The Reckoning: America’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal by Mary L. Trump

Author:Mary L. Trump [Trump, Mary L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838954406
Google: qh8ZEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2021-08-18T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

We Hold These Truths

Despite the centuries-long project to prove otherwise, and as much as many of us still believe otherwise, there is no truth to the myth of white superiority. That fact, unfortunately, is irrelevant in the context of the power inherent in the racial hierarchy white people have built. White supremacy is an increasingly powerful construct that spins a narrative designed to confer power on whites and deny it to Blacks. It teaches whites across generations that their race confers upon them significant advantage and prestige. The theories upon which these beliefs are based are utter nonsense. The advantages, however, are quite real.

Given that white supremacy seemingly runs through every strand of fabric from which this country has been woven, it’s understandable that one might conclude that it is a uniquely American phenomenon. It was brought to the Northeast coast by the Puritans, however, along with their stringent brand of Reformation Protestantism known as Calvinism. In search of freedom to worship, for themselves if not for anyone else, the original settlers of what would eventually be called New England embraced concepts of whiteness, white superiority, and Protestantism as fiercely as they embraced Calvin’s theology.

While the Reformation in general represented a turning away from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and all the advances in science, intellectual exploration, and art they represented—anything that was not aligned with biblical teachings—John Calvin’s insistence upon the totality of this rejection and the righteousness of his own cause bordered on, or crossed into, the fanatical. (He once claimed that proponents of the heliocentric model of the universe exhibited “monstrousness” and that “the devil possesses them,” simply because they thought the Earth moved through space—which it does.)

Calvin’s doctrine of predestination posited that only a select few have been chosen by God for salvation, and everybody else, regardless of the quality of the mortal lives they lead, is condemned to eternal damnation. The belief that good works have no impact on the disposition of one’s soul might have influenced the development of the character of the future American. It also might explain, at least in part, the enduring myth of rugged individualism that continues to plague us. When people searched for clues to their divine fate, the conclusion was drawn (probably by people of means) that material wealth was the most obvious sign of God’s mercy. Not much about this assumption had changed by the time Fred Trump began to espouse Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking” in the 1950s, and not much has changed since then.

By contrast, poverty marked you out as one of the damned. It was through this lens that slavery came to be seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy of Black inferiority. Enslavement was the destiny of the enslaved and the clearest sign that Blacks were not deserving of God’s grace. In this way slavery and the genocide of Native Americans could both be accepted and, as a result, Black labor could be believed to have no value, existing only as something to be taken with impunity by their white “owners.

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