The Divided State of America: The 450-Year History of the Creation and the Conflation of Whiteness in the United States

Abstract

A careful look into the fragile founding of the United States of America reveals that a nation founded on the ideals of liberty and justice for all could have never come to be without the enslavement and the subjugation of some. However, before America was a “slave society,” it organized itself around concepts of class, religion, and nationality. Race came after the fact. Indeed, it was not until interracial alliances among the colony’s poor whites and poor blacks proved to be a threat to the planter elite that whiteness was constructed and a race-based “slave society” was born. Seeking to control both their proprietary and political interests, the planter elite used race as a tool to fracture class coalitions and advance their political agenda of “divide and conquer.” Today, race continues to be central to politics. This thesis aims to retrace the four hundred and fifty-year history of the creation and the conflation of whiteness in the U.S. context. Drawing on insights from this review, this work culminates with an analysis of one of the most divisive events in American history: the 2016 presidential election of Donald J. Trump. In adopting a historical lens, the pages that follow come to the conclusion that the seeming resurgence of race and reactionary politics in the Trump Era is nothing new. Rather, the rise of Trump is merely the most recent manifestation of a sinusoidal cycle writ from America’s origin sin: the construction of race. This is THE DIVIDED STATE OF AMERICA.