Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm Tim O'Brien. Today's Crash Course, The Promised Land versus White Supremacy. We white Christians no longer represent the majority of Americans, writes Robert P. Jones, a white Christian. We are no longer capable of setting the nation's course by sheer cultural and political dominance, but there are more than enough of us to decisively derail the future of democracy in America.
That's from Robbie's new book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, an exploration of the historical foundations of white supremacy in the United States. The book is wide ranging, incisive, and ultimately a call to action from someone steeped in the same culture and moras he examines, I'll read you another excerpt. At its heart, this book sets out to expose the deep, hidden roots of America's current identity crisis. He writes, this moment of reckoning with our fraught and contested heritage is
spawning new practices of remembering. It is also generating a visceral and sometimes violent resistance. The fault Line's Robbie examines affect every facet of American life, individuals, families, communities, politics, the economy, and institutions ranging from courts to corporations. Robbie brings skills to this endeavor. He has a widely published and award winning writer, a well regarded polster, and president
and founder of the Public Religious Research Institute. He has written two other books and is lavishly trained in religious studies and ministries. Welcome to Crash Course.
Robbie, Hi, thanks for having me.
We have got a lot to discuss, and since the theme of this one is white supremacy, let's just set the table right there. You know, it's a term that doesn't come easily to many people's lips. Joe Biden gave a speech honoring and remembering the Tall massacre of nineteen twenty one last year. It was the one hundredth anniversary, and I think he was the first US president to utter the term white supremacist or white supremacy. Why do you think that term is still so hard for some people to say.
Well, you know, I think what happens, particularly with people who are white, is they think of perhaps the image that comes to mind is some black and white image of people in robes and hoods burning across in the eighteen hundreds or maybe as late as nineteen twenty. But it's still a century back there in our minds, and so we tend to, I think, associate it with something quite extreme and quite long ago that pictures faded. It's black and white. But what I mean by it is
actually something a little more familiar to us. And I'll borrow this actually from colleague of mine, Eddie Cloud, who's a professor at Princeton. But you know, he talks about what he calls white supremacy without all the bluster, and it really just means a way of thinking about it and much more everyday terms. It's one of those terms of art. But if you just take the words and flow them around and we talk about the idea of a commitment to the supremacy of whites instead of white supremacy,
it gets closer to the meaning that I mean. And so that's very near to us, you know, in our history. You know, during my lifetime, for example, I grew up in Mississippi and went to Jackson Public schools in the state's capital, and the schools didn't get desegregated until I was in third grade. Right, I was born in nineteen sixty eight, right, so this is nineteen seventy six before this happens, and that's you know, two decades beyond Brown v.
Board of Education. And it was because you know, the simple idea that the best schools, libraries, parks, the best parts of town with redlining, all of these things, right, were very much driven with this idea that really white lives were worth more than others and the best things in our communities were to be reserved for their use only.
For the best people, the best that's right for the best people.
Yeah, And it wasn't just a you know, I think the thing that is clear, you know, I'm a religious studies scholar by training, but that these things were not just assertive in philosophical argument, but they were grounded in theology, right, They were really grounded in kind of teachings. And so there's not much of a stronger claim you can make than to say that white people were designed by God to be at the top of the social and political pyramid and everyone else is designated below.
That it's the word of God. In that elocution you've written that previous book, White Too Long, about the intersection of race, racism, identity, and Christianity. What led you to this particular book.
Well, thanks, You know, it's been a bit of a journey. You know, I grew up very much in the Southern Baptist Evangelical world in the South, so it's been partially a kind of chronicle of my own thinking and wrestling
with these issues. You know, the first book I wrote with the word white and the title was actually in twenty sixteen called The End of White Christian America, and it was really trying to wrestle with the demographics in the country and the ways that we had moved from being this majority white Christian country to one that was no longer a majority white Christian country. So trying to look at the demographics and how that was setting off I think a lot of reactions in our culture and
our politics. Just to kind of give you the numbers there, you know, recently two thousand and eight, the country was fifty six percent white and Christian, as you put all you know, Protestants, Catholics, non denominational folks all together, a majority white and Christian. By the time Barack Obama gets out office, our first African American president, that numbers dropped
to forty seven and today at numbers forty two percent. Well, the country just in a very short amount of time actually has crossed this milestone from being majority white and Christian to won the so longer majority white and Christian. And then the last book, called White Too Long, was really focused on It was part memoir history, memoir, and also kind of social science and attitudes in the country.
But looking at really my own families history. My family's longer routes go back into Middle Georgia, six generations there, and so trying to tell the story of my own family. I have a family Bible from eighteen fifteen, you know, that was very valued possession in my family. But also found out that through doing some genealogical research on that family that owned that Bible, that they also enslaved people in Middle Georgia. So this Christian identity and enslaving other
people was seen to be completely consistent. And my own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is actually the largest Protestant denomination in the country still today, was founded in eighteen forty five explicitly to make enslaving other people compatible with the practice of Christianity. All right, and so just kind of getting clear of that book was really trying to get it clear of those roots. But I realized that I really need to take the story back even further.
