what is now Wall Street in 1711.18 The founder of what is now Citibank, Moses Taylor, became the richest man of his century through the illegal trade of slaves from New York to Cuba.19
Captive slaves brought in enormous profits for all parties involved, not least because the total dehumanization of Black Africans made them useful financial instruments. As Zenia Kish and Justin Leroy show,
Through a process of financialization, masters and investors transformed slaves from subjects excluded from market activity because of their legal status into mitigators of risk absolutely essential to the functioning of such markets. Yet their status also obscured this central importance. Planters alternately considered them the ultimate risk, in the form of potential rebellion, or the most prudent investment, because the natural increase of enslaved property created what Jefferson termed a “silent profit”, as slaves were a self-reproducing form of capital.20
Bank capital thus took advantage of slavery’s profitability. It made Black captives the very instruments that underwrote additional credit to slave masters and traders looking to maximize their investment. This history places in clear view how Wall Street is one of the most prominent monuments to white supremacy that exists today. Wall Street benefited mightily from white supremacy, as the bondage of Black slaves and the relative freedoms bestowed upon whites of all classes helped secure the fortunes of early Wall Street financiers. Not coincidentally, whites were made to believe that they rightfully created the most exceptional nation to have ever been birthed. Wall Street has laughed all the way to the bank ever since, monopolizing into six mega corporations responsible for the great fleecing of Black Americans during the 2008 financial crisis. More to come on this in the next chapter.
And finally, many monuments to white supremacy exist in U.S. popular culture. American schools and sporting events regularly play the “Star-Spangled Banner” despite the fact that its author, Francis Scott Keyes, was an avowed racist who owned slaves and referenced his contempt for Africans in the third verse of the song.21 White supremacy is present in everything deemed exceptional about American “culture,” which is really an amalgam of stolen cultures re-prescribed to the people through the levers of power and profit. It is rooted in the corporate food we eat, the corporate clothing we buy, and the corporate music we consume. American exceptionalism and white supremacy are not only deeply connected but also stand as the driving forces of American cultural life.
The broadway musical Hamilton, which premiered on Broadway in 2015 and has since shattered records in recording sales, is a case in point. Hamilton sports a Black cast that places a spotlight on Alexander Hamilton’s experience as a “Founding Father” of the U.S. The musical has garnered critical acclaim but little criticism as an entertaining monument to white supremacy. However, according to Rutgers historian Lyra Monteiro, the musical downplays the Founding Fathers’ involvement with slavery by dressing up Black actors in their garb and painting Alexander Hamilton as the abolitionist-minded father of the nation.22 In the hilariously titled article, “‘Hamilton: the Musical:’ Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders . . . and It’s Not Halloween,” Ishmael Reed argues that such representations obscures how Hamilton not only married into a slave holding family, but also conducted transactions in the sale of slaves for them during his tenure in the Continental Army.23 None of this was mentioned in the Hamilton musical, making it another monument to white supremacy, rather than a critique of it.
Hamilton is a pitch perfect example of how practices of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism often reinforce the ideologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence. Consider how Lin-Manuel Miranda explained his rationale for casting black actors in the roles of people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Such casting, he said, “allow[s] you to leave whatever cultural baggage you have about the founding fathers at the door.”24 Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theatre that hosted Hamilton added his take. “It has liberated a lot of people who might feel ambivalent about the American experiment to feel patriotic,” he said. “I can feel it in myself—it makes me cheer to be reminded of everything great about America and to have the story reappropriated for the immigrant population.”25 To make matters even worse, in an advertisement deceptively disguised as a journalistic interview, Lin-Manuel Miranda spoke with Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley to promote the importance of personal financial planning.26 It should come as no surprise that Morgan Stanley would try to exploit Hamilton’s success, and given the pro-capitalist ideology that permeates the musical, it definitely should come as no surprise that Miranda would welcome the bank with open arms.27
Claims of Hamilton being “revolutionary” are quite laughable once we consider the kinds of people who have fallen in love with it. In his article, “You Should be Terrified That People Who Like ‘Hamilton’ Run Our Country,” journalist Alex Nichols says fans should feel rather skeptical whenever people like Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Rupert Murdoch, and the rest of the D.C. and Wall Street elite unanimously praise a show like Hamilton. Sarcastically drawing from a line in a positive review featured in the New Yorker, Nichols argues Hamilton really is the “musical of the Obama era”:
We might call it a kind of, well, “blackwashing,” making something that was heinous seem somehow palatable by retroactively injecting diversity into it [. . .] Contemporary progressivism has come to mean papering over material inequality with representational diversity. The president will continue to expand the national security state at the same rate as his predecessor, but at least he will be black. Predatory lending will drain the wealth from African American communities, but the board of Goldman Sachs will have several black members. Inequality will be rampant and worsening, but the 1% will at least “look like America.” The actual racial injustices of our time will continue unabated, but the power structure will be diversified so that nobody feels quite so bad about it. Hamilton is simply this tendency’s cultural-historical equivalent; instead of worrying ourselves about the brutal origins of the American state, and the lasting economic effects of those early inequities, we can simply turn the Founding Fathers black and enjoy the show.28
