Donald Yacovone, lifetime associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, discusses his book, “Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity.” He talks about the evidence of white supremacy’s deep-seeded roots in our nation’s educational system by looking at nearly 100 years of school textbooks. Yacovone finds that racism seeped in through Lost Cause narratives, exclusion of African Americans from the Slavery story, and flat out lies about the Post-Civil War period of Reconstruction. The most damning and surprising aspect is that these textbooks were written by and for Northerners after the Civil War, thus proving the point that White Supremacy was strengthened not eliminated in post-War American society.
DONALD YACOVONE is a lifetime associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the author or editor of eleven books, the winner (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) of an NAACP Image Award for The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross in 2014, and a recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University in 2013.
