Racism by law

Joel Edward Goza’s new book is an exceptional contribution to the growing genre of anti-racist histories. While it necessarily traverses some familiar pathways, the level of depth achieved in this concentrated detailing of key figures demonstrates undeniably how the ideology of White supremacy has been baked into our national culture. Simultaneously, Goza’s unique legislative focus allows readers to experience more fully how past projects continue to create the context for present realities. Ultimately this book provides a North Star toward a better future, highlighting the need for repentance and repair—and beginning the work.

Because the genre of anti-racist history has been expanding in the last decade, perhaps by now we all know something of the inherited lies we need to unlearn. Goza facilitates this unlearning by charting White supremacy’s insidiousness in popular culture and showing how it has structured the social reality of the United States through each generation’s legislation. To do this work, Goza frames his examination around key White male power brokers—in popular culture and in politics—and dives deeply into both their intimate logic and their expansive reach. Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Dixon (author of The Clansman), Madison Grant (architect for eugenics), and Ronald Reagan provide the pillars for understanding the cultural scene of White supremacy and the creation of its legislative house which we continue to inhabit today.

We see anew not only Jefferson’s personal entanglement in the project of slavery but his contribution to US culture’s enduring anti-Blackness. Similarly, by detailing Lincoln’s lesser known “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” Goza expands our understanding of this complex figure who “appeased the Southern power structure even at the expense of Black dignity.” Demonstrating how White supremacy was the “broken bedrock” on which the nation was built, Goza artfully portrays how lies and caricatures became White America’s common sense. Through intellectuals like Grant and popular novelists like Dixon, readers are offered a window into the mythmaking that shaped White America’s racist imagination through the early 20th century. Highlighting policymakers in this cultural drama, Goza persuasively demonstrates a recurring pattern in the United States of the “deadly political art of deferring racial justice.”