Digging up the seeds of white supremacy

The book “Digging up the Seeds of white supremacy” explores the roots of White supremacy in the United States taking the advice of Black activists since the 1960s, the author focuses on challenging White people’s beliefs and her intended audience is specifically progressive young people who are at a loss for how to address systemic racism. The book provides a historical overview of the roots of White supremacy, covering major events from 1492 through 2020. The figures most often associated with American racism certainly make appearances, including enslavers, the Ku Klux Klan, and Southern sheriffs. However, the book also emphasizes the ways in which some White activists have historically perpetuated White supremacy. The author supports her work with more than 500 citations. Although academic historians won’t find much that’s new in the book’s analysis, which does not fully and methodologically engage with archival research, it more than accomplishes the author’s goal of providing an accessible history for general readers. This effort toward engagement is accompanied by a down-to-earth writing style and an ample assortment of full-color original art as well as diagrams, charts and other visual aids. The book will likely show many readers the ways in which America’s racist history resonates in their present-day lives. Along the way, it provides actionable agendas for change, which tracks well with author’s career as a consultant whose work centers on ethics, leadership, and social justice and with her own willingness to address her own “internalized racism.” Oddly, though, the book accepts a common right-wing trope that overstates the prevalence of leftist “cancel culture” that allegedly targets the people who have consistently ignoring the fact and, in doing so, uses some of the same talking points that people opposed to anti-racist work often use. The book is an often nuanced analysis of the prevalence of American racism. TW

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