American History of White Supremacy and American Exceptionalism

Studying American History and its underlying beliefs and prejudices it seems since the get go of the American Revolution at the very least White Supremacy lay like a sickness rising to the forefront and then as a disease subsiding into a form of remission or dormancy or to be felt like a mild low level fever which at any moment bursts open into the full blown disease once again.

Americans in general have still not faced their own troubling history brutal oppressive unforgiving nature of racism and White Supremacy . So how can the American Psyche be healed if the people of America especially White Americans are living in various forms and variations of denial and delusional thinking.

Having supposedly been given equal rights at the end of the civil war only to see these rights torn away by legislation mainly at the state level and torn away by force and intimidation and the phony politics of empty rhetoric and false promises .The white liberals claim to care about Black Lives until there is a choice to be made more money for the poor and minorities or more money for war in the end War wins as does the system of incarceration because "war" and " Prisons For Profits " are more profitable than Doing The Right Thing . There is little profit as it were in actual Justice. The American Justice system itself is unjust and a sham and a lie . But the US government and the Press claim the USA a Just and equitable society when in fact it is a racist class based society in which the entire system operates in order to benefit the elites and the oligarchy .

And yet even now after all that has happened since the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam war and the anti-war movement we are told we must accept the establishments accepted Myths and shibboleths regarding the history of America and even the current militarized nation and empire of the United States as if America stood outside history and beyond the judgement let alone examination by those sceptical about those myths .

After the fall of the Soviet Union the Neocons and Neo-liberals were exuberant in their belief that American hegemony around the globe was now assured and therefore putting an end to history as we know it of conflicting interests since the only important interests were those of the American Empire.
This has not been the case the USA since 9/11 has been involved in Perpetual War.

Now reading the book :

- This Vast Southern Empire : Slaveholders At The Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp , Pub. 2016.
( about the control that Slave States and the pro-slavery politicians and White Supremacists had over American Foreign Policy prior the Civil War and beyond )
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One of the books I just read included a great breakdown and myth shattering book about the Mexican American War

- A Wicked War : Polk,Clay, Lincoln, And the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico by Amy S. Greenberg , pub. 2012.

This book was enlightening and yet disturbing since it exposes how the USA without any justification invaded Mexico in order to obtain more property which it did : Texas, New Mexico, California etc. initially in order to add more property and states controlled by the pro-slave faction . During this war US volunteers acted more as terrorists than a legitimate army as they committed numerous atrocities against the Mexican people - but as we see in that war non-Americans are not seen as human but as Subhuman .

 Meanwhile Americans in general are told Mexico started the war which is a lie but that 's most of American history and its present a Big nasty corrupt lie . But the American people in general don't care as long as they feel safe and are prosperous.

This is also a timely book for 2020 as the USA does all it can to provoke a war with Iran as they did with Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan or even as the US sponsors destabilizing uprisings, the use of draconian sanctions and COUPS as in Venezuela, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua , Brazil , El Salvador etc.

It would appear that the USA assassinated General Soleimani of Iran in order to provoke a war with Iran. The killing was a violation of International Law but the USA has abandoned International Law as of 9/11 and refuses to turn back. Just recall that President Obama also bombed weddings, funerals , family reunions and even meeting of local leaders who were not involved in the fighting . As in Mexico in Ira the troops raped and plundered and brutalized and murdered civilians without a second thought which is just what the propagandists told them to do since the propagandists including the American and the Western Media insist on proclaiming all Iraqis ( Iranians, Afghans, Libyans, Syrians, Yemeni , Palestinians , Lebanese are all subhuman terrorists.

To further understand the American psyche I have read a number of other books over the last 35 years or so.
But here are some of the most recent dealing with racism, white Supremacy, ultra-Nationalism , slavery, the US Civil War and how the South managed to turn things around and in the end the White Supremacist and the Confederates won by creating the Color codes, Jim Crow, the Prison Labor Farms, segregation and an Apartheid system to keep black people form exercising their rights to vote or their right to free speech or the right to travel , or to work etc.

- The Myth of the Lost Cause : Why The South Fought The Civil War and Why The North Won by Edward H. Bonekemper III, Pub. 2015.

- The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History by Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan , Pub. 2000 .

- Dixie's Daughters : The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture , By Karen L. Cox ,
pub. 2003.

- Baptized In Blood : The Religion of the Lost cause 1865-1920 by Charles Reagan Wilson , pub. 1980.

- The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader : The " Great Truth " about the " Lost Cause " edited by James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta , pub. 2010.

- The Second Founding : How The Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution by Eric Foner , pub. 2019.

- Stony The Road : Reconstruction, White Supremacy , and The Rise of Jim Crow , by Henry Louis Gates, JR. , pub. 2019.

To further understand how the Southern States managed to change the whole narrative of the Civil War and beyond we need to understand the myth of the lost cause which suggest firstly that the Civil war was about state's rights and not about slavery . But this was a lie since the leaders of the Confederacy wrote a constitution which gave more power to the central government than to the states . The South wanted the Northern states to help protect the institution of slavery and white supremacy and to allow for a further expansion into the newly settled or conquered areas but the North rejected this and it was the South which then attacked the North.

