"White Americans began as a people so arrogant in convictions of racial superiority that they felt licensed to kill red people, to enslave black people, and to import yellow and brown people for peon labor. We white Americans have been racist in our customs, in our conditioned relexes, in our souls." (1998/Page 4/Arthur M Schlesinger, Jr.)
"...the ideology of white supremacy, not slavery, proved the more ubiquitous and more enduring institution. It became the standard by which citizenship was defined, and it determined who would prove worthy of power....Rather than Southern slavery, however, it was Northern white supremacy that proved the more enduring cultural binding force, planted along with slavery in the colonial era, intensely cultivated in the years before the Civil War, and fully blossoming after Reconstruction....It succeeded as the superstructure of democratic society by allowing normal political conflict to proceed with the assurance that the assumed dangerous mudsill class (once controlled by enslavement) could pose no threat to the social order." (2022/Pages 5 & 6 /Donald Vacovone)
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