And so this book is trying to really locate where does this come from. What's the kind of near proximate cause to this link between white supremacy and Christianity that really sets the moral compass in many ways in this country. And so I pull it back in this book historically back further. It leads back to fourteen ninety three where this thing called the Doctor of Discovery had emerged and really does again like set the moral compass for Europeans that land on these shores.
That's a useful bit of historiography from you. For a couple of reasons. Columbus Day is going to have been celebrated shortly before we air, and that has become a controversial holiday in the United States. It was historically celebrated as a moment of great discovery, the conjoining of Europe with the North American continent, and a door opening up
to progress and prosperity. What we now know about Christopher Columbus himself and the introduction of slavery through the Columbian expeditions have provided us with a much more complex and troubling picture of enslavement, expropriation, and mythologies built to justify
those things. And I think one of the really useful historical things you do with the book is say, you know, we tend to think about the arrival of African American slaves as the incenting moment around racial mythologies and racial suppression and exploitation of the United States, but in fact it began long before that tell us a little bit about the doctrine of discovery in that context.
Yeah, even that move to thinking about including the enslavement of Africans in the kind of colonial history is fairly new, right. We really got that with the sixty nineteen project, which just emerge over the last five years and not uncontroversially a lot of backlash over that, But you're right, I am arguing that we really need to broaden the aperture even more because by the time sixty nineteen arrives, we have more than a century of European interaction with indigenous
people in this country. I think we often forget that the history goes back that far, and more importantly, what we have is a kind of moral and theological worldview that develops that guides the way that Europeans more broadly
think about people who inhabit these lands. And I think that piece is still very much with us today, rooted in a set of fifteenth century someone arcane papal document that were developed, but they essentially boiled down to this idea that because essentially people were asking, well, what's our moral obligation to these people that we are encountering in these lands, And the theological and moral logic that developed basically came up with this one criteria and the essential
question was are they Christian or not? If these people that they are quote unquote discovering were not Christian, then they could be considered, I mean this is the actual word in the document, they could be considered enemies of Christ. And as enemies of Christ, then they were legitimized in occupying those lands, taking possession of the land, stealing their goods. It actually like spells out in these documents that they
have permission from the Church to do this. And then this one phrase has always really stayed with me from that set of papal documents actually says and not only those things, but that they have permission to reduce their
persons to perpetual slavery and all spelled out. So if you think about the whole Transatlantic slave trade, genocide, dispossession of Native Americans, it's all sort of of a peace with this moral and religious worldview that gets developed, you know, out of the late fourteen hundreds.
And very similar to some of the later codes, you know, the white Men's Burden and secular constructs that were used by the British and other European colonial powers to subjugate countries in Africa and populations in Africa in East Asia, and again the idea that you could put conventional morality to the side because you were dealing with the population of people who by definition were opposed to your own moral code, so it didn't matter what you did to them.
Yeah, and the idea was that, you know, the terms that come up over and over again in these documents and even in more popular construls, not just the legal construls, but are the idea that by giving these people again who are seen to be enemies of Christ or savages or pagans, the words that come up are by giving them Christianity and civilization, like those two were to come up all the time, Christianity and civilization, that these were seen to be such enormous goods were being bestowed upon
these people that it justified everything else. They lost their land, their lives, their goods, their freedom, their sovereignty, all of that was seen to be justified because giving them the superiority of Christianity and the superiority of European civilization was seen to outweigh all of those losses.
I think the other useful thing that you do in analyzing it this way is locate expropriation and racism within the Native American experience, the indigenous peoples of the United States. We have rich historiography around the black experience in the United States, but I think it's less front of mind how the genocide that was visited upon indigenous peoples in the United States and then it preceded this epical slavery period by a meaningful amount of time.
Yeah, that was something I really got clear about just in the process of doing research for the book. You know, like in my home state of Mississippi, you know, we think about these vast farmlands and then kind of you know, still today it's some of the richest farmland in the world, and the Mississippi Delta and that alluvial floodplain kind of
going from Memphis to Vicksburg. But prior to eighteen hundred, those lands were heavily forested swamp land essentially, and now the soil was very rich, but you couldn't get to it. But people realized that that was going to be very rich land. And Europeans basically had two problems. One they were occupied by indigenous people and two they didn't have the labor to clear all that land and then to
turn it into farmland and the defarm it. And they solved it really with violence, by killing off many of the original inhabitants of the land by force and by diseases that were spread, and then with force removal. There was actually, you know, a whole period of the actually got called Indian removal. That was the official policy of the United States in the eighteen thirties. That resulted in what became known as the Trail of Tiers, was should
be called the Trails of Tears. There were multiple waves of force removals where you know, as many as twenty five thirty percent of the folks died on the way, there were kind of forced marches in the dead of winter, in many cases over hundreds of miles that had to happen first in order for African labor enslave labor to be brought in to clear that land and to turn it into farmland. But again, the thing driving the engine
is this idea. It's not that far from many of our device today, but this idea that these lands were intended to be a kind of, you know, divinely ordained promised land for European Christians.
