The superstructure of racism has long outlived the social structure of slavery
that generated it. The following passage from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With
the Wind, written in the 1930s, shows racism alive and well in that decade.
The narrator is interpreting Reconstruction:
The former field hands found themselves suddenly elevated to
the seats of the mighty. There they conducted themselves as
creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to
do. Like monkeys or small children turned loose among
treasured objects whose value is beyond their comprehension,
they ran wild—either from perverse pleasure in destruction or
simply because of their ignorance.^27White supremacy permeates Mitchell’s romantic bestseller. Yet in 1988, when
the American Library Association asked library patrons to name the best book
in the library, Gone With the Wind won an actual majority against all other
books ever published!^28
The very essence of what we have inherited from slavery is the idea that it
is appropriate, even “natural,” for whites to be on top, blacks on the bottom. In
its core our culture tells us—tells all of us, including African Americans—that
Europe’s domination of the world came about because Europeans were
smarter. In their core, many whites and some people of color believe this.
White supremacy is not only a residue of slavery, to be sure. Developments in
American history since slavery ended have maintained it. Nine of the eighteen
textbooks do list racism (or racial discrimination, race prejudice, etc.) in
their indexes, but in several, the word never appears in the text. Racism is
merely the indexer’s handle for paragraphs on slavery, segregation, and the
like. Only one book, Pathways to the Present, defines the term.^29
Worse yet, only three textbooks discuss what might have caused racism (or
racial prejudice, etc.). The closest any of the textbooks comes to explaining the
connection between slavery and racism is this single sentence from The
American Pageant, after telling how slave owners “increasingly lived in a
state of imagined siege”: “Their fears bolstered an intoxicating theory of
biological racial superiority... .” The American Tradition includes a similar
but much vaguer sentence: “In defense of their ‘peculiar institution,’
southerners became more and more determined to maintain their own way of
life,” but such a statement hardly suffices to show today’s students the origin of