America's Original Siin

**Content Warning**

This work contains:

• Slavery, racial terror, and sexual violence

• Genocide and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples

• Japanese wartime incarceration, Chinese labor exploitation, and anti-immigrant terror

• Police violence, eugenics, forced sterilization, and fascist ideology

• The weaponization of Christianity and the rise of Christian nationalism

The narrative does not flinch from graphic historical realities, systemic cruelty, or the complicity of churches, courts, corporations, and political leaders. It challenges national myths, religious certainties, and inherited notions of innocence.

By choosing to read this, you are stepping into:

• A relentless examination of how land theft, stolen labor, and racial hierarchy built American wealth and power

• A sustained comparison between U.S. racial systems and Nazi law, including how the latter borrowed directly from the former

• An unfiltered exploration of how theology, science, and law have been used to sanctify white supremacy

• A wide-angle view of global colonialism, tracing how these patterns radiated outward to shape the modern world

This is a work meant for readers prepared to have cherished narratives unsettled, to sit with anger and grief, and to engage history as a living, dangerous force rather than a closed chapter. It is not recommended for those seeking comfort, patriotic reassurance, or a neutral, detached summary.

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Part One: The Foundational Crime and Slavery in America

The Economic Architecture of American Slavery

The institution of slavery in the United States was not a peripheral or marginal practice, nor was it an accidental feature of the nation’s development. Rather, slavery was foundational to American economic development, deeply woven into the nation’s political and constitutional structures from its inception. Between 1526 and 1776, millions of enslaved Africans were forcibly brought to what became the American colonies, with approximately 500,000 of the estimated 11 to 12 million Africans forcibly transported to the Americas ending up in mainland North America. This transatlantic migration of captive human beings represents one of the largest forced relocations in human history.

The scale of slavery’s integration into the American economy was staggering. Research demonstrates that slavery was a major driver of regional and national economic growth leading up to the Civil War, with estimates showing that enslaved workers’ output was responsible for roughly 18.7 to 24.3 percent of commodity growth per capita for the United States as a whole between 1839 and 1859. Yet this figure becomes even more remarkable when considering that enslaved Americans accounted for only 12 percent of the U.S. population at this time. The productivity gains from slavery were extraordinary precisely because they were extracted through violence, coercion, and the denial of compensation.

By the 1730s in the Chesapeake region, births to enslaved women outnumbered imports, creating a self-reproducing labor force that continuously expanded enslaver wealth without requiring new purchases from Africa. This development meant that enslaved people became not merely workers but a form of property that generated value through reproduction itself a particularly brutal commodification of human beings. Enslaver families accumulated generational wealth through the bodies of enslaved people, a wealth inheritance that would continue to benefit white Americans for centuries.

The profits from slavery were not confined to the South. Northern merchants, financiers, and traders profited significantly from slavery through commerce, shipping, and trade in enslaved people and slave-produced goods. New England merchants dominated the slave trade itself, while Northern capitalists invested in slave-produced commodities like cotton and sugar. The wealth generated from these ventures catalyzed industrial development in Northern cities. Research on British slavery reparations shows that slavery wealth accelerated Britain’s industrial revolution, with locations that received the highest levels of slavery compensation seeing total income increases of more than 40%, population increases of 6.5%, and capitalists’ income rising by more than 100%. This same dynamic operated in America’s North.

Slavery and the Constitution

The founding documents of the United States enshrined slavery into the very structure of governance. The Constitution contained multiple provisions protecting slavery, most notably the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for representation and taxation purposes. This constitutional arrangement gave slaveholding states disproportionate power in the House of Representatives and, through the Electoral College, in presidential elections. The Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution (Article IV, section 2, clause 3) prohibited states from freeing those “held to Service or Labour” and required that they be returned to their owners. This transformed the federal government into an instrument for slavery’s enforcement.

The existence of these provisions reveals a central truth about American origins: the contradiction between the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that “all men are created equal” and the nation’s simultaneous embrace of chattel slavery was not a flaw in the system but constitutive of it. The nation’s founding ideals were built upon a fundamental lie. White colonists declared universal human rights while constructing a racial caste system that denied those rights to millions.

Slavery, Racialization, and Ideology

Slavery did not exist in a vacuum as merely an economic institution. It required an ideological superstructure to justify the enslavement of human beings and that ideological superstructure was race. Prior to the development of racial slavery, European settlers in the Americas enslaved people of various origins, including indigenous peoples and European indentured servants. But by the late 17th century, particularly following the legalization of chattel bondage in the 1660s, slavery became increasingly radicalized, with African ancestry becoming the primary marker for permanent, hereditary bondage.

This process of racialization was not natural or inevitable; it was constructed deliberately. Racialization is the process of regulating, organizing, and subjecting populations through capital and labor integral to and endemic in the capitalist world-system. Race itself is a social construct created to justify exploitation, not a biological reality with inherent meaning. European colonizers developed the concept of “Blackness” as a specific radicalized category equated with unfree labor, creating the first codified legal and institutional form of racialization in world history.

Religious justifications for slavery were prevalent, often using scripture to argue that certain groups were destined for servitude, while cultural narratives such as the “White man’s burden” promoted the notion that European cultures were superior. These ideologies served to transform slavery from a temporary economic condition into a permanent racial condition, allowing enslavers to treat enslaved Africans and their descendants not merely as laborers but as a fundamentally different category of human being.

The creation of whiteness as a racial category accompanied the creation of Blackness. Whiteness was gained through the construction of hierarchies in the capitalist world-system based on divisions of labor that affected access to resources. As historian David Roediger and others have documented, even poor European immigrants could access what he calls the “wages of whiteness” the psychological and social benefits of racial privilege even as they remained economically exploited. This allowed the planter elite to maintain control by dividing the working classes along racial lines.

Scientific Racism as Legitimating Ideology

By the 18th and 19th centuries, religious and cultural justifications for slavery were supplemented and in many cases replaced by pseudoscientific claims about racial hierarchy. Scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals across Europe and America constructed elaborate theories claiming to prove that people of African descent were biologically inferior to whites, with smaller brains, different skull shapes, and inherent intellectual deficiencies.

Scientific racism emerged as a pseudoscientific rationale for racial hierarchies, perpetuating stereotypes and economic arguments that claimed racial groups had inherent social and economic limitations. These “race scientists” engaged in gross distortions and fabrications, measuring skulls in ways designed to confirm their predetermined conclusions. Race groups were said to possess shared physical and genetic traits such as skin color, skull size, eye shape, and height, with these biological differences supposedly correlating to cultural, intellectual, and moral differences.

This pseudoscientific racism served a vital ideological function: it made slavery appear not as a brutal system of violence and exploitation, but as the natural order a supposedly scientific reflection of inherent human differences. The distorted scientific theories of Social Darwinism were used to rationalize colonial successes as inevitable rather than because of desires for subjugation. This ideology would later be weaponized not only to defend slavery but to justify colonialism, genocide, and the global system of white supremacy.

Part Two: The Theological Justification How Christianity Sanctified Slavery

The Biblical Defense of Slavery

One of the most damning aspects of American slavery was the degree to which Christian churches and Christian theology were marshaled to justify and defend the institution. Learned, devout, Evangelical Christians, with the Bible in their hand, supported slavery with missionary zeal. They were opposed to gross cruelty to slaves and sexual exploitation of women, but not to the institution itself that propagated such horrendous treatments. In supporting the institution, they knowingly allowed for the worst of the abuses to continue unchecked.

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the denomination’s flagship institution, released a 71-page report documenting its dark history. The report noted: “The founding fathers of this school all four of them were deeply involved in slavery and deeply complicit in the defense of slavery.” Many of their successors on this faculty, throughout the period of Reconstruction and well into the 20th century, advocated the inferiority of African-Americans and openly embraced the ideology of the Lost Cause of southern slavery. The seminary’s early faculty and trustees defended the righteousness of slaveholding and opposed efforts to limit the institution.

Pro-slavery theologians pointed to biblical passages to justify slavery. Their opinion is summed up in the Old School (Presbyterian) General Assembly report of 1845 which concluded that slavery was based on “some of the plainest declarations of the Word of God.” That slavery has always had the sanction of the Almighty God. They explicitly endorsed both Testaments and stated that to oppose slavery was a denial of the authority of Scripture.

