LLL: Teaching White Supremacy-America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity

Henry Louis Gates calls Yacovone’s new book “the most profoundly original cultural history in recent memory.” We are thrilled that Eddie Glaude, one of the nation’s most prominent scholars and public intellectuals, will be joining the author to discuss the clear and damning evidence assembled by Yacovone of white supremacy’s deep-seated roots in our nation’s education system.

Join us at Labyrinth Books or click here to register for the livestream.

Sifting through a wealth of materials, from primary readers to college textbooks and other higher-ed course materials and from the colonial era to today, Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which white supremacist ideology has infiltrated American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity.

The author argues that it is the North, not the South, that bears the greater responsibility for creating the dominant strain of race theory, inculcated throughout the culture and in school textbooks, that restricted and repressed African Americans and other minorities, even as Northerners blamed the South for its legacy of slavery, segregation and racial injustice.

Donald Yacovone is the lifetime Associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His previous book is The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, co-written with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He is the recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois medal. Eddie Glaude is a passionate educator, author, political commentator, and public intellectual who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. His influential books include Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul; In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America; and Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own.

This event is part of Labyrinth’s and the Public Library’s joint programming and is cosponsored by Princeton University’s African American Studies Department and Humanities Council.