So let's bring it a little closer into the present. In your book, you focus on three case studies, as it were, the lynching of three black circus workers in Duluth, Minnesota in nineteen twenty, the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre which resulted in three hundred deaths in nineteen twenty one, and Emmett Tills murder in nineteen fifty five. What links those three events and why did you group them together in your book?
Well, you know, the truth is, I could have written fifty chapters, one for each state that told very similar histories. I wanted to get some kind of different kinds of states that had different stories, So you know, Mississippi is my home state, and wanted to start there for personal reasons. And really this is the more recent story and until murder, torture and murder of course, was the spark, really meaning talk about it as the spark that ignited the modern
civil rights movement, So thought that was important. It's also
a deep, deep south state. Oklahoma, you know, is essentially its origins are, to put it kind of bluntly, was to be a dumping ground for indigenous refugees that were being pushed off the land all across the southeastern seaboard and forcibly moved there to Oklahoma's has this very peculiar, you know history itself, and then also this history of white racial violence toward African Americans in Tulsa, and then, you know, I didn't want to just pick on southern state.
Oklahoma was a very conservative red state as well. Politically it's I think it may be the only state where every county voted for former President Trump in the last election. So I want to go somewhere a little different culturally, and can't get us further north in Minnesota, so good kind of midwestern state hugs Canada pretty far north, and you know, tell the story there. I think by doing that, I think it helps make it clear, as it became clear to me during the research, this is not really
a Southern story. It's not just a Red state story. This is really an American story. And again, I think you could tell these stories. There's comparable stories in every state in the country. But by telling it through three different lenses, I think the patterns become fairly clear. You see their echoes of the same kind of treatment of indigenous people, the same kind of treatment of African Americans, and these kind of violent outbursts that happen in all three places.
Is the commonality. They're both the combination of violence with myth making and other excuses that justify the use of the violence.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, you know, there's, first of all, this mythology we've been talking about that the US is of you know, divinely ordained promised land, specifically for people of European descent who are Christian, and so that gets the whole thing off the ground and drives it, you know. But then there are these outbursts of violence to protect
that vision and myth making. And then there is you know, in each place there was this process of intentional forgetting of kind of sweeping it all under the rug after these violent events happening, and protecting a kind of myth of innocence that people continue to tell about themselves in each place.
Throughout your book, and specifically towards the end, you talk about paths towards healing, and you focus in on reparations as being a very practical and tangible tool for addressing some of the wrongs of the past. It's a controversial policy. The African American community, the Black community the United States supports it wholeheartedly. Hispanics for the most part, don't support it.
Asian Americans don't support it. White Americans don't support it, and around half or so of the Democratic Party is ambivalent to disapproving of it. And when I'm speaking of reparations for our listeners, it's simply trying to put a dollar amount on the damage that's been visited on these
exppropriated populations. I imagine we will get there soon with Native Americans, but most of the dialogue right now is about the Black community and descendants of armor slaves, the argument being that cutting a check might address some of the economic and social fallout that came from slavery, oppression and expropriation. What do you do, though, Robbie, with the fact that there is such sort of popular mechanical opposition towards using something like reparations as a tool.
You're right about the kind of ambivalence in the general American public about this, you know, I think that it is really linked to a real ignorance of our history. You know. I think that that's the link, is that if you ask about reparations in the abstract, people generally
know there was slavery. There was, But I think people don't really know the links between slavery, reconstruction, tearing down of reconstruction, the erection of Jim Crow, and just you know, the systematic effort to disenfranchise African Americans even after the abolition of slavery. And I think when you get clearer about that history, the question of reparations becomes less controversial, and I think the resistance to is less. So I really think we're just at the very beginning of a
process of truth telling around this history. And in fact, that's why we're seeing so much in the political battles they're over history. What's going to be taught to our kids in school. What isn't, what's appropriate, what's not, what's
the real American story, what's not? Like all these kinds of questions, it's because there is this moment of reckoning happening, and that if we fully reckon, I think with the realities of that history, you know, the questions of reparations, repair, repairing the damage, put in theological terms, repentance, those kind of questions become I think, less abstract when you are more grunted in the history. So I think this is
going to be an ongoing conversation. But as I see it, you know, if you think about a process of confession and truth telling that leads to repentance and repair, we are only at the very beginning of the confession and truth telling part of that process. And so I think as that goes on, that conversation will will develop, and I think it will need to include, you know, not just African Americans, but indigenous people. It'll need to include you know, we also had like a whole history of
Asian American prejudice. I mean, we had an act that was just explicitly called in the nineteen twenties the Chinese Exclusion Act for goodness sake, so you know, we'll need to reckon, I think, with all of that history going forward. But the only other thing I'd say to this is that I think that sometimes people are thinking about this at a very high abstract like national level, but where I've seen things on the ground kind of working is
actually at the local level. Right. So a place like Evanston, Illinois, had the history of redlining, and they've actually tried to set up a fund that allows for anyone who could show that they were denied alone in Evanston on basis of race, can then apply now for help with it down payment, help with house payments as a way that
the city is trying to reckon with that history. So all of that to say, I think the tighter it's connected to kind of local histories, I think that also helps as well, because then there is a coherent story that people are understanding we're doing this because of these concrete actions in the past.