To the southern evangelical, the Bible, in its reference to servants, spoke clearly to them that these were slaves, “belonging absolutely to their masters, who had a right to dispose of their persons, their bodies, goods, and even of their lives in some cases.” The master claimed right to the slave because: 1. He claimed him as his property. 2. He purchased him. 3. The law declares him to be his property. 4. God has conferred upon the master the right to his slave.

Slaveholders argued that how could slavery be pronounced a ‘great moral evil’, preachers argued, when considering the biblical characters who owned and traded in slavery? Professor Dew, president of William & Mary College and supporter of slavery, was frequently quoted: “Slavery was established and sanctioned by Divine authority, among even the elect of Heaven – the favored children of Israel.” If Godly men held servants in bondage, to the slaver, it was impossible to consider slaveholding a sin. And to accept such as being a sin, “it was an aggravated crime against God.”

The Curse of Ham and Religious Justification

The most egregious biblical justification for slavery was the doctrine of the “Curse of Ham.” Despite some problems with this story What was so terrible about seeing Noah drunk? Why curse Canaan rather than Ham? How long was the servitude to last? Surely Ham would have been the same color as his brothers? it eventually became the foundational text for those who wanted to justify slavery on Biblical grounds. In its boiled-down, popular version, known as “The Curse of Ham,” Canaan was dropped from the story, Ham was made black, and his descendants were made Africans.

This grotesque misinterpretation of Genesis 9:18-27 became the cornerstone of Christian defenses of slavery. The story was retold to suggest that God had ordained African people for perpetual enslavement a theological license for the unlimited brutalization of human beings.

The Southern Baptist Convention: Institutional Complicity

The formation of the Southern Baptist Convention itself reveals the degree to which American Christianity became compromised by slavery. During the earliest period of their history in America, Southern Baptists questioned the morals of slavery, but over time they became a denomination that largely ignored or even supported it. At their annual meetings in 1835 and 1837, the Alabama and Mississippi Baptist Conventions declared that abolitionism would create instability in the nation, that it was contradictory to the teachings of Jesus, and that it would negatively affect the well-being of enslaved people.

All of these decades of regional tensions within the Baptist church finally resulted in the South separating and forming their own organization. The Southern Baptist Convention was officially formed on May 8, 1845 explicitly because Northern Baptists refused to appoint slaveholders as missionaries. In other words, the largest Baptist denomination in America was literally created to defend slavery.

The slaveholding Baptists considered it their holy duty to bring their enslaved people to salvation though religious education, believing that God wanted them to bring the Gospel to those whom they did not consider able to fend for themselves spiritually. By this logic, Southern Baptists believed that abolition would render them unable to fulfill this duty. This paternalistic sentiment served to mask the profound evil they were perpetuating.

Part Three: The Aftermath Slavery’s Persistence Beyond Abolition

From Slavery to Jim Crow: Continuity of Racial Oppression

The abolition of slavery in 1865 did not end the systematic subjugation of Black Americans. Rather, it marked a transition to new forms of racial oppression designed to continue the subordination of Black labor with even greater legal and social mechanisms of control. Immediately following the Civil War, most states of the former Confederacy adopted Black Codes, laws modeled on former slave laws that were intended to limit the new freedom of emancipated African Americans by restricting their movement and forcing them into a labor economy based on low wages and debt.

Vagrancy laws allowed Black people to be arrested for minor infractions, while a system of penal labor known as convict leasing was established, effectively re-enslaving Black men convicted for vagrancy. This represented the seamless transition of slavery into incarceration, a process that would continue throughout American history. The same white supremacist power structure that had enslaved Black people now imprisoned them, using state violence to maintain racial control.

When Reconstruction ended in 1877, white Southerners intensified their efforts to restore white racial dominance through legal mechanisms. Between 1874 and 1975, states and local communities passed “Jim Crow” laws that mandated “separate but equal” status for African Americans, segregating education, public facilities, transportation, and virtually every aspect of public and social life. These laws did not create equality; they institutionalized inferior treatment. Jim Crow laws condemned Black citizens to inferior treatment and facilities, with education segregated and public facilities providing substandard accommodations that were almost always inferior to those provided to white Americans.

The Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine, providing the key legal sanction for Jim Crow laws. This decision revealed the bankruptcy of the American legal system’s commitment to equality judges explicitly sanctified racial apartheid as constitutional.

The Police as Slave Patrol: The Evolution of Racial Control Through Law Enforcement

A crucial and often overlooked aspect of the transition from slavery to Jim Crow was the evolution and institutionalization of the slave patrol system into modern policing. While scholarly debates exist about whether modern police directly descended from slave patrols or developed from English law enforcement traditions, the historical evidence is clear that slave patrols existed and evolved into police forces with similar functions: maintaining racial control through surveillance, violence, and the criminalization of Black people.

Slave patrols were organized groups in the British American colonies that emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a response to fears of slave rebellion. South Carolina was the first to establish formal patrols in 1704, followed by Virginia and North Carolina in the ensuing decades. By the end of the eighteenth century, these patrols were present in all states where slavery was legal, adapting their strategies based on local dynamics, such as the size of the enslaved population and the perceived threats of insurrection.

These patrols engaged in multiple functions: 1) catching (and beating) escaped slaves; 2) preventing and subduing slave revolts; and 3) policing communities in what could be called “crime suppression tactics” by modern policing standards. The patrols were sanctioned by local governments and engaged in law enforcement activities. Slave patrols gave any white person the authority to control and punish Black individuals without legal repercussions.

As slavery gave way to Jim Crow, the mechanisms of racial control adapted but remained continuous. When cities formally established police departments, the transition was direct in many cases. Charleston, for example, created its police force by simply hiring the slave patrollers as police officers. Boston originally hired eight officers while Charleston’s police department was started at over 100 the reason was simple: they were, for all intents and purposes, still the slave patrol.

The continuity was not merely in personnel but in function. Police forces were established to maintain racial order and enforce racial hierarchy. Throughout the Jim Crow period and beyond, police engaged in systematic racial violence and discriminatory enforcement. Police officers commonly used what is now called stop-and-frisk to arrest African Americans for “crimes” like suspicious character. In Philadelphia, for example, Black people comprised 7% of the population but 25% of arrests.

This pattern persisted into the modern era. Research from the NAACP and the National Urban League revealed systemic, massive policing problems throughout the twentieth century. Almost a century later, the Chicago Police Department’s own records from 2000-2015 show that nearly 90 percent of victims of police use of force were people of color. The police have never ceased to function as an instrument of racial control, tracing a lineage of violence from slavery patrols through Jim Crow enforcement to contemporary mass incarceration.

Part Four: Racialized Exploitation Beyond Black Americans Japanese Internment and Chinese Slave Labor

Japanese American Internment: Concentration Camps on American Soil

The horrors inflicted on Americans of Japanese descent during World War II demonstrate that racial oppression and state-sanctioned imprisonment did not end with slavery or Jim Crow. Instead, they evolved into new forms targeting different racialized groups whenever deemed expedient by white political leadership.

On February 19, 1942, approximately two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal of all persons of Japanese descent from the West Coast of the continental United States. This single executive order resulted in the mass incarceration of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, about two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens born and raised in America.

The justification for this atrocity was explicitly racist. Roosevelt’s own writings from 1936 reveal his prejudiced thinking: he privately stated that “every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the Island of Oahu who meets these Japanese ships or has any connection with their officers or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp.” This was not a spontaneous reaction to Pearl Harbor; it reflected decades of anti-Japanese prejudice embedded in American law and culture.

General John L. DeWitt, who ordered the forced removal, made explicit the racial logic undergirding the internment. A letter circulated by DeWitt stated that “it is impossible to determine the loyalty of Japanese Americans because of their race.” In other words, the government deemed an entire ethnic group inherently suspect based purely on ancestry, not evidence, not citizenship, not behavior. This was racial profiling on a massive, governmental scale.

The removal process was brutal. Approximately 122,000 men, women, and children were forcibly evacuated from their homes on 48 hours’ notice. They were initially transported to temporary “assembly centers” where, in hastily converted horse stables and livestock pavilions, families were crammed together. Some Japanese Americans reported later that they feared they were being transported to execution sites.

They were then moved to ten permanent “relocation centers” concentration camps in remote areas across Wyoming, California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, and Arkansas. These camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences, patrolled by armed guards, and filled with overcrowded barracks providing minimal shelter. Internees were forbidden from taking more than they could carry, and most were forced to sell their homes, businesses, and possessions, often at a fraction of their value.