Like Lin-Manuel Miranda, bankers and other ruling class elites view condemnation of the nation’s genocidal and slaveholding origins as “cultural baggage.” And one’s refusal to either venerate or celebrate America’s anti-Black and anti-Indigenous Founding Fathers is a condition from which one must be “liberated.” No wonder both conservatives and liberals are enamored with Hamilton. “The musical flatters both right and left sensibilities,” Nichols concludes. “Conservatives get to see their beloved Founding Fathers exonerated for their horrendous crimes, and liberals get to have nationalism packaged in a feel-good multicultural form.” So as it turns out, in addition to the NFL, the New York Times, CNN, NPR, Hollywood studio executives, and America’s public schools, we now have another chief propaganda tool for the U.S. state: Hamilton, a musical where “[t]he more troubling questions about the country’s origins are instantly vanished, as an era built on racist forced labor is transformed into a colorful, culturally progressive, and politically unobjectionable extravaganza.”29
The veneration of the “Founding Fathers” is a crucial aspect of American exceptionalism. Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson, and the like have been canonized as the foremost representatives of the values of democracy, freedom, and liberty so often ascribed to the United States. Their critical role in the maintenance and expansion of white supremacy is rarely taught or remembered. The erasure of historical memory under the guide of American exceptionalism has created a hierarchy of slave owners that represent divergent yet related trends in American politics. This was evident in a Saturday Night Live sketch that awkwardly tried to contest Donald Trump’s sarcastic statement that perhaps statues of Washington and Jefferson should be removed as well. In the contemporary context of Charlottesville, Washington and Jefferson are “good” while Robert E. Lee and his Confederate allies are “bad.” More specifically, Washington and Jefferson are venerated as representatives of noble and sophisticated liberalism in contrast to the barbaric conservatism of the Confederacy.
The tendency to defend the Founding Fathers’ racism by calling Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton mere “products of their time” is a paramount example of anti-Blackness. By suggesting that “everyone believed slavery was okay back then,” we equate everyone with every white elite person. But not only were there plenty of white abolitionists (both rich and poor), there were—much more importantly—all of the slaves who were against slavery, slaves that waged numerous rebellions throughout the history of their enslavement. The typical “product of their time” argument totally erases slaves from our imagination, as if they themselves had no moral agency. They are—once again—pushed into what Frantz Fanon called the zone of nonbeing, or what Saidiya Hartman calls “the position of the unthought.”30
Again, this is one of the perplexing things about Hamilton. If the goal is to let people of color know that this is their country too, and that the American story is also their story, the question must be asked: Were you simply unable to find any person of color in the history of this country—from its inception to today—that could have driven this point home? Before we too quickly judge the creators of the musical, however, we must confront our own sinister practices of spreading the U.S. “Founding Fathers” propaganda. Why are these slave owners and white elite bankers presented as the nation’s heroes which children are raised to emulate? Are our imaginations that limited? Is our knowledge of history so whitewashed and our aspirations for social justice so contaminated that we have students celebrate the people who perpetrated state violence and oppression, not those who actively resisted it? What if we stopped telling children that they, too, can be president of the United States? What if instead we taught them that they, too, can be like Ella Baker, Eslanda Robeson, or her husband Paul Robeson. They can be like Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, George Washington’s runaway slave Ona Judge, or even the 18th-century revolutionary quaker dwarf Benjamin Lay.31 What does it say about us—and the stories we believe about our “exceptional” and “innocent” nation—that we think it noble to pursue a job as head of an imperial state? Indeed, if we’re talking about monuments to white supremacy, we can add the office of the presidency to that list. As both the domestic and foreign policies of Barack Obama have shown, the office can serve as a monument to and enforcer of white supremacy even with a person of color running it.
White supremacy laid the foundations for the development of the U.S. and its subsequent growth into the largest capitalist and imperialist power the world has known. The ideology of American innocence has us admit, deceptively, that our country might be racist, but that our founding values and ideals will carry us forward. Ideas such as liberalism and conservatism, and the Americans that uphold them, are reflections of the dominant system of a given society. Such people, especially in the liberal spheres, are deceived into naively and innocently thinking that we can move past our brutal racism with the structures and ideologies put in place by our nation’s rulers. But “America” itself is a monument to white supremacy. As Jodi Byrd points out, “We can take down all the Lee, Jackson, Jefferson, Washington, Cook, and Columbus monuments that litter the cities and towns of this nation, but the structural intent behind putting them up in the first place remains written onto the land.” “Those monuments,” Byrd continues, “order space, naturalize possession and dispossession, and even in their absence continue to produce the ownership of land as the only path to freedom.”32 White supremacy thus remains alive and well in the genesis of Wall Street, the prison industrial complex, and numerous channels of cultural reproduction such as the musical Hamilton. Those who have torn down Confederate monuments to white supremacy have hopefully begun a process where these monuments can be torn down, too.