“The importance of textbooks is simply overwhelming because they are designed to form and shape generations of students. This is how students learn about the history of the United States, this is how they learn what values it symbolizes and the aims and goals of the republic,” says Donald Yacovone.
“What so shocked me when I started reading these textbooks was the degree to which they overtly emphasize the centrality of whiteness in the creation of the republic and of the self.”
Today, host Esty Dinur spends the hour with Donald Yacovone discussing his latest book, Teaching White Supremacy, which traces “how white supremacy has suffused every area of American learning.”
Donald Yacovone is a lifetime associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He has written widely on abolitionism, gender, the African American role in the Civil War, white supremacy, and American cultural history. Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity (Pantheon, 2022) is his ninth and latest book.
Cover image by Hermann Traub from Pixabay