The camps were brutal. Food was inadequate, medical care was minimal, and conditions were filthy. More than 1,600 people died during their incarceration from disease, malnutrition, and despair. Families were torn apart, with some Japanese American men separated from their families and sent to Tule Lake camp because they answered “no” to questions about their loyalty to America a refusal to accept the government’s implicit suggestion that their ethnicity made them suspect.

Yet the federal government required Japanese American young men to serve in the military. More than 30,000 Japanese Americans served in the U.S. armed forces, many in segregated units fighting and dying for a nation that was simultaneously imprisoning their families. The contradiction was profound and devastating.

This was not discovered only after the war to be unjust. Contemporary voices, particularly from Black Americans and Black newspapers, condemned the internment immediately. George S. Schuyler, an associate editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the leading Black newspapers in America, warned African Americans: “if the Government can do this to American citizens of Japanese ancestry, then it can do this to American citizens of ANY ancestry...Their fight is our fight.” He understood that Japanese American imprisonment established a precedent for the imprisonment of any racialized group deemed threatening.

It took decades for official acknowledgment. In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, formally apologizing for the internment and providing reparations payments. By 1992, the U.S. government had disbursed more than $1.6 billion (equivalent to $4.25 billion in 2024) to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated. Yet this reparations amount roughly $20,000 per person was far below what was actually needed to compensate for lost property, businesses, and opportunities. Most Japanese Americans never fully recovered their losses.

The internment reveals a fundamental truth: in America, the rights of racialized minorities depend entirely on political will and perceived national interest. When white Americans feel threatened, the Constitution provides no protection for those deemed racially suspect. The camps operated with full governmental authority, and the Supreme Court upheld their constitutionality.

Chinese Coolie Labor and the Transcontinental Railroad: Building America on Racial Exploitation

If the story of Black slavery is America’s most extensive exploitation of labor, the story of Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad is one of the most brutal and most thoroughly erased from American historical memory. Between 1863 and 1869, approximately 10,000 to 20,000 Chinese workers comprising 80 to 90 percent of the Central Pacific Railroad’s workforce built one of America’s greatest engineering achievements while being subjected to conditions of near-slavery.

The Chinese workers were not freely chosen for this work; they were recruited through deception. Recruiters from the Central Pacific Railroad traveled to China, telling impoverished and desperate Chinese men that they would find opportunity and wealth in America. Instead, they encountered a system of racial exploitation, low wages, brutal conditions, and systematic violence.

The voyage itself was lethal. Approximately 2,523 Chinese workers embarked from Hong Kong on the 75 to 100-day journey to California. The ships were overcrowded, with workers crammed into tight quarters lacking fresh water, adequate food, air, and sunlight. By the time these ships reached California, 1,620 workers a death rate of 64 percent had perished. This catastrophic mortality rate was acceptable to railroad owners because the workers were replaceable and could be obtained cheaply.

Those who survived the voyage faced even worse conditions. The Central Pacific Railroad employed Chinese workers for the most dangerous and arduous work: blasting tunnels through solid granite rock in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. During the construction of the Summit Tunnel at Donner Pass, Chinese workers spent fifteen months drilling and blasting through 1,659 feet of rock. In total, Chinese workers blasted 15 tunnels and built 40 miles of snow sheds through mountainous terrain.

The work was extraordinarily dangerous. Chinese workers were often suspended by ropes from cliff faces, holding dynamite and chisels, working to blast through granite. One historian recorded: “On one occasion, there was a huge rock on the slope of the mountain that stood in the railroad’s path and must be removed by blasting before the tracks could go through.” Rockslides, explosions, environmental exposure, violent clashes with other workers, and avalanches regularly killed workers. It is estimated that approximately one in ten Chinese laborers working on the Sierra Nevada section of the railroad died from these various causes.

The wages paid to Chinese workers revealed the systematic racial discrimination embedded in the railroad’s labor practices. White workers were paid $35 per month plus food, accommodation, and equipment. Chinese workers initially received only $26 per month with nothing else no food, no shelter, no basic insurance. They had to purchase their own food, clothing, and lodging from this meager wage, meaning their actual earnings were even lower than the nominal wage.

Moreover, the treatment was degrading and violent. White supervisors regularly whipped Chinese laborers without cause or consequence. The railroad management deliberately pitted different ethnic groups against each other Chinese workers against Irish workers against Italian workers against German workers against free Black workers to prevent labor solidarity and to depress wages across all groups.

The exploitation was so extreme that Chinese workers organized a strike on June 25, 1867, demanding equal pay, shorter workdays (from 11 to 10 hours), and better working conditions. The strike lasted about a week before the Central Pacific Railroad responded by cutting off all food and supplies to the workers’ camps and threatening violence against the remaining strikers. While the strike technically failed in its immediate aims, the workers did achieve some gains: the most experienced Chinese laborers received wage increases, working hours were reduced, and the whipping of Chinese workers stopped. More importantly, the company realized it could not take the workers for granted, and it quietly improved pay following the confrontation.

After the completion of the railroad in 1869, Chinese workers were systematically excluded from later railroad work and from other industries. Those who remained in America faced increasing legal discrimination. Anti-Chinese immigration laws were passed, miscegenation laws prevented Chinese men from marrying white women, laws restricted their property ownership, and they were excluded from skilled professions and many occupations. The phrase “doesn’t stand a Chinaman’s chance,” referring to the extremely dangerous work Chinese workers performed as “powder monkeys” setting explosives, entered American vernacular as a way to describe something impossible or doomed.

The wealth generated by Chinese labor on the transcontinental railroad one of America’s greatest infrastructure achievements and source of economic power flowed to white railroad owners and investors, while the workers themselves were economically destroyed and then legally excluded from participating in the American economy.

Part Five: The Irish Path to Whiteness How One Oppressed Group Became Oppressor

Irish Indentured Servitude and Early Exploitation

The history of Irish immigrants to America reveals a crucial aspect of American racial politics: the construction of whiteness as a category that excluded some Europeans initially, only to include them later once they accepted the racial hierarchy and participated in the oppression of Black Americans and other people of color.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, thousands of Irish people were forcibly transported to the Americas. Following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (1649-1653), Irish political prisoners, vagrants, and people deemed “undesirable” by the English state were transported against their will to the Caribbean and British North America. This practice, known as “Barbadosed” in the Caribbean context, treated Irish people as expendable labor.

Unlike African slavery, which eventually became racially based and hereditary, Irish exploitation during this period took the form of indentured servitude. Indentured servants agreed to exchange labor for a fixed period typically seven years in exchange for passage to America and promised food and shelter. However, the distinction between indentured servitude and slavery was often blurred in practice.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of Irish individuals were treated as mere property. English masters exploited Irish women not only as laborers but for sexual purposes, forcing them to bear children who would become enslaved. The offspring of enslaved or servant Irish women were often kept in bondage, effectively enslaving the next generation. When Irish women gave birth to children fathered by African men, these mixed-race children sometimes commanded higher prices in the slave market than pure Irish or African slaves, leading settlers to deliberately breed Irish women with African men for profit.

This practice became so widespread and economically significant that in 1681, legislation was enacted to prohibit the mating of Irish slave women with African slave men. The reason for this prohibition was explicitly economic: mixed-race slaves were more profitable for traders than single-ancestry slaves, and the practice threatened the profits of major slave transport companies.

By the mid-1600s, Irish people constituted a significant portion of the Caribbean enslaved population. In places like Antigua and Montserrat, Irish individuals represented up to 70 percent of the population. Records indicate that in 1655 alone, 2,000 Irish children were sent to Jamaica and sold to English settlers.

Over more than a century, England transported tens of thousands of Irish people in conditions of servitude and slavery to the Americas. After the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798, records indicate that Irish rebels were sold to America and Australia as punishment. One British ship even discarded 1,302 enslaved and servant people into the ocean to ensure the crew had sufficient food the Irish and African captives treated as cargo whose lives mattered less than the ship’s provisions.

The 19th Century Irish Immigrant Experience: Discrimination and the Path to Whiteness

By the nineteenth century, Irish immigrants to America faced systematic discrimination and violence based on their ethnicity, religion, and cultural background. The Irish were not yet considered “white” in the way Anglo-Saxon Protestants understood whiteness. Nativist movements emerged explicitly to oppose Irish immigration and to protect American culture from what nativists perceived as the dangerous influence of Irish Catholicism and Irish cultural practices.