Robbie, on that note, I want to take a quick break so we can hear from a sponsor, and then we'll come right back. We're back with Robbie Jones, author of The Hidden Roots of White supremacy. We were just talking about reparations and its challenges, So let's talk a little bit more about money. You've criticized James Carville, Bill Clinton's well known advisor, for recommending the politicians and policymakers emphasized class over race. Carvill's famous formulation was, it's the
economy stupid. And I think your counter argument is, no, it's white supremacy stupid, and it's white racism stupid. And that if we're going to solve some of the divisions we're dealing with now that have come out of the history you and I were discussing earlier in the show, you have to prioritize racism and the mythology surrounding white supremacy to deal with that.
Right, Well, you know, is certainly the case that these two things are inter woven in our history. And I don't want to overstate the point. You're right about my criticism of that. I think it does not fully explain the moment we're in, our deeper history, the deeper divides that we're dealing with now. It may have worked as a short term political slogan, but if we're really going to understand for the long term, the train has shifted. We actually did some kind of testing of this and
some public opinion survey work. You know, my day job, I wear the present founder of Public Religion Research Institute. We do a lot of public opinion polling, and we partnered with the Atlantic in twenty sixteen and actually tested this out, this idea. So, what's driving the bigger partisan divisions and what was driving specifically support for Donald Trump
in twenty sixteen. Was it a kind of economic resentment argument or was it more of a cultural resentment argument around immigrants and whites being discriminated against and those kinds of things. And we basically found no surprise, it's both. So when we put it in a kind of fancy regression model and held a bunch of stuff constant, both of these things turned out to be independent predictors of
support for Trump. But the cultural factors, this kind of anti immigrant sentiment, resentment against African Americans, denials of systemic racism, those things were three times as powerful as the economic resentment arguments for support for Trump.
As a motivating force for a vote. Yeah.
So if you think about this as a recipe, it's three parts kind of racial resentment and one part kind of economic resentment that was kind of driving our grievances that we're driving support.
So your lesson from that is your policy prescriptions and your analysis should follow a similar recipe.
Yeah. Yeah, I think we're going to get to the root of the problem and not just finesse it. We're really going to have to deal with this head on. And I think the other thing that's changed is the demographics of the country since the nineteen nineties. This is the first generation that has really been had to deal with the fact that white Christians country are no longer a supermajority. Can't just depend on overwhelming with numbers, right,
the numbers just aren't there. And so the question of are we a pluralistic democracy when even when the outcomes may not go our way because we don't have the numbers anymore, do we still support democracy? Do we still support fair and open election? Those are I think questions that are very present for us today in a way that they weren't. And that's why I think race and ethnicity and these big debates over you know, we're debating less about policy today, I think, or I would argue,
than we are about identity. You know, who gets to be an American? Who is America for? Who is this country for? And whose belongs and who doesn't. These are the bigger dividing lines today, and they're all wrapped up with these kind of ethno religious claims.
Also, you know, informed in that conversation often by ethnic groups whose ancestors experienced discrimination themselves, whether it was the Jews or the Irish or the Italians, who at a distant but not so distant point in the past had to deal with the very same discrimination that they support now. And these random definitions of what does it mean to
be an American? Let's talk about symbols to that. That's another part of your work that I think is powerful and important in the conversation we're having, especially given all the discussion of what to do with monuments to the Confederacy and various statuary and monuments that are sprinkled around the country that do enshrine a certain racial hierarchy and
an oppressive racial order. In the book I mentioned earlier, White Too Long, which came out in twenty twenty, I believe you mentioned how some Southern churches had stained glass windows that had images of Confederate generals. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson embedded into the glass. And that was powerful to me because again it was this tangible and visible touchstone for what you've been addressing throughout your career, which is this intermingling of Christianity, racism, and brute force.
How do you think about how important this kind of symbols and iconography and statuary monuments are in in this greater problem of white supremacy and racism.
