| At the foundation of the United States rests, just below the surface, a story of conquest and genocide of indigenous peoples in Central and North America. The actions of Christopher Columbus and the earliest colonists in North America were undergirded by a view of the world, in which the supremacy of those of European descent was both unspoken and assumed. The presumptions about the nature of persons and groups outside the bounds of Europe were instrumental in the origination of the United States and its practices of slavery, segregation, lynching, and military incursions. What originated as a myth of Anglo-Saxon purity, taking both the English culture and Germanic tribalism, became the concept of whiteness in the United States. Whiteness or white supremacy, though often reconfigured, has been the central tenet of American society since its founding. First used to establish superiority over the native peoples already occupying the land, it was soon expanded to establish the inferiority African Slaves, immigrants, persons of the Jewish faith, Muslims, and sexual minorities. The roots of the conception of whiteness will be traced to show the degree to which race, religion, and cultural pride, arising first in Europe before being reformed in the United States, ensured a racial caste system that relegated oppressed communities to permanent and irrevocable second-class status within the nation. This project will draw to a close by showing the degree to which the earliest presumptions about racial superiority and inferiority remain at the center of the contemporary conservative movement within the United States and its efforts to culturally return the country to a previous era in which racial lines of demarcation were infallible. |