As early as 1827, American business owners began refusing to hire Irish immigrants. Job postings explicitly stated “No Irish Need Apply” signs that became ubiquitous in American cities. This discrimination extended beyond employment to housing and education. Landlords and property owners refused to rent to Irish tenants. Irish immigrants were confined to overcrowded, unsanitary urban slums characterized by dilapidated housing, inadequate sanitation, and minimal services.

The Irish faced waves of violent nativist attacks. In cities like Boston and New York, anti-Irish riots erupted regularly, with nativist mobs attacking Irish neighborhoods and individuals. The violence was fueled by economic competition white workers feared that Irish immigrants would work for lower wages and displace them combined with religious bigotry and cultural prejudice. The predominantly Protestant American establishment viewed Irish Catholics as foreigners whose allegiance was to the Pope rather than to America.

Discriminatory employment practices were systematic and pervasive. The Irish were excluded from skilled professions and well-paying jobs, relegated to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Those who found work took the most dangerous, lowest-paying jobs: digging canals, building railroads, working in factories under hazardous conditions. They worked for subsistence wages while facing constant exploitation and violence from employers and coworkers.

The Irish lived in conditions of extreme poverty and poor health. Overcrowded tenements lacked adequate ventilation, sanitation, and clean water. Disease spread rapidly through these communities. Tuberculosis, cholera, typhus, and other infectious diseases devastated Irish neighborhoods at rates far exceeding those of wealthier areas. Life expectancy for Irish immigrants was significantly lower than for native-born white Americans.

How the Irish Became White: Racial Solidarity with Slavery and Against Black Americans

Yet despite this oppression, Irish immigrants eventually achieved a form of acceptance into American society not through the elimination of discrimination, but through their willingness to participate in the oppression of Black Americans and to claim a place within the white racial hierarchy at the expense of Black people.

Historian Art McDonald documents this painful transition: “Once the Irish secured themselves in those jobs, they made sure blacks were kept out. They realized that as long as they continued to work alongside blacks, they would be considered no different. Later, as Irish became prominent in the labor movement, African Americans were excluded from participation.”

In other words, Irish immigrants and white workers understood that accepting lower wages and dangerous conditions was preferable to competing with Black workers and immigrants of color. White employers deliberately used racial division to prevent labor solidarity. As long as Irish workers could maintain their distance from Black workers and could actively participate in racial exclusion, they could claim the “wages of whiteness” the psychological and social benefits of racial privilege even while remaining economically exploited.

This dynamic played out across American cities. In Northern cities where Irish workers dominated certain industries dock work, construction, manufacturing they used their positions to systematically exclude Black workers. In the labor movement that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Irish workers who became union organizers and leaders often excluded Black workers from participation.

The Irish participation in policing demonstrates this process clearly. As formal police departments emerged, Irish immigrants found employment as police officers. They became enforcers of racial order and Jim Crow segregation. Police forces in major American cities became disproportionately Irish, and these Irish police officers enforced segregation, arrested Black citizens at disproportionate rates, and participated in racial violence.

By the early twentieth century, Irish Americans had become definitively white in the American racial hierarchy. They had achieved this status not by being admitted to an already-existing white community, but by actively constructing whiteness through racial exclusion of Black Americans and other people of color. They had learned, as all European immigrants would learn, that in America the path to acceptance and economic advancement was through participation in white supremacy.

Part Six: Global Colonialism and the Spread of White Supremacy

Colonialism as Systematic Racialization

If slavery constructed racism in America, colonialism spread and systematized white supremacy globally. European colonialism was fundamentally intertwined with the creation and maintenance of racial hierarchies. The nexus between colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy is parasitic and intimate, with historical evidence demonstrating an interdependent relationship where the West caused rampant destruction through processes of racialization that constructed identities in cultural, social, economic, and civilizational terms, thereby producing hierarchies that determined the rights and status of radicalized and colonial subjects.

The foundational logic of colonialism was extractive. Colonial powers reorganized African economies to serve as commodity exporters, transforming the continent’s small farms and pastures into export-oriented plantations growing cotton, coconuts, palm oil, and cocoa. Restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make maximum use of economic potential which is what development is all about while wealth created by African labor and resources was grabbed by capitalist countries of Europe.

The Berlin Conference and the Division of Africa

The colonization of Africa reveals the brazenly systematic nature of European imperialism. With the Berlin Conference in 1884, European heads of state (in the absence of any African people or representatives) delegated borders to codify who controlled which part of Africa and its resources. This conference, which excluded African nations entirely, carved up an entire continent according to European interests. By 1914, all of Africa, except Liberia and Ethiopia, fell under the control of European Imperialism.

The mechanism of control was straightforward: colonial powers took the best land by force, and African farmers were forced to grow cash crops like cocoa and coffee, causing food shortages in many areas of Africa. The colonial history of Africa still casts a shadow on development in the continent, with evidence showing that cash crop production had positive effects on local development in terms of urbanization, road infrastructure, and household wealth but only in the zones of extraction, while surrounding areas were intentionally underdeveloped.

Colonial powers created vertical infrastructure designed to extract resources, with railways and transportation built to integrate agricultural zones with African ports while displacing local forward production linkages, preventing local processing, manufacturing, and domestic economic differentiation that might otherwise have resulted. In other words, colonialism did not merely exploit Africa; it deliberately prevented African development by structuring the continent’s economy to serve European interests.

The Caribbean Plantation System

The Caribbean provides a particularly stark example of colonialism’s devastation. The plantation economy emerged in the Caribbean during the late 15th and early 16th centuries following European colonization, with the Spanish, British, French, and Dutch seeking to exploit fertile lands for profit. Sugar quickly became the backbone of the Caribbean economy, with the plantation system thriving on the exploitation of enslaved Africans.

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, the transatlantic slave trade forcibly brought millions of Africans to the Caribbean, where they were subjected to inhumane treatment, enduring grueling labor, violence, and deprivation. In the Caribbean, slaves died faster than they could reproduce, yet planters had trouble getting the number of captives they wanted, creating constant demand for transatlantic slave trade imports. The plantation system created rigid social hierarchies based on race and class, with European planters and colonial administrators at the apex amassing enormous wealth, free people of color marginalized in the middle, and enslaved Africans forming the majority of the population, enduring systemic oppression and exclusion.

The triangular trade system fueled economic growth in Europe and the Americas, but its benefits were unevenly distributed, with the Caribbean bearing the brunt of exploitation. The wealth accrued by plantations and sugar exports ensured a lively trading industry that was unprecedented in its planned accumulation of capital one of the largest planned accumulations of wealth the world had yet seen.

Part Seven: Racialization and Capitalism The Intimate Connection

How Capitalism Created Race

Racialization the process of constructing racial categories and hierarchies—is integral to and endemic in the capitalist world-system, justifying superexploitation, extreme surplus value extraction, and resource expropriation for the purpose of accumulation and profit. This is not coincidence or unfortunate side effect; it is structural. The relationship between capitalism and racialization was established with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, where color, culture, labor, and humanity were conflated as markers of inferiority.

In order to exploit African labor power systematically, Europeans had to rationalize harsh conditions, involuntary servitude, and the conscription of labor through discourses of racial inferiority, making the economic relationship between whiteness and Blackness naturalized with spatial and temporal significance. White people were defined as producers, owners, and agents of accumulation; Black people were defined as property, labor, and objects of exploitation. These definitions were not natural or biological; they were produced through the structures of capitalism itself.

The colonization of Africa and the Caribbean reified the white European/Black African hierarchy by inserting the colonizer/colonized relationship, with economics and race becoming further entrenched and mutually constitutive. Economics influenced the need for African resources and labor, while race determined the way in which these would be controlled. African labor and resources made global accumulation possible at the same time that this process marked them as “Other,” and therefore inferior, because of the radicalized terms upon which they were inserted into the capitalist system.

White Supremacy and Capitalism as Unified System

The relationship between white supremacy and capitalism is not one of coincidence but of fundamental dependence. Capitalism exists within a context in which the racial contract influences market outcomes, with the capitalist free market system being fundamentally a system that normalizes, empowers, and encourages the exploitation and abuse of non-white people, specifically Black and Indigenous folks. The market was constructed and functions within a white supremacist society, which means that its outcomes uphold white supremacy.