Oh thanks for that. No, I think they're hugely important. We could sort of argue using words and books and
those kinds of things. But one of the things that after the Civil War, this group called the United Daughters of the Confederacy saw very clearly was that one way to educate the next generation and to stake their claim on their spin on history was to create these monuments and to put them in very public spaces a courthouse lawn, so that when people were going in to have a case adjudicated, there was a kind of statement on the
lawn about whose law who was in charge? Essentially, you know still and they were Confederate soldiers often and I mean you know here in Virginia near where I live,
still there is in Orange Virginia. There's Madison's grave, there's the courthouse, and there's a huge Confederate monument right on the lot of the courthouse, and engraved in there it says they died for the right all right ght you know, for the right there and this kind of declaration, the massive statute Jefferson Davis in Richmond on Monument Avenue in Richmond that has now been torn down, but was there, and it had this big column probably fifty feet high,
with a gold statue of a woman with her finger pointed at the heavens, and under it in Latin it said God will vindicate right the Confederacy. So like these were things that stood for one hundred years, right, that citizens had to drive by every day and kind of educated them. So I think these symbols are hugely important.
This is all very recent history, and I think certainly those wanting to kind of uphold the law's cause, you know, they had a textbook program, but they also had this monument program that they saw is really influential in shaping public memory, right, And if that's the history we're telling, it shapes how we kind of deal with others in the present.
So I assume you think it's a healthy process that some of these minings were being taken down or people are either looking at them in contacts or getting rid of them.
You know, I do. You know, I'd be straightforward about it.
You know.
The one thing that changed my mind. So I grew up in Mississippi. I mentioned, and my high school was the Our mascot was the Rebels, like we were following the University of Mississippi. We had a Confederate colonel as the mascot, you know, kind of walk around on the football field. The band played Dixie when the football team scored a touchdown, and there was a cheerleader that ran up and down the sideline with a big Confederate battle flag.
And it was a public school in Jackson. So I come very much out of this world and didn't understand like I was one of the people who thought about it as it's our heritage, that's what that's about. Right. People in my family fought on the side of the Confederacy in Georgia, and so that's part of my family's history. But what I realized is that I think the change that really helped me is realized is that the vast majority of the Confederate monuments that went up did not
go up during the Civil War. They did not go up even in the years following the Civil War. Most of them went up in the nineteen twenties and in the nineteen fifties. And once you kind of realize that, you're like, oh, well, what's that about. Well, it was the re establishment of Jim Crow and the response to Brown b Board of Education desegregating public schools that just led to this flowering of this kind of honoring of the Confederacy and this kind of revival of this lost cause mythology.
Also, you know, when you mentioned earlier that the football team was called the rebels, I guess it would be too long a term to put on the football helmet to call them the domestic terrorists. But you know, a language that we use to describe what the Confederate Army d You know, they were insurrectionists, they took up arms.
They meet every classic definition of domestic terrorism. But they've been shrouded in this sort of romantic gone with the wind pageantry of a noble order that was subjugated by the grinding industrial power of the Yankees.
Yeah, and you know, the word that I think flew around so much too, was honorable, like that was the term right. There was kind of this sense of honor. They served with honor right, and you see that on all the monuments they died for the right. All that stuff is about valorizing that worldview. Again, that was really about defending their right to own other human beings on the basis of race. Right. And so it's massive dissonance
to try to hold those two things. You know that that's an honorable and by the way way to live.
Let's also talk, since we're moving through these institutions, how this has informed the architecture of the law. There's a million different examples we could try to dig into to explore that in a kind of tidy podcasting way, and I don't want to reduce it to just raw simplicity. But one of the recent Supreme Court rulings, Halen versus Raquin, involved a decision around whether or not Native American adoptees
children should be prioritized for Native American families. In other words, if Native American families are adopting kids, they have the first right to get in and try to have those children in their home. And there was a challenge of that law, saying it shouldn't exist, and the Supreme Court, in a seven to two decision said no, the law should exist. It serves a good social purpose. But you probably can see where I'm going to go with this.
I was very interest in Samuel Alito's descent, in which he described the reason for his dissent as essentially this arbitrary way of giving one group of people a preferential ethnic status that they didn't necessarily deserve. And then in I think during oral arguments, he also mentioned that besides, when the Europeans came to the United States, this was a very warlike culture, and the Europeans essentially did a great service in suppressing these savages, and they weren't really
a community. They lived on very different sides of the country, and on and on. And it was very revealing because I think Alito, in a number of his judicial decisions, cherry picks history, rewrites history, and then uses it to define the law and his view of the law. And in the context of the law being such an important set of swim lanes around how we can live civilly together, the vestiges of white racism aren't far from that either, are they now that's right.
It also is just shockingly ignorant of the history, particularly between the US government and indigenous peace people this country. To sort of argue that they shouldn't get special treatment flies in the face of the way that the United States has dealt with indigenous people from the beginning, that is, as sovereign nations, right, and then later as dependent peoples
inside the United States. But nonetheless it's always been absolutely they get special treatment because of their special historical status and relationship with the US. So to even complain that that's a thing, I think is shockingly ignorant of the history here. Gorsich's opinion on this case is interesting to me. He's staunchly pro indigenous sovereignty and really understands this connection here. But you know, again, if we just kind of see the history where they.
