Teaching White Supremacy

America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity

By: Donald Yacovone

Narrated by: Cary Hite

A powerful exploration of the past and present arc of America’s white supremacy—from the country’s inception and Revolutionary years to its 19th century flashpoint of civil war; to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter.

“The most profoundly original cultural history in recent memory.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

“Stunning, timely . . . an achievement in writing public history . . . Teaching White Supremacy should be read widely in our roiling debate over how to teach about race and slavery in classrooms."—David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History, Yale University; author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Donald Yacovone shows us the clear and damning evidence of white supremacy’s deep-seated roots in our nation’s educational system through a fascinating, in-depth examination of America’s wide assortment of texts, from primary readers to college textbooks, from popular histories to the most influential academic scholarship. Sifting through a wealth of materials from the colonial era to today, Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which this ideology has infiltrated all aspects of American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity.

Yacovone lays out the arc of America’s white supremacy from the country’s inception and Revolutionary War years to its nineteenth-century flashpoint of civil war to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter. In a stunning reappraisal, the author argues that it is the North, not the South, that bears the greater responsibility for creating the dominant strain of race theory, which has been inculcated throughout the culture and in school textbooks that restricted and repressed African Americans and other minorities, even as Northerners blamed the South for its legacy of slavery, segregation, and racial injustice.

A major assessment of how we got to where we are today, of how white supremacy has suffused every area of American learning, from literature and science to religion, medicine, and law, and why this kind of thinking has so insidiously endured for more than three centuries.

©2022 Donald Yacovone (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

“How did the South 'win the narrative war' about race equality, as Bryan Stevenson has so aptly put it, following the Civil War? In fascinating, if deeply troubling detail, the historian Donald Yacovone has charted the creation and systematic implementation of the pernicious myth of white supremacy in the very classrooms of America where our youngest and most impressionable citizens are shaped. Examining an astounding array of textbooks in the 19th and 20th centuries, Yacovone in compelling prose has captured the nation’s deliberate fashioning of 'American identity' as fundamentally, inevitably, and unalterably 'white.' The most profoundly original cultural history in recent memory, Teaching White Supremacy places the development and institutionalization of American racial ideology squarely where it belongs: not in the slave South, but in the ostensibly free North, assaulting common perceptions of Northern racial exceptionalism.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

“Teaching White Supremacy reveals in great detail the battle over historical memory in public schools and how the white elite has devoted extraordinary resources to perpetuating racist ideas in each generation through the K-12 curriculum . . . Yacovone documents the timeworn playbook guiding contemporary legislators in their campaign to censor teaching truthfully about racism and other forms of oppression in U.S. history . . . Those stories of resistance permeate the book and offer strategies and inspiration for those defending the right to teach outside the textbook today.”—Deborah Menkart, executive director of Teaching for Change and co-director of the Zinn Education Project

“[Yacovone] masterfully details how U.S. K-12 and college texts since the 1830s have inculcated whiteness as a national inheritance passed from generation to generation . . . accessible, thoroughly documented, and well-reasoned. . . essential reading for all interested in truly understanding America’s past and the systemic distortions to repress and restrict the historical narrative with an insidious ideology.”—Library Journal (starred review)

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Thank you! Amazing book to stress the importance of what we don’t know, and HOW we can fix it! Great book.

An Excellent Compendium

An excellent compendium of the white supremacist slant of high school and college history texts

Accuracy At It’s Highest

This book is worthy of all school administration as the nation and world’s legacy of white supremacy is intersectional in every curriculum standard area of study. It should be required reading for districts and private institutions of all types.

review of teaching white supremacy by john d whitmore, a retired public speaking/ english/ and drama high school teacher.

being my 1st audible. experience TWS required me too slow down to.8 speed and to stop frequently for note recording for further readings. Clear, crisp , articulation by narrator. i will be going back for selected references but this not like underlying or margin notes. require s skill in working this medium. thanks jdw

Necessary literature

The narrator was dry and the author rambled off topic for pages at a time at various points but when the book stays on topic it is gut wrenching, extremely valuable information in terms of illustrating how white supremacy was reinforced by our education system. The examples and quotes mentioned in the book are pure gold.

Good, important material

Frankly, I was appalled at all the brainwashing through so many years and we are probably not done yet. I graduated from high school in 1954 so reached deep into my memories. Also I’m a Tennessean who has lived in Cleveland Ohio since 1958, so I compare North and South with knowledge of both. Thanks for recording. That made it more palatable to endure: sorry example after sorry example. Listeners and readers have pictured here a travesty of living together respectfully. We have to do better.

Disappointing

Not the book which is extraordinary, but the fact that we’ve made so little progress in the last 200 years. Reading portions of this book is like reading yesterday’s newspaper. May the Creator have mercy on us all!

Excellent...and he shows the North's true side

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Informative and interesting read

As a history teacher, this opened my eyes to just how white supremacist ideologies have lingered in our nation’s textbooks throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. There is so much information to gain from reading this book.

Everything was good except the epilogue

Should not have included the epilogue. Dropped it from 4 stars to 3 stars because of this.