Ultimately, the domination and exploitation of non-white people will continue to be an integral part of the liberal capitalist market system, regardless of whether this is done consciously or not, because it is built into the structures of the market itself. The Racial Contract perpetuates “an economy structured around the racial exploitation of others,” entrenching European economic dominance and white privilege through the expropriation of racialized labor.

Part Eight: Hitler’s American Model How Nazism Was Inspired by American Racial Law

The Nuremberg Laws and the Study of Jim Crow

One of the most haunting and instructive aspects of American racial history is the direct influence that American racial laws and practices had on Nazi Germany’s development of some of the world’s most explicitly genocidal legislation. The historical record is unambiguous: Nazi lawyers and ideologists carefully studied American Jim Crow laws, anti-miscegenation statutes, and immigration restrictions in developing the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the legal centerpiece of Nazi persecution.

On June 5, 1934, approximately one year and a half after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany gathered for a meeting to begin crafting what would eventually become the notorious Nuremberg Laws. A stenographer preserved a verbatim transcript of this meeting a document that reveals with stunning clarity the degree to which Nazi legal architects looked to America as a model for racial oppression. This is not speculation; this is documented historical fact preserved in Nazi archives.

During this meeting, the Nazi lawyers engaged in detailed discussion of statutes from 30 U.S. states that criminalized racially mixed marriages. They reviewed how various U.S. states determined who counted as a “Negro” or a “Mongol,” and debated whether they should adopt U.S. techniques in determining who counted as a Jew. What emerges from this transcript is the reality that the United States had developed the most sophisticated and comprehensive system of racial law in the modern world and the Nazis recognized it as such.

Hitler himself praised American immigration law in his book Mein Kampf, specifically citing the 1924 Immigration Act as a model of racial purity legislation. In fact, one Nazi lawyer remarked: “We’re doing the same thing you Germans are doing, but why do you have to say it so explicitly in your German laws?” to which the state secretary replied, “But the Americans put it in their own laws even more explicitly.”

The Miscegenation Laws: America’s Unique Contribution to Racial Law

The United States stood alone in the world for the harshness of its anti-miscegenation laws, which not only prohibited racially mixed marriages but also threatened mixed-race couples with severe criminal punishment. These were not laws confined to the American South; they existed across the entire nation. Nazi lawyers carefully studied the statutes not only of Southern states like Virginia, but also of states like Montana and other Northern states. This is crucial: racial supremacist law was not a Southern aberration but an American system, embedded throughout the nation.

The Nazis were fascinated by these American miscegenation laws and incorporated them directly into their own racial legislation. The Nuremberg Laws included a “blood law” that prevented marriage and sexual relations between Jews and “Aryans,” directly modeled on American miscegenation statutes. The most radical Nazi lawyers in that 1934 meeting were the strongest advocates for using American law as a model. The language used in Nazi discussions of Jews’ supposed threat to racial purity mirrored the language used in American discussions of Black Americans both groups were described as posing an “influence” problem that had to be prevented through law.

Hitler’s Admiration for American Genocide of Native Americans

While much attention has been paid to Nazi fascination with American racial law, perhaps the most chilling aspect of Nazi engagement with America was Hitler’s admiring engagement with America’s treatment of Native Americans. In a 1928 speech, Hitler praised the Americans for having “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keeps the modest remnant under observation in a cage.” This was not a casual remark; it was part of Hitler’s broader worldview of conquest and racial elimination.

Hitler saw America’s conquest of the West as an admirable model precisely because it demonstrated the successful displacement and elimination of an indigenous population by a racially superior group. For Hitler, the United States was a successful racial empire that had eliminated its indigenous population and maintained racial purity through strict racial law and Germany should do the same by expanding eastward and displacing Slavic populations. The logic was explicit: Germany should be spreading east in the way the Americans spread west, and they should at a minimum displace and possibly eliminate local populations, as Americans had done.

This vision of racial conquest and genocide was not some aberrant Nazi invention it was inspired by American settler colonialism and American racial ideology. One Nazi writer described the founding of the United States as “the fateful turning point in the Aryan struggle for world domination.” In other words, the Nazis viewed America as the first successful white supremacist state, having achieved through violence and law the racial domination that the Nazis now sought to establish in Europe.

The American Eugenics Movement: The Foundation of Nazi Racial Science

Beyond immigration law, Jim Crow, and miscegenation statutes, the Nazis found inspiration in one more uniquely American institution: the American eugenics movement, which subjected tens of thousands of Americans to forced sterilization in the name of racial and genetic purity.

Beginning in the early twentieth century, the American eugenics movement gained tremendous traction, with California eugenicists leading the charge in promoting forced sterilization. The movement produced elaborate pseudoscientific literature claiming that certain populations including poor people, people with disabilities, immigrants, and racial minorities carried genetic defects that threatened to “swamp” the nation with incompetence. These theories were fundamentally rooted in racism and class oppression.

By 1933, California had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other U.S. states combined. Between 1927 and 1981, the United States performed approximately 60,000 to 70,000 forced sterilizations, with California accounting for more than one-third of all sterilizations performed in the United States.

The Supreme Court legitimated this atrocity. In 1927, in the case of Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld eugenic sterilization laws, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously writing: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” This decision removed constitutional barriers to forced sterilization and encouraged its spread. The Virginia sterilization law upheld in Buck v. Bell became a direct inspiration for Nazi Germany’s eugenic sterilization program.

The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by California’s, with Nazi Germany ultimately carrying out a total of 375,000 forced eugenic sterilizations. More disturbing still: in the Nuremberg trials that followed World War II, Nazi doctors and officials cited Buck v. Bell as precedent for their own sterilization programs. American legal precedent was weaponized to defend Nazi atrocities.

California eugenicists even produced literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and sent it overseas to German scientists and medical professionals. Madison Grant, a prominent American eugenics supporter, received a letter from Hitler himself, in which the Führer proclaimed Grant’s book “The Passing of the Great Race” to be his bible. This was not a one-way process of influence; there was active exchange between American and Nazi racial scientists.

Nazi Study Tours of American Racial Oppression

The influence extended beyond legal documents and scientific correspondence. Archival records show that Nazi officials literally went on study tours to the United States, observing how the U.S. Census categorized people by race, how the Immigration Act of 1924 excluded non-”Nordic” immigrants, and how police enforced segregation in Southern towns. Delegations attended criminology conferences and met with American prison administrators to learn about “modern” penal colonies. Hitler’s government sought to build a world-spanning empire, and in America it saw the first modern racial empire already realized.

The implication is staggering: American racism provided the practical template, the legal framework, the scientific justification, and the organizational model for Nazi genocide. The Holocaust did not emerge ex nihilo from German evil; it built upon and improved upon the American racial system. The racism that America developed and practiced was the blueprint that Nazi Germany studied, copied, and escalated to industrial genocide.

Part Nine: The Wealth Built on Stolen Labor and Stolen Land

The Theft: Appropriation of Indigenous Lands

America’s wealth was not created through the genius of American innovation or the hard work of American entrepreneurs. It was created through two interconnected acts of massive theft: the seizure of Indigenous lands through violence and fraud, and the extraction of labor from enslaved Africans without compensation.

The land theft began immediately upon European arrival and continued systematically for centuries. Pope Alexander VI in 1493 issued a unilateral decree of international law the Doctrine of Discovery that categorized Indigenous Peoples as subhuman because they were not Christian and treated their land as unoccupied and available for the taking. This papal decree provided the theological and legal justification for what would become centuries of systematic dispossession.

In the colonial period, there were sometimes treaties entered into or token payments made for use or purchase of Native People’s land, but predominantly, outright theft, enforced by violence, was the method of colonial land control. For example, in 1663, by decree from King Charles II, the colonial British Empire seized all the land of Native Peoples between 31 and 36 degrees latitude (an area extending from today’s southern Georgia border to North Carolina’s northern border), from the east to the west coasts. This single decree transferred millions of acres from Indigenous peoples to European control.

Eighty years later, King George II of England awarded the Earl of Granville the upper half of what is now North Carolina an area of 26,000 square miles stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to an indefinite western boundary, containing what is now Durham County. In the Carolina colony, Granville’s agents carved up stolen Native People’s land into parcels which were sold to English settlers, with ownership conferred through land grants that transformed the land and all its resources into private property. Private land ownership was previously unknown in the Americas; it became the cornerstone of law and the necessary prerequisite for generational wealth, privilege, and power.