Don't want to stop you on that for one minute, you know, one of the reasons that Gorstch understands it is because it's part of his lived experience. Yeah, you know, he grew up around some of this, he had direct contact with it. That kind of humility and recollection of one's own lived experience as opposed to your academic or legal theories could inform more of what the court does.
And I think that it is an argument as well for the thesis of your book that only by reckoning with our history and trying to live in that experience through history, can we fully understand what the best policies are or the best laws.
I think that's exactly right, you know, and it's refreshing to see it not just fall completely along ideological lines here that you've got actually corpse that taking in a very different tact than Aledo on indigenous cases here. But the reason for that law in the first place is because there was an over attempt really in kind of the United States posture toward indigenous tribes developed over time.
You know, it was first put people on reservations, but it was then this kind of process though, destroy their culture, destroy family units, send children off to boarding schools. Many children were stripped of their kind of tribal identity and putting boarding schools where their hair was cut, they're putting European clothes, beaten if they spoke their native languages, et cetera.
And so those adoption laws were actually passed in the wake of that kind of cultural genocide that had been meted out and trying to protect the integrity of Indigenous families. And so again, if you don't know that history, you could try to make some abstract arguments about they got to be treated the same as everybody else, but that's clearly not the case, either from a legal and kind of treaty obligation standpoint or from the kind of cultural history.
And lastly, before we take another break in this tour we're taking through American institutions and racism, let's talk about the corporate world and businesses. We're in the middle of the woke backlash against corporate leaders trying to take a more ecumenical and open minded approach to how to recruit and elevate members of their own workforces. The role companies
and businesses play in society. How much do you think that the business and corporate life in the United States has also been both informed and defined by white racism.
Well, you know, clearly heavily structured. You know, if we go back to the middle the twentieth century, and not that far back, if you were the head of a fortune five hundred company, chances are you were white, you were male, you were Christian and probably Protestant, not Catholic or Jewish. You know, the rotary clubs were filled with white Anglo Saxon Protestants. Country clubs, for example, where a lot of business deals get cut right on the golf
courses and mingling at the club after. You know, eighteen Holes explicitly excluded African Americans, but also Jews and Catholics from those institutions. So even at a cultural level, you know, it's been a deep, deep part of the structure of corporate America. But I do think what we have seen is corporations really leaning in to pluralism, to diversity. But you know, they're leaning in because they read the demographics
of the country. So it's part the right thing to do, but it's also a very pragmatic thing to do if they really want to appeal to the rising you know workforce. You know, we're still another decade or so away from the country being majority non white, even though we've already passed a point where country no longer majority white and Christian, but that's on the horizon. And if you're looking at
high schools today is a majority non white. So corporations looking at their next generation of you know, workforce and markets Frankly, they've really got to take this into account. And I think what we're seeing though, is a backlash against that movement again from this group, mostly white and Christian folks who are used to being, you know, at the center.
Of all of this, and it mirrors the political backlash, the electoral backlash.
Yep, that's right, Robbie.
I want to take another break and then we'll come right back up and pick this conversation up again. I'm back with Robbie Jones, historian and political analyst. We've been talking about the deep roots of racism in American life. So let's look ahead, Robbie. Racism and racial violence are animating forces right now in American life. I think it's very stark. I think people are I'm going to say they're surprised to see it, though I don't think they
should be. But I think that the Trump era has pulled the band aid back on some of the myths we've told ourselves about racial progress and tolerance. How do you see this playing out as you look ahead over the next few years. The deep roots of white supremacy that you've analyzed so lushly, and then just the realities of how it exists in our daily life, which we've just been talking about.