The South promoted the notion that Black people as African Americans were subhuman and unable to govern themselves which was also a lie but they further demonize Black men as being super-predators whose daily thought was that they wanted to rape white women . The Rape Myth was really a bit of projection since Whites in the age of slavery pre-Civil War could rape any black woman they wanted to and now after the war they lost that privilege though soon enough they would regain absolute power over the freed slaves and this has changed little since even Hillary Clinton and other were once again calling up this Myth calling black men Super-Predators in the 1990s to justify Mass Incarceration which has helped destroy whole Families and neighborhoods by making and labeling millions of Black men felons and as Felons they lose the right to votes and most of their civil rights such as a right to welfare, food stamps, education, housing to participate in politics or even to associate with their loved ones . .

After the Civil War the Southern states just a few years later were passing laws to restrict the voting rights of the freed slaves and restricting their movements through various measures and passing laws so Blacks unlike whites had to show Their Papers to any white person who asked and of course there was the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings by KKK or by mobs - so began a form of incarceration which led to giant prison farms housing over 90% blacks - which lasted through to the 1980s and then revived by the Clintons and Mass Incarceration .

Lynchings continued far into the 20th century til the 1940s and beyond.
In the 1950s and 1960s the Klan and other groups such as the Citizens Committees terrorized Black people and disappeared them or just bull -whipped them in the streets in broad daylight without any repercussions .

Here's some books I read recently like those above this reading list started in July 2019 til today

Here are some books on the Ku Klux Klan followed by books on Lynching ::

- "Ku Klux Klan" : Ku Klux : The Birth of The Klan During Reconstruction by Elaine Francis Parsons , pub. 2015.

- Hooded Americanism : The History of The Ku Klux-Klan by David M. Chalmers , pub. 1965 & 981 .

- The Second Coming of the KKK : The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition , by Linda Gordon , pub. 2017.

- Behind the Mask of Chivalry : The Making of The Second Ku Klux Klan by Nancy MacLean , pub. 1994.

As for Lynchings and mob violence and white Race riots:

- On Lynchings by Ida B. Wells-Barnett , pub. 1892 , republished 2018. ( Ida was the first to systematically stud

- Lynching in the New South : Georgia and Virginia , 1880-1930. by W. Fitzhugh Brundage , pub.1993.

- Lynching and Spectacle : Witnessing Racial Violence in America , 1890 -1940. by Amy Louise Wood , pub. 2009.

- At The Hands of Persons Unknown : The Lynching of Black America , by Philip Dray , pub. 2003.

also see on the roots of white supremacy and the establishment of Racist based or Racial Based laws in the USA ie defining race such as one drop of black blood makes one Black and therefore according to America's Racist tradition inferior to white Americans especially of Northern European descent .
The NAZIS under Hitler were in impressed by American laws on Race which had created Jim Crow Apartheid State and so applied to every aspect of daily life from marriage contracts to sexual relations to the use of public utilities from water fountains to hotels to where Blacks were permitted to live or go to school etc.

- Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream by Sarah Churchwell , pub. 2019.

- Hitler's American Model : The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law , by James G. Whitman , pub. 2018.

- American Exceptionalism and American Innocence : A People's History of Fake News - From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror by Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong , pub. 2019.

On the rise of white supremacy into the Trump era of America First ideology joined to that of White Nationalism and the Religious Right and Christian Fundamentalism , Dominionism and Christian Reconstruction (Rushdoony ) ( ala Handmaid's Tale ) see:

- Alt-America : The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, By David Neiwert , pub. 2018.

- Bring The War Home : The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew , pub. 2019.

- Everything You Love Will Burn : Inside The rebirth of White Nationalism in America , Vegas Tenold , pub. 2018.

and for further background on the history of slavery and white supremacy see these books read recently :

- The Black Jacobins : Touissaint L' Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution , by C. L. R. James , pub. 1963 & 1969.

- The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism : The Roots of Slavery , White Supremacy , and Capitalism in Seventeenth Century North America and the Caribbean , by Gerald Horne , pub. 2018.

- Confronting Black Jacobins : The United States , the Haitian Revolutionand the origins of the Dominican Republic , by Gerald Horne , pub. 2015.

- The Counter- Revolution : Slave Resistance and the Origin of the United States of America , by Gerald Horne pub. 2016.

also see books read previous to this more current bloc or unit of research -

- The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness , Michelle Alexander , pub. 2011.

- Slavery and the Founders : Race and Liberty in the age of Jefferson 2nd edition , by Paul Finkelman , pub. 2001.

- Dog Whistle Politics : How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked The Middle Class , pub. 2014.

- From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime : The Making of Mass Incarceration in America by Elizabeth Hinton 2016 .

- The Condemnation of Blackness : Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad , pub. 2010 & 2011.

- American Nightmare : The History of Jim Crow by Jerrold M. Packard , pub. 2002.

- " WORSE THAN SLAVERY " : Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice , David M. Oshinsky , pub. 1996.