The wealth generated from this theft was immense. English settlers marveled at the richness of the appropriated lands: “They had never seen 20 miles of such extraordinary rich Land, laying all together, like that betwixt the Haw River and the Occoneechee Town.” This extraordinarily fertile land, developed by Indigenous peoples over centuries, now belonged to European settlers who had simply seized it through declarations and violence.

The Stolen Land and Slave Labor Nexus

The theft of land set the stage for the next, equally devastating theft: the forced extraction of labor from enslaved Africans without compensation. The transformation and cultivation of the appropriated land could not have occurred without enslaved labor. Working from dawn to dusk, enslaved people provided the free farm labor on stolen land that was the basis of the economy and the foundation of the wealth of this nation.

When the Civil War began in 1861, nearly one out of three people in what is now Durham County were enslaved, and about a quarter of white farmers legally owned enslaved people. The Cameron Plantation, located largely in Durham County, was the largest in the state. This single plantation represents the model that built America: stolen land worked by enslaved people, generating immense wealth for white slave owners.

The scale of slavery’s integration into American economic development was extraordinary research demonstrates that slavery was a major driver of regional and national economic growth leading up to the Civil War, with enslaved workers’ output responsible for roughly 18.7 to 24.3 percent of commodity growth per capita for the United States as a whole between 1839 and 1859. At this time, enslaved Americans accounted for only 12 percent of the U.S. population, yet they generated nearly a quarter of the nation’s economic growth.

The Quantification of Theft: The Price of Racial Capitalism

The theft can be quantified. Research on slavery’s central role in U.S. economic growth shows that slavery was an important driver of per capita growth in commodity output in the two decades before the Civil War and was increasingly important to economic development in both Southern states and the nation as a whole. This growth came entirely from stolen labor unpaid, coerced labor extracted through violence.

At the regional level, the increase in commodity output per enslaved worker drove per capita growth in the South Atlantic, East South Central, and West South Central regions. This was not peripheral to Southern development; it was the engine of Southern wealth. And Northern merchants, Northern financiers, and Northern industrialists participated fully in this wealth generation through the slave trade, trade in slave-produced goods, and investment in slavery.

The generational accumulation of this wealth is crucial to understanding contemporary America. Enslaved people generated output, and their owners accumulated that output as capital. Through this mechanism, every year of slavery, enslaved people created wealth that was not theirs but belonged to their enslavers and their enslavers’ descendants. This wealth was inherited, invested, grew through compound returns, and became the foundation of white family fortunes that persist to this day.

Quantifying the Debt: Reparations and Unpaid Wages

The financial magnitude of this theft is staggering. Various calculations have been made of what America owes in reparations, with scholars calculating unpaid slave wages at 3% compounded interest as totaling $18.6 trillion about $454,000 per descendant outpacing the contemporary wealth gap even after subtracting average per-person debt for all Americans.

The United States’ Committee on Reparations for Slavery stated that the total harm estimated from enslavement is between $100 trillion and $131 trillion, with the United States required to pay approximately $26 trillion for its practice of the transatlantic slave trade from 1776 to 1865. To place this in perspective, the entire U.S. federal budget in recent years has hovered around $6 to 7 trillion annually. The debt owed for slavery exceeds what the nation spends in a year by a factor of 4-5.

Other calculations focus on the wealth gap itself. Scholars and economists focusing on the gap in net worth between Black and white individuals calculated that roughly $352,000 in 2016 USD is owed per Black American to eliminate the mean Black-white wealth gap. In 2019 USD, this amounts to $905,426.10 per Black household. Research examining the effects of a hypothetical reparations intervention consisting of $905,426.10 to each Black household, distributed over 10 years, found that such payments could nearly triple household wealth for Black families and decrease premature mortality by 29% and overall mortality by 21%.

The Homestead Act: Legalized Theft Dressed as Opportunity

Perhaps no piece of legislation better exemplifies how government policy systematized racial theft than the Homestead Act of 1862. The Homestead Act promised 160 acres to settlers willing to cultivate the land, transforming millions of Europeans and white Americans into landowners and creating what became the white middle class.

Yet this opportunity was systematically denied to Black Americans and Native Americans. Black farmers were routinely excluded from Homestead Act grants under discriminatory practices, with more than one million white families claiming land under the Homestead Acts compared to at most 5,500 Black families. This is not a small difference; it is the difference between a population that accumulated generational wealth through land ownership and a population systematically excluded from wealth-building.

In 1865, Union General William Sherman issued Field Order No. 15, which redistributed 400,000 acres of confiscated land to formerly enslaved people. This represented genuine reparations a chance for formerly enslaved people to begin building wealth and economic independence. But this opportunity was short-lived. President Andrew Johnson overturned the order less than a year later, returning most of the land to its white Confederate owners, and systematically excluding people of color from land ownership.

The irony is profound: while the government stole land from Native Americans and gave it to white settlers through the Homestead Act, it stole the one opportunity given to formerly enslaved people to own land and build generational wealth. If former slaves had been promised 160 acres the same as white settlers it would have equated to roughly $291,000 per descendant today, still failing to cover the wealth gap. The government gave white America the tool to build wealth and explicitly denied it to Black America.

The Wealth Inheritance: Slavery’s Continuing Effect

The consequences of this systematic exclusion persist in the present day. Research tracking individual-level census records of Black families from 1850 to 1940 and extending analysis to neighborhood-level outcomes in 2000 and surname-based outcomes in 2023 shows that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth than Black families whose ancestors were free before the Civil War.

These Free-Enslaved gaps account for 20 to 70 percent of the corresponding Black-White gaps, meaning that slavery’s effects directly explain a substantial portion of contemporary racial inequality. This is not the result of current discrimination alone; it is the result of slavery having prevented wealth accumulation that would have been inherited and invested over 150+ years.

In 1870, in the immediate aftermath of slavery, the wealth gap between Black and White Americans was a staggering 23 to 1 equivalent to just $4 of wealth for Black Americans for every $100 for White Americans. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the ratio was even more extreme: 56 to 1. Fast forward 150 years and that gap has narrowed to about 6 to 1 with average per capita wealth of White Americans at $338,093 in 2019 but only $60,126 for Black Americans.

The rate of convergence has slowed dramatically. From 1870 to 1940, the wealth gap narrowed from 23 to 1 to 11 to 1, a rapid rate of closure. But in the 80 years from 1940 to 2020, the gap closed only from 8 to 1 to 6 to 1 a much slower rate. Rather than continuing the trajectory that would have eliminated the gap entirely by the 1980s, the post-1940 period saw racial differences in asset ownership particularly home ownership widen the gap.

Redlining, FHA Mortgages, and the Destruction of Black Wealth-Building

The post-slavery period saw new mechanisms emerge to prevent Black wealth accumulation. After emancipation, proposals to provide former slaves with land so they could survive economically were largely defeated. Instead, Black Americans were concentrated in urban areas with restricted economic opportunity. When the opportunity to build wealth through homeownership emerged in the post-World War II period, systematic discrimination prevented Black participation.

The Federal Housing Administration’s mortgage insurance program became the primary mechanism through which white Americans built wealth through homeownership in the post-war period. But Black Americans were systematically excluded from FHA loans through a practice known as “redlining” the practice of refusing to insure mortgages in neighborhoods with Black residents or residents of color. This was not merely private discrimination; it was government policy, with FHA maps literally drawn with red lines indicating areas where the government would not insure mortgages.

Due to this historic lack of homeownership, the windfall gains of gentrification have not gone to formerly redlined populations. When neighborhoods improved and property values soared, the white families who had accumulated wealth through government-backed mortgages saw their wealth multiply. Black families, excluded from this wealth-building opportunity, were either priced out as gentrification accelerated or saw their homes seized through various mechanisms.

Wealth is built over time and passed down across generations both the assets themselves and the benefits wealth can provide. The Homestead Act, FHA mortgages, and other government programs built white wealth systematically. Exclusion from these programs systematically prevented Black wealth-building. More than 150 years after the end of slavery, today’s racial wealth gap is the legacy of very different wealth conditions after emancipation.

Slaveholder Descendants and Contemporary Wealth

The wealth transferred to slaveholders’ descendants continues to compound. Research examining legislators’ ancestries found that legislators whose ancestors enslaved 16 or more individuals had $3.93 million higher net worth compared to legislators whose ancestors were not slave owners. This data focuses on politicians, but the pattern extends far beyond government.