Well, you know, I do think it's important to just point to the context. Again. We did have, you know, the confluence of the election of our first African American president, and I think importantly his re election as well, because I think many folks can conserve the white Christians maya thought that his election was something of a fluke, but then like when he was re elected in twenty twelve, I think that was a sign that something had clearly
shifted in the culture. So we have that event, and then it does happen at the same time that we move from being majority white Christian country that wants no
longer majority white Christian country. So I think that's a kind of perfect storm in many ways to kind of set off a cultural backlash, a big symbolic figure like Barack Obama, a coupled demographic change at the same time, you know, and then at the local level, like seeing things like Spanish language billboards and Spanish language radio stations and going to the grocery store and seeing a whole ethnic food rial that wasn't there ten years ago, Like
there are all these kind of signs that the country is really shifting, and I think that that has like set off this kind of context. And that's the stage actually that Donald Trump walked onto, right. He didn't create those dynamics, but he walked onto that stage. You know, he had props that were pretty well set for him, a set that was constructed, but he skillfully was able to use that. I think particularly the make America Great Again slogan. You know, I've argued that the most important
word in that is the last one. It's the again. It's the nostalgia for taking the country back right to a time really when it was a kind of white Christian country. And so I think I look forward, I do still feel like this is one of the biggest dividing lines, kind of two very different and diametrically opposed visions of the country. Who the country's for, who belongs
those big questions. Is the country a divinely ordained promised land for European Christians or is the country a pluralistic democracy where everybody, regardless of race or ethnicity or religion, stands on equal footing before the constitution. And these are
big questions we've never fully answered in this country. And that's why we're still here because we really never fully answered that question, and because the country is changing, it's really forcing the conversation out into the open in a way that I think it's tried to be finessed in the past, but we're really going to have to wrestle with this. So looking ahead, I do think the next year could be pretty challenging because we're going to have
the big partisan machines revved up. And today our two parties are increasingly divided along ethno religious lines. The Republican Party self identified Republicans today are seventy percent white and Christian in a country again this forty two percent white and Christian. The Democratic Party self identified Democrats are only twenty five percent white and Christians. So you have this kind of race religion party all kind of pulling in the same direction. And we know from survey work that
the pr I did with Brookings last year. You know, it's about thirty percent of the country that believes that former image that the country has a divinely ordained promised land for European Christians. About three and ten Americans believe that, but it's a majority of Republicans that believe that right, And so that's a battle line that's going to be fought out here with all of the resources that the
party apparatus has over the next thing. The other thing we know is that folks who believe that view of America as a kind of divinely ordained promised land are four times as likely to support political violence to defend it. And so I think that's going to be a real
challenge as we look ahead this year. The longer view, I'm more hopeful, and I think if we stay off of the kind of big national frame and we look at what's happening in local communities, like the National Cathedral changing its windows, like what's happening in the Delta with retelling the story of them at til what's happening in Duluth,
what's happening in Tulsa, commemorating the Tulsa Race massacre. These things on the local level, the tearing down of Confederate monuments in Richmond do tell me that the win and is kind of blowing toward pluralism and democracy. So I think the longer term outlook for me is I'm more hopeful about it. I'm pretty concerned about the next twelve to fifteen months.
When you were talking about Trump earlier, you mentioned make America Great Again as one of his pre eminent slogans, which it was, but let's not forget that before he ran for president in twenty sixteen, he went to school as a birther and that's voting Birtherism avidly to undermine Barack Obama, Barack Obama's legitimacy as a president, Barack Obama's
legitimacy as an American as a human being. Any sort of road tested I think during that period, the themes, the emotions, the talking points that he then walked down to the national stage in twenty sixteen and then wedded all of that to this Carnia act he had engaged in for previous decades as a casino owner.
Yeah, it's notable with Obama, he went after him both on race and religion. Yeah, it wasn't just about not being ableable to run for president not being born in the country, but it was about being a Muslim right as well. So it was kind of this two pronged attack that he was kind of testing out there.
And you know, one of the other realities of Donald Trump is when asked about the various white national groups who have been either on the periphery of his candidacy and his administration or his public persona and his speechmaking. He's never really disavowed them. He was given a chance with David Duke at one point to disavow David Duke, the former leader of the KKK, and Trump just couldn't
bring himself to do it. And in more recent iterations both with the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers, and we could probably go down a whole long road on Donald Trump and racism. I'm going to avoid that for the efficiency of this conversation. But one of the things I thought about in that is that, you know, the KKK is a certain kind of white supremacist organization. They're scary, they're dark. They actually in the past were actively involved in lynchings and then became in the post lynching era.
I don't know what you would call them, a social organization for people to air their grievances, but they weren't
openly violent. The Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers were all around the January sixth insurrection, and I think some of their former members stated that they thought it would incent to civil war, that they thought it was time to actually use violence overturn the election results, and of course, because it was this particular group saying it, it was to overturn election results in the interests of preserving white power.
Do you see change organizationally as well in recent years or decades in terms of how white supremacy is getting both organized and then weaponized.
You know, I do you know there's a famously Atwater quote where he says, you know, you can't use the N word anymore to motivate voters, but you can talk about bussing, right, So you kind of find these euphemisms
for talking about it. There's certainly still some of that that goes on, but I think it's becoming more and more direct, talking about immigrants as rapists and criminals, straightforwardly demonizing kind of whole people groups, and even when they're clearly white supremacist groups, saying things like they're fine people on both sides.
Right at Charlesville, Yeah, Trump who also said, you know, when we ranted about immigrants at their rapists, their murderers, but some of them are nice people.
Yeah. Right. But there's not only not a disavowal by one candidate, but there's not a disavowal by the party. I think that is really significant, right that he was never punished inside the party.
For for him ultimately, And I think.
