White Nationalism, White Supremacy, and Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia is the only full text he ever wrote and it is very weird. A few years back I had to read it for a course called Inventing the Environment in the Anthropocene and in reading it you see Jefferson grappling with some funny conundrums.

For instance, if you don’t yet have the concept of extinction, it is pretty hard to explain all of the gigantic elephant bones turning up in people’s backyards across the state (they were Mammoth bones). He wonders extensively where all the elephants have gone. Maybe up to Canada?

There was also the conundrum of where all of the pumice (an air-filled volcanic rock) that floated down the Mississippi is coming from. Jefferson was sure that Lewis and Clark would find volcanos ringing what is now Montana. When they came back with no volcanos to speak Jefferson was dumbfounded (they hadn’t explored Yellowstone).

But maybe the weirdest section is Jefferson grappling with the relationship between race and politics. Weird because we see the entanglement of three separate ideas: the ethics of slavery, the ideas that constitute white nationalism, and ideas that constitute white supremacy. In short, it seems to me that Jefferson was a slave-owning abolitionist, a certain white nationalist, and a less certain white supremacist.

My purpose here is not to suggest that these three things don’t often all come in one package or have obviously overlapping Venn diagrams, but instead to disentangle them so we can think through more clearly how they reinforce one another and show up separately in our politics today.

Being a slave-owning abolitionist is a complicated moral space to occupy. I’m open to the position that it doesn’t matter ethically what someone says, but instead what they do. But I’m also not really here to prosecute the binary-cultural question of whether Jefferson should be historicized as a god or demon. So does it matter that:

Jefferson and many others believed slavery should be abolished in the new American nation. Emancipation would fulfill the ideal that “all men are created equal.”

Throughout his life, Jefferson privately endorsed a plan of gradual emancipation, by which all people born into slavery after a certain date would be freed and sent beyond the borders of the United States when they reached adulthood.

In a sense, Jefferson is an example of someone for whom the pragmatics and centrism of the day precluded him from realizing his deeper beliefs about what he called the “deplorable entanglement” of slavery. He was an abolitionist in theory and a brutal slaveholder in practice.

But of course, the quote above from our modern vantage point is even weirder than that somewhat basic dissonance between values and behavior, in the sense that for Jefferson the abolition of slavery was synonymous with deportation of everyone of African ancestry: “all people born into slavery after a certain date would be freed and sent beyond the borders of the United States”. But, where beyond the boarders?

Jefferson, along with many other Americans, combined plans for emancipation with colonization―moving freed slaves outside the U.S. “I have seen no proposition so expedient . . . as that of emancipation of those [slaves] born after a given day, and of their education and expatriation at a proper age,” Jefferson wrote in 1814.

Jefferson and most of his white abolitionist contemporaries were ultimately pessimistic about the possibility of a true multiracial democracy. And this pessimism is essentially a white nationalist position: the political belief that the best national arrangement be in the equivalence between the nation and the white race. And thus, from this perspective, the only way of ultimately achieving the Enlightenment dream proposed in the US Constitution was to abolish slavery and then deport everyone of African ancestry.

For those who in this moment are thinking, “wow, that’s a crazy idea to send freed slaves back to Africa” I might point you toward the history of the country of Liberia. Here’s the first few sentences to the short history linked in the previous sentence:

Liberia was founded in 1822 as an outpost for returning freed slaves from the Americas. It grew into a colony and eventually became a commonwealth, and achieved independence in 1847 with the help of the American Colonization Society (a private organization based in the United States).

So, as the term white nationalism would suggest, white nationalism is a political ideology that Stephanie Hartzell notes in her brilliant piece on the alt-right’s relationship to all this shit, “a pro-white ideology ‘that calls for a separate territory and/or enhanced legal rights and protections for white people.’”

And thus, Jefferson was certainly a white nationalist.

In theory, one could have a Black nationalist political ideology wherein one believes that the Black race and the nation should be equivalent. Or, of course, Christian nationalism, which the US at least in theory was created to stop through the separation of church and state.

In the broadest sense, nationalism is a pattern of political ideologies: the idea that the nation (the thing with lines on a map) should be exclusive to a certain identity, whether that be racial, religious, or something else. But this broad pattern of nationalism-as-identity-politics is not the same as set of ideas that constitute a white supremacist ideology. Here’s a long but concise chunk of interview from Hartzell’s incredible work on the alt-right:

A White Nationalist believes in the value of diversity & the beauty of every race’s [sic] & ethnicity’s God-made characteristics. We want to preserve those. The so-called Liberals who claim to value them are really destroying them by allowing them to mix with each other & destroy their differences. A White Nationalist wants every Nation to be populated by its own Folk, & them alone; this will obviously involve making more nations than there are today & closing them off to immigration.