Enslaver families became founding families of industries, universities, and cities. The wealth accumulated through slavery was reinvested in manufacturing, finance, real estate, and other sectors. Counties with higher rates of slavery in 1860 are associated with better socioeconomic outcomes for whites today and with higher contemporary levels of racial inequality in education. In other words, the wealth generated from slavery persists as wealth for descendants of enslaver families.

Part Ten: Christian Nationalism and Nazism The Same Evil in Different Languages

Christian Nationalism as Proto-Fascism

One of the most dangerous ideological developments in contemporary America is the rise of Christian nationalism and it bears disturbing similarities to the Nazism that plagued Europe in the twentieth century. After five years of empirical research, scholars have concluded that Christian nationalism an ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic belonging and participation is a form of nascent or proto-fascism. Not full-blown fascism (yet), but a complex of ostensibly-religious ideologies, identities, and values that could potentially lead toward fascism given the right recipe of resources, political opportunities, and a population acclimated to its underlying ideals.

The “Christian” content of Christian nationalism stands for something far beyond and altogether different from mere orthodoxy. “Christian” in this sense represents more of an ethno-cultural and political identity that denotes a specific constellation of religious affiliation (evangelical Protestant), cultural values (conservative), race (white), and nationality (American-born citizen). It is this subliminal, unrecognized content of the word “Christian” that gives Christian nationalism its fascist potential.

Reading common features of fascist societies as outlined by Yale Philosopher Jason Stanley in his book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” the tell-tale characteristics of Christian nationalism are unmistakable. These characteristics include:

1. An ideology built on reference to a mythic past (America as a “Christian nation” from its founding)

2. Populist support for strongman demagogues

3. A culture of anti-intellectualism, including anti-education and anti-science beliefs

4. An ideology that views social hierarchies as normal and necessary

5. Idealization of patriarchal families

6. Peace maintained by authoritarian “law & order” tactics

7. Strongly pro-nativist/anti-pluralism

8. Foments cultural anxiety about sexual deviance

9. Pervasive victim mentality

Christian nationalists hold views supporting capital punishment and the police “cracking down on troublemakers,” and even justify police violence against African Americans (maintaining authoritarian law & order). They hold anti-immigration views, expressing strong suspicion toward Hispanic immigrants and Muslims (strongly pro-nativist/anti-pluralism). They hold views in opposition to same-sex marriage or civil unions and transgender rights (foments cultural anxiety about sexual deviance). And while researchers have not quantitatively studied how Christian nationalist ideology is related to a “victim mentality” characteristic of fascist regimes, such a mentality is constantly on display among America’s most prominent Christian nationalist thought-leaders.

Christian Nationalism as Religion of White Power

Recognizing Christian nationalism as proto-fascism helps to disentangle it from religion itself. Research clearly demonstrates that Christian nationalism actually has little to do with religiousness per se. In fact, when comparing how Christian nationalist ideology and traditional measures of religious commitment (e.g., worship attendance, prayer, sacred text reading) influence Americans’ political attitudes and behaviors, they work in the exact opposite direction.

Why does Christian nationalism behave so differently from traditional religious commitment? Because it is a religion of white conservative America that worships power. It is “Christian” in name, but only as a code of sorts. Much like labels such as “terrorists,” “welfare queens,” “illegals,” and “criminals” become racially-coded dog whistle terms in political discourse, so has the term “Christian” in the minds of many conservative Americans. It stands for “good and decent (white, native-born) citizens.” But it also stands for “us” who must defend “our” country from “them.”

Asking whether Americans believe the government should advocate Christian values, whether they think religious symbols should be displayed in public spaces, whether they think our nation’s success is part of God’s plan most Americans may not sense any underlying threat from embracing such views in isolation. But in combination these beliefs undergird the characteristics of the Twentieth Century’s most horrifying fascist regimes the populist demagoguery, the xenophobia, the oppression of minorities, the anti-intellectualism, the jingoist militarism, the authoritarianism.

The Nazi Precedent: German Christian Nationalism

The German case offers a chilling historical precedent. At the time of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the synthesis of Christianity, nationalism, and antisemitism had been centuries in the making. As one foreign visitor noted in the late nineteenth century, for most German Protestant clergy their “belief in Christianity was so closely intertwined with a strong nationalism that it was difficult even for themselves to say where the one began and the other ended.”

Most Confessing Christians, like other German Protestants, were nationalistic and antisemitic. Their fight against the heresies of the explicitly pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen was driven by opposition to the latter’s ideologically-driven distortions of Christian doctrine as well as the idolization of the Führer and Nazi state. But even within those parameters there was a wide range of political views and a great deal of caution and cowardice. The Confessing Christians who explicitly grounded their political opposition to National Socialism in their Christian faith remained a minority within German Protestantism.

The German Christians movement, which existed between 1933 and 1945, represents the full fusion of Christianity and Nazism. The movement used scriptural support (Romans 13) to justify respect for temporal authority and was sympathetic to the Nazi regime’s goal of “coordinating” the Protestant churches into a single and uniform Reich church, consistent with the Volk ethos and the Führer principle. The German Christians were supportive of the Nazi Party’s ideas about race. They issued public statements in which they claimed that Christians in Germany with Jewish ancestors “remain Christians in a New Testament sense, but they are not German Christians.” They also supported the Nazi Party platform’s advocacy of “Positive Christianity,” a form of Christianity that did not stress the belief in human sinfulness. Some of them went so far as to call for the total removal of all Jewish elements from the Bible, including the Old Testament. Their symbol was a traditional Christian cross with a swastika in the middle.

Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich fused authoritarian nationalism with a Christianity complicit in delusions of racial, moral and global superiority. The symbolism and rhetoric of that time echoes through modern-day Christian nationalism. The German version of Christian nationalism morphed into Nazi flags adorning the exteriors and interiors of churches and the theological premise that Hitler and the Third Reich existed to return Germany to its God-intended dominance over all other nations and races.

The Warning for America

Many Germans had difficulty believing hardline Nazi policies would continue once Hitler achieved power, let alone descend into genocide. They failed to understand that those who use intimidation and violence to achieve power also use it to stay in power. The warning from history is clear: Christian nationalism, which sounds innocent when discussed in isolated terms, becomes dangerous when combined into a coherent ideological package.

The distinction between traditional religious commitment and Christian nationalism is crucial. Research shows that those high in Christian nationalism but low in traditional religiosity are far more likely to support authoritarian politics, police violence, and the restriction of minority rights. They are motivated by cultural and political power rather than genuine spiritual conviction. When such ideology becomes the dominant political force in a nation, with strongman political leaders willing to wield it, the results have historically been catastrophic.

Part Eleven: The Secular Founding
What the Founding Fathers Actually Believed About Religion

The Constitutional Rejection of Religious Establishment

One of the most persistently misrepresented aspects of American history is the role of religion in the founding of the nation. Conservative activists and Christian nationalists have worked tirelessly to rewrite history, claiming that America was founded as a “Christian nation” and that the Founders intended Christian principles to guide government. This claim is contradicted by the historical record.

The Framers of the Constitution incorporated two pillars of American democracy religious freedom and church-state separation into the founding documents, building what Thomas Jefferson revered as a “wall of separation between Church & State.” The phrase does not appear in the Constitution itself, but the concept is enshrined in the very first freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Known as the establishment clause, the opening lines of the First Amendment prohibit the government from creating an official religion or favoring one religion (or nonreligion) over another.

The separation of church and state did not emerge from indifference to religion or hatred of churches. Rather, it emerged from hard-won experience with religious conflict and state coercion. Jefferson and Madison had seen local parishes imprison people for not paying tithes to the churches, which were the fundamental social organizations of the day. They were incensed by people being forced to pay churches they were not practicing members of, and could be imprisoned for not doing so. This was overtly theocratic, and went against the Enlightenment ideals of the two men.

The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, written by Jefferson, was the precursor to the 1st Amendment of the Constitution. This statute explicitly protected the right of conscience and prohibited any compulsion in religious matters. The Founders’ vision was not hostility toward religion, but protection of both religion and government from each other’s corrupting influence.

The Religious Beliefs of the Founding Fathers

The Founding Fathers themselves held diverse religious beliefs, but few held orthodox Christian views. George Washington was extremely private about his religious beliefs. He almost never used the term “God” or referred to “Jesus.” Many of his pastors and peers understood his refusal to receive communion in his adult life as indicating Deistic belief. Thomas Jefferson was rumored to be a full-on atheist but publicly identified as a deist. He famously created the Jefferson Bible, literally cutting out all the supernatural bits of Jesus’s life with scissors. James Madison was a deist but did not seem to be as into religion or theology as much as he was into political theory.