That's something that's new. It's sort of giving that permission for as long as the candidate is winning and has public supports polling well, to not have that be a disqualifying thing to happen over and over again, not just once, but multiple times. It became pretty clear. So I think that's something fairly new in our recent history and the kind of politics of white grievance. I think coming to the fore and not really being masked or using euphemisms,
but just straightforward to out there. I think it's something you new that we're contending with.
One of the things you've taught me through your writing that was really helpful to me is I used to be more mystified by this collision between Christian values and racism. It's overtly hypocritical. I grew up a Catholic. I'm a laxed Catholic. I don't practice any religion, but I believe deeply in Christian tenets, love and forgiveness as a useful philosophic approach to our fellow human beings. And I believe that if you then embrace Christianity and Christian values, it
should preclude racism and certainly should preclude violence. And I think what your work has taught me is actually that the racism and the violence are part of the mix, that they were never a separate thing, That it's not a thing to be denied, it's actually a thing to be embraced. Because Southern white Christianity was built on the back of racial dominance, that raises another question for me
is what's the way out? These are very deep seated things that the political process is and solving it's actually bringing to a boiling point. You mentioned earlier that corporations are really have been adroit in trying to address it. But corporations and businesses and families can often move more quickly than political institutions. And the battle we're having right now is over our political institutions, because they will shape our laws and our regulations and our I think public safety.
And so what's the way out of that mess?
Well? I don't have a grand ten point plan. If I did, you know, everyone should be suspicious of it anyway. But what I have seen though, is and I learned this, I think just from being on the ground, I have some hope in what local communities are doing. I mean in Mississippi, right, these were not wealthy people with postgraduate degrees. I mean in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi is fairly poor, rural county.
And yet the descendants of sharecroppers and enslaved people and the descendants of enslavers decided to get together and tell the truth about what had happened in Mattel, try to tell more truthful accounting of how they got to where they were in they and you know, that little effort that began with a handful of people in a room has blossomed into just last month, a new national monument that's going to be the Emmett Till and made Me
Till Mobile National Monument that President Biden just signed into law. Right, So that's a pretty big trajectory from people in a room in a rural county in Mississippi where you know, racial political tensions are really high, but yet found a way to kind of hold enough people together to kind of move forward there. I think similar story even in
Tulsa and Duluth. They're messy stories, but there are stories of movement and progress and truth telling that leads, I think to the kind of repair and healing that we're needing in the country. I think, in fact, when we're reading the backlash, reading of the resistance is in fact a backlash to that movement in a more positive direction and a more pluralistic, democratic direction. But there is a kind of backlash that we're experiencing now, so you know,
look ahead again. I think that's where I find I think some hope is that these local efforts aren't just following the headlines. Unusual, unexpected things are happening, you know, when people who are neighbors who are actually trying to
get to know each other. And I think that's true for all of us, right, So, I think as these things get built at the local level, one of the things that did in all of these places is it put people in the room together that wouldn't normally be in the room together, and they tried to kind of wrestle it out and it changed everyone in the process.
The show is about learning moments, even though we're talking about the roots of vast and intractable, seemingly intractable problems. I wanted to ask you, what did you learn from working on your book that you didn't know prior to engaging with that work.
Yeah. Well, the book started actually without including indigenous history, and it actually became a very central part of the book. But it was along the way that I realized, oh, wait a minute, I really not going to understand what happened to m until and let's say, understand what happened to the Choctaw before it's slaved Africans entered this. I'm not going to understand what happened at the Tulsa Race
massacre without understanding what happened to the Osage. We're gonna have a whole movie about that coming out, Killers of the Flower Moon very soon. I can't understand really what happened in lynching these three African American men without understanding the mass execution of thirty eight Dakoda men and the eighteen hundreds, and so I think it's like seeing those stories together was what I think was really the biggest learning moment for me, because you know what little Indigenous
history I knew, and it was very little. It had got very little for my formal education. And that's saying someone for someone of the PhD in American religion that I nonetheless got very little about Indigenous people. So I think that was one of the biggest things, is seeing that come through and just seeing those interconnections and helping to see a more holistic story about how it got to be who we are and where we are.
Robbie, I could continue on and on with you, but we've unfortunately we've run out of time, and I really appreciate you coming on today.
Thank you, knows I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Robbie Jones is the author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the president and founder of the Public Religious Research Institute. He also has a newsletter you can subscribe to Robert P. Jones dot substack dot com Here at crash Course, we believe the collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising,
and always instructive. In today's Crash Course, I learned that Christianity and racism, which I often thought of as inherently being an opposition, are perhaps more often than not adjacent to one another. What did you learn? We'd love to hear from you. You can tweet at the Bloomberg Opinion handle at Opinion or me at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now, and please leave us
a review. It helps more people find the show. This episode was produced by the indispensable anam Azarakas, Moses ondem and me. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and we had editing help from Sagebauman, Jeff Grocot, Mike Nitze and Christine Danden Bilart. Blake Maples says, our sound engineering and our original theme song was composed by Luis Garra. I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with another Crash Court