Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity

Historian Donald Yacovone exposes evidence of America’s entrenched and enduring legacy of White Supremacy in its education system through Teaching White Supremacy. Reviewing countless manuscripts, literary works, history books, and other primary sources, Yacovone identifies the continuous thread of racist and Eurocentric ideologies that ignored the Black American experience, justified and downplayed the brutality of slavery, and emphasized racial domination in the cultural narrative of the United States. The history of teaching history in American public schools in the US has always centered on White Anglo-Saxon ideals promoted by Northern writers. Yacovone painstakingly documents the incessant denigrating representation of enslaved Africans and Indigenous people in children’s textbooks. While the institution of slavery metastasized in the South, Yankee thinkers and authors sustained the invisibility of race and, in so doing, perpetuated and reinforced racism.

As educators and parents contend with the backlash against multiculturalism, it is important to understand the roots of the problem. Teaching White Supremacy is a critical addition to the profusion of texts naming the pre-eminence of the legacy of structural and institutional racism in U.S. society. What sets this book apart is Yacovone’s stature and lifetime expertise as a scholar and researcher of African-American history. His deep knowledge of the long arc of prejudiced beliefs and attitudes informs opportunities to rethink the past and defy the supremacy of Whiteness in American cultural identity.