Now, contrast this with a White Supremacist, who believes that Whites should control everyone. A White Nationalist wants freedom for the White race (& really for all races, but we consider that their own responsibility). A White Supremacist wants to create a master-slave relationship.

This is from an interview with an alt-right white nationalist who does not identify as a white supremacist. The interviewee offers a very charitable interpretation of a white nationalist logic — that in order to preserve the beautiful diversity of races we must keep them separate, exclusive by nations. This is probably someone self aware of (likely) his presence in an academic study, using what he imagines as Hartzell’s moral logic (diversity is good) to present his position in what might be received as a good light.

But the distinction drawn here is important too. While white nationalism is a sort of politics of exclusivity, white supremacy is one of dominance-via-inclusivity — the suggestion that the whites should be the elites that are in charge, control the happenings of other races within the nation. Using this frame to think about Jefferson becomes complicated in assessing the extent to which he was white nationalist or white supremacist. For instance, Jefferson did it seem want to deport Americans of African descent back to Africa in order to create a nation made up exclusively of white folks (nationalism) and yet:

Like many other 18th-century thinkers, Jefferson believed blacks were inferior to whites. Though he questioned whether their low status was due to inherent inferiority or to decades of degrading enslavement.

This is ideological white supremacy, which is of course quite different than the popular use of white supremacy today to describe the way in which the structure of our society (laws, policies, etc.) has come to provide white people more resources than nonwhites. While my use of the term references a specific ideology, the popular use references the sociological enactment of that same ideology over time by real people. I think this distinction matters — ideological and sociological white supremacy. You may not!

But I would say — since idk, this is all about words (which is important!) — that the common use of “white supremacy” to describe a political system that distributes resources intentionally to one race over another is closer to a white nationalist set of ideas (Hartzell: “that calls for a separate territory and/or enhanced legal rights and protections for white people.”) than to the much broader and arguably even stupider stance of white supremacy (white people are superior beings and should rule other races).

In other words: white supremacy is an ideological stance about the relationship between groups of people, while white nationalism is a normative political claim about what ought be the relationship between people and the state. While white supremacy is often historical, white nationalism is often concerned with the future. If white supremacy is an explanation of the past, white nationalism is its forward looking. In theory, the two need not be linked.

For instance, one could be simply a pessimist about the possibility of multiracial democracies, but believe in the equality of all people. And yet, in practice we basically never see this. In almost all cases the two ways of making sense of the world co-occur despite all attempts at charity from those entangled in these cultures.

Anyway — do I care about Jefferson at this point? — it seems to me that Jefferson was a slaveholder, theoretically an abolitionist, definitely a white nationalist, and a somewhat unconvinced white supremacist in the sense that he could not disentangle whether the supremacist racial hierarchy to which he and most of his white elite contemporaries subscribed was natural or constructed through generations of trauma. We could maybe put words to this ideological conundrum that sound something like natural racial supremacy versus constructed racial supremacy. I guess for me it doesn’t really matter because whichever it is, it’s some bullshit.

Fortunately, today we live in a society that explicit white supremacy is basically entirely tabooed, whether it’s natural or constructed. But here is why distinguishing between nationalism and supremacy matters: white nationalism is not actually as tabooed. The white nationalist political dream of an entirely homogenous (white) community out there by themselves, unbothered by the dirty ongoing negotiations of a multicultural democracy, left alone to be white and happy and self-sufficient, and with no obligation to the messy train wreck of cosmopolitan America…this vision fuels the dreams one half of our politics today. It is everywhere, and it is growing.

I wrote a super brief post about white nationalism a week ago and will write more because I know that the suggestion that white nationalism is on the rise is one that probably requires more empirical evidence for folks to believe.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this. For me, this is I think a better position to critique Jefferson from than the sort of like, he is bad because he had slaves critique: he was a white nationalist who continues to fuel the imaginations of yeoman farmer-worshipping white nationalist today. For all of his celebration as a visionary, he was someone who did not believe in the moral possibility of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation or the Civil Rights Act or Obama, let alone a Stacey Abrams or Ilhan Omar. He did not believe in the possibility of what we’ve become, which is not to say we are not continually in the process of becoming and unbecoming.

It is just to say that while the cultural debate over whether Jefferson should be deified or demonized rages on, the fact remains that he was ultimately wrong about what we could become.