“Where are we?” It’s a simple question, one might assume. The answer could be the name of a city or neighborhood, or a set of coordinates copied from an app: N 36° 7' 46.75'', W 86° 50' 19.256''. The question becomes much more complicated when you add, “And how did we get here? And who are ‘we’?”
Robert Jones has done a lot of good work with those questions. In his most recent book, once again dealing with the legacy of white supremacy in the United States, he returns to the fateful year when a little-known church doctrine emerged that shaped the way five centuries of European Christians would understand the “discovered” world and the people who populated it.
Jones shows how the enslavement of Africans was not America’s original sin but, rather, the continuation of acts of genocide and dispossession flowing from the first European contact with Native Americans. These deeds were justified by people who embraced the 15th century Doctrine of Discovery: the belief that God had designated all territory not inhabited or controlled by Christians as their new promised land. This reframing of American origins explains how the founders of the United States could build the philosophical framework for a democratic society on a foundation of mass racial violence—and why this paradox survives today in the form of white Christian nationalism.
Jones takes a close look at particular places and how “we” have arrived, encountered each other, and emerged from there. He shows his readers the connections between Emmett Till and the Spanish conquistador Hernando De Soto in the Mississippi Delta, in what is known as Tallahatchie County; between the lynching of three Black circus workers in Duluth and the mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota men in Mankato, and between the murder of 300 African Americans during the burning of Black Wall Street in Tulsa and the Trail of Tears. In all three places, the removal of Indigenous populations in the 19th century was followed by murders of Black citizens in the 20th. In each place, through stories of people navigating these complexities of “we” and “here,” Jones illuminates the possibility of a new American future in which the promise of a pluralistic democracy is finally fulfilled, by us.
This spring, I would like to read this book with a group of Nashville neighbors and colleagues, and I imagine a 5-week or 5-session format, following the major sections of the book. Please let me know if you’d like to join the group, and please forward this post to anyone you think might be interested in participating.