The strongest evidence of the Founders’ secularism lies in their explicit statements. Jefferson wrote: “I believe that religion is solely a matter between an individual and their God, for which they are accountable to no one else. I hold in high regard the act of the American people that declared legislature should make no law respecting religion, prohibiting the exercise thereof thereby creating a wall of separation between church and state.”

Jefferson further declared: “History shows no examples of a populace dominated by religious leaders maintaining a free civil government.” He wrote: “Religious bondage confines and weakens the mind, rendering it unfit for any noble endeavor.” In his writings, he also stated: “It is clear that the same authority that can establish Christianity to the exclusion of all other religions could just as easily establish a specific sect of Christians, excluding all others.”

When the Constitution was being discussed, Madison noted in his papers that when Benjamin Franklin suggested opening the Constitutional Convention with formal religious prayer, no one else agreed with him. Out of the dozens of other delegates, no one else agreed that a formal religious prayer had a place in their public political deliberations. This is because the notion of the need for separation between religion and politics was much stronger among the Founders than it is today.

Treaty of Tripoli: The Explicit Rejection of Christian Nationhood

Perhaps the most explicit statement of the Founders’ secularism came in the Treaty of Tripoli, initiated by President George Washington in 1796, signed into by President Adams in 1797, unanimously ratified by the Senate, and published in all 13 states without any recorded dissent. The treaty explicitly stated: “The government of the United States is not in any way based on the Christian religion.”

This was no accident or oversight. This treaty was carefully negotiated and unanimously ratified. It represents the official position of the early American government: the United States was not and is not a Christian nation.

Jefferson’s Criticism of Christianity

Jefferson went further than simply arguing for separation of church and state. He was openly critical of Christian doctrine and practice. He wrote: “Christianity is the most distorted system that has ever existed.” In another letter, he wrote: “There is nothing redeeming in our superstition of Christianity; it has made half the world fools and the other half hypocrites.” He also stated: “Lighthouses are more useful than churches.”

Yet Jefferson did not attack Jesus’s moral teachings. He wrote: “I believe that religion is solely a matter between an individual and their God, for which they are accountable to no one else.” He further expressed his belief that “the legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

In his famous request to his deathbed friends, Jefferson asked for his accomplishments to be remembered as: “author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & father of the University of Virginia.” He listed the Declaration and the Statute of Religious Freedom before his own democratic legacy.

Madison’s Vision of Religious Liberty

James Madison was equally clear about the dangers of religious establishment. He wrote: “Religious bondage confines and weakens the mind, rendering it unfit for any noble endeavor.” He further declared: “Churches have never been the protectors of people’s liberties.”

In his Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, addressed to the General Assembly of Virginia in 1795, Madison made clear that religion thrives best when government does not support it: “It is clear that the same authority that can establish Christianity to the exclusion of all other religions could just as easily establish a specific sect of Christians, excluding all others.”

No Religious Test for Office

The Constitution explicitly prohibited religious tests for federal office. Article VI, section 3 states: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” This was a radical statement for its time, explicitly allowing non-Christians and non-believers to hold office.

This provision directly challenged Christian nationalist claims that government should favor Christian values. If the Founders believed in a Christian nation, why would they explicitly allow non-Christians to hold the highest offices? The answer is clear: they envisioned a secular government that protected religious freedom but did not establish or favor any particular religion.

The Modern Distortion of the Founders’ Intent

The revisionist history promoted by Christian nationalism contradicts the explicit statements and documented positions of the Founders. Yet this revisionism persists because it serves ideological purposes. By claiming that America was founded as a “Christian nation,” Christian nationalists attempt to justify government action on the basis of Christian values and to claim special status for Christian citizens.

The Founders understood from European history the dangers of religious establishment. They had studied the Thirty Years War, in which millions died over religious disputes. They knew of the English Civil War, fought partially over religious questions. They understood that mixing religion and politics corrupted both. Their vision was not hostility to religion, but a government that would neither establish religion nor restrict its free exercise.

Part Twelve: The System Continues Bringing It All Together

The Unbroken Chain

From the earliest moments of European colonization through the present day, a system has persisted and evolved: the systematic extraction of labor and resources from non-white peoples for the benefit of white people and white-controlled institutions. This system has taken many forms slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, redlining, police violence, wage theft, Japanese internment, Chinese coolie labor, Irish exploitation but its logic has remained constant.

Slavery created the ideology of race. Colonialism spread that ideology globally. When slavery ended, new mechanisms emerged to maintain racial control and labor extraction. When formal colonialism ended, neocolonial mechanisms ensured continued extraction. The mechanisms change; the logic remains the same.

The wealth generated by slavery, colonialism, and labor exploitation did not disappear when those institutions formally ended. It persisted, was inherited, was invested, and compound returns accumulated. The descendants of enslaver families and white beneficiaries of these systems remain wealthy. The descendants of enslaved peoples, colonized peoples, exploited workers Chinese, Japanese, Irish, and countless others remain systematically disadvantaged. The global structures of inequality established through colonialism persist. American cities remain segregated along lines established through redlining and explicit racial policy.

The Ideological Justification: From Religious Theology to Scientific Racism to Christian Nationalism

The system of white supremacy has always required ideological justification. These justifications have evolved as older ones became indefensible. When religious justifications for slavery became intellectually untenable, they were replaced with scientific racism. When the pseudoscience of the nineteenth century became discredited, new ideologies emerged. Christian nationalism represents the contemporary resurgence of white supremacist ideology cloaked in the language of faith.

What connects slavery’s theological defense to Nazi racial science to contemporary Christian nationalism is the fundamental impulse: the need to justify the unjustifiable, to make domination seem natural, inevitable, and even righteous. Each ideology claims special knowledge whether of divine will, biological fact, or historical destiny to justify the concentration of power, wealth, and resources in white hands.

The American Inspiration for Global Evil

America’s crimes did not remain contained within American borders. American racial systems inspired and provided blueprints for some of the world’s worst evils. Nazi Germany adopted American racial law. American eugenics influenced Nazi racial science. American treatment of indigenous peoples inspired Nazi visions of Lebensraum and eastern conquest.

Yet America emerged from the fight against Nazism not as a nation forced to confront its sins, but as a superpower. The nation that had inspired Holocaust perpetrators now presented itself as the moral victor. Meanwhile, Black Americans who had fought and died to defeat Nazi racism returned to a segregated homeland where Jim Crow remained in full force. The hypocrisy was complete and devastating.

The Contemporary Persistence

The original sins of America remain unresolved and unaccounted for. The racial wealth gap persists at 6 to 1. Formerly redlined neighborhoods are now underinvested in and suffer higher rates of poverty, pollution, and violence. Police forces continue to function as racial control mechanisms, with Black Americans disproportionately subjected to stop-and-frisk, arrest, and lethal force. The American system of mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts Black and brown people, has created a new system of forced labor and marginalization reminiscent of slavery’s aftermath.

Christian nationalism rises again, with white evangelical Christians increasingly organized around a political movement that promotes authoritarian governance, the restriction of minority rights, and the dominance of Christian symbols and values in public life. The parallels to the German Christian nationalism that enabled Nazism are unmistakable and alarming.

The Choice Before America

The nation faces a choice. It can continue to deny its history, to rewrite its founding as a “Christian nation,” to ignore persistent inequality as natural or deserved, and to allow Christian nationalism to rise unchecked. The historical precedent suggests this path leads to fascism.

Alternatively, America can acknowledge its founding contradictions and enduring injustices. It can recognize that the ideals proclaimed in founding documents were not lived out in practice, and that addressing this gap requires fundamental structural change. It can reject Christian nationalism as the proto-fascism it is and reaffirm the secular, pluralistic vision of the Founders who explicitly rejected religious establishment and defended religious freedom.

This would require genuine reparations for slavery, not merely symbolic gestures. It would require the redistribution of wealth stolen through centuries of exploitation. It would require the transformation of systems police, education, housing, healthcare that continue to perpetuate racial inequality. It would require rejecting the myth that America is a “Christian nation” and embracing instead the secular, democratic values that actually formed the Constitution.

The original sin remains. The theft continues. The question is whether America will finally account for it.

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