A Review of Robert P. Jones's The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future (2023)

The adage “looks can be deceiving” is easily revised to read “books can be deceiving.” We tend to assume that the author of a book has a mastery of the topic under discussion. But a skilled writer is also a skilled storyteller. And it is often the case that a good storyteller knows how to weave together a tapestry of other people’s writings on a given topic. And with the guidance of a masterful editor, a published book can make it seem as if the author has a deep grasp of the subject matter.

By all appearances, Robert P. Jones’s The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy is an excellent book about a timely and trendy topic. It has been picked up by a number of mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times, Time magazine, and The Guardian in the United Kingdom. It’s been on the New York Times Bestseller list and has become something of a sensation.

Be that as it may, there are those of us as Native people who have spent decades studying the history of federal Indian law and international law in relation to Indigenous peoples. Our work has provided us with a different interpretive framework for reading The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy.

As someone who has done a deep analysis of intricacies of the topic, I see that Jones’s book is missing a key point: From what I prefer to call an Original Nations’ perspective—a view-from-the-shore, looking out at the invading ships sailing toward our ancestors—what Jones sees as “white supremacy” is evidence of a global system of domination that has been used for centuries by the most powerful elites on the planet, and continues to be used by them in the United States, and elsewhere throughout the world.

In The Hidden Roots, Jones says he traces the prejudice of racial white supremacy in America back to 1493 and the issuance of papal documents by Pope Alexander VI. Sixty-five years ago, in Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (1959), the eminent scholar Lewis Hanke said, “it is only in recent years that the application of natural slavery [domination] to the American Indians during the Spanish conquest has been studied seriously.”

“Generally speaking,” Hanke continues, “there was no true racial prejudice before the fifteenth century, for mankind was divided not so much into antagonistic races as into ‘Christians and infidels’.” Hanke goes on to say that the “expansion of Europe to Africa, America, and the East changed all this and thus the story of Spanish experience has a value for those who would understand race issues on the world scene.” A question arises: Is it more accurate to frame bigotry and oppression during the fifteenth century and afterwards as having been based on “race” or “religion,” or perhaps both?

In his seminal two-volume work The Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allen provocatively states, “there were no ‘white’ people” in Virginia “when the first Africans arrived there in 1619.” “Nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years,” he adds. The moniker “white” began to be used in colonial records in the 1680’s. That was when Virginia’s ruling class began using the category “white people” as a means of social and political control.

In The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, Jones does not take Allen’s point into account. He projects a color spectrum form of racism (“white”) back to the era of Columbus, at a time when the consciousness of Western Europe was undergoing a transition from Christendom’s Medieval mentality to the mentality of the Renaissance Era.

As stated above, when Jones traces his narrative back to 1493, he does so to correspond to four papal documents issued that year by Pope Alexander VI, shortly after Columbus’s first voyage to the Bahamas and back to the Iberian Peninsula. However, those documents reflect the religious orientation of the Christian world (“Western Christendom”), rather than a racial orientation toward “white” people. It was a time before people were labeled in terms of “colors” on the color spectrum.

The 1493 papal documents were written using indelible Octopus ink to symbolize the permanent nature of the papal grants that were made “en perpetua” (in perpetuity). They were written on lambskin parchment (symbolizing a member of the flock, perhaps?). They are reflective of a desire by the pope, on behalf of an imperial church, to propagate and expand a permanent “Christian empire” by working to force what the Holy See calls “barbarous” non-Christian “nations” to live under “Christian domination.”

Is this reflective of a “race” prejudice against our Original Nations? The papal bulls are not written in terms of racial animosity. The documents are reflective of Hanke’s comment about a time when Christian thinkers, including the “popes” and their canon lawyers were dividing “mankind” in terms of the religious categories “Christians and infidels,” or “Christians and pagans.”

In Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (2004), Antony Anghie examines the thinking of Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic theologian who greatly influenced the development of international law. Vitoria lectured on the status of the “Indians” presumed to exist under Spanish “sway” (“dicio”). His Relectiones theologicae, which contain two courses of his lectures—Relectiones De Indis and De Jure belli Hispanorum in Barbaros—are “an examination of the title of the Spaniards to exercise domination over the inhabitants of the New World.” (See J. L. Brierly, The Law of Nations, 1963, p. 26).

“[T]he one distinction which Vitoria insists upon,” says Anghie, “and which he elaborates in considerable detail is the distinction between the sovereign Spanish and the non-sovereign Indians.” Anghie further points out that “Vitoria bases his conclusions that the Indians are not sovereign on the simple assertion that they are pagans.”

In other words, Vitoria draws the conclusion that the Indians are not sovereign because they are not Christians. The sovereign is presumed to have a right of domination, and the non-sovereign Indians are presumed to be destined to live subject to Spanish domination. Given this framing, it is assumed that the Indians have no right of domination that be used to compete with the Christian powers, such as Spain and the Catholic Church.

So, we must ask: In what regard are imperial papal documents of the Catholic Church, which are directed at non-Christian “nations” (“barbarae nationes”), evidence of the “roots” of the racism now called “white supremacy”? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that those papal documents are evidence of Christendom’s assertion of Christian religious supremacy over non-Christian “Indians” on behalf of the Roman Catholic Empire?

In those papal documents, the monarchical head of the Church expresses an explicit intention to establish Christian domination over non-Christian nations and peoples wherever they could be located (“discovered”). Unfortunately, Jones does not discuss these details in The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy.

Jones also fails to explain the Christian-infidel and Christian-pagan distinction that is found in the anti-Indian idea-system called U.S. “federal Indian law.” He could have made it clear to his readers that in the Johnson ruling of 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court differentiates between the “ultimate dominion” (i.e., dominium, or a claim of a right of domination by) “Christian people” and what the Court called the non-property “occupancy” of the “natives, who were heathens.” Today’s U.S. Supreme Court still uses this religiously premised categorical difference in cases it decides which have to do with Indigenous nations and peoples.

Jones could have explained that the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “heathen” as a word “of Christian origin.” If he had mentioned this, however, it would have placed his focus on religion and not race. And it would support a conclusion that matches Vitoria’s thought process mentioned previously: To this day Christianity and the Bible are the main basis for the U.S. claim of a right of domination over Native nations and peoples.

Jones tends to lump Indigenous nations and peoples into an image of “American society,” divided into racial and ethnic categories. For Indigenous nations and peoples, however, mentally integrating Indigenous people into the “mainstream” American milieu doesn’t work because our existence as nations and peoples long predates the claim of a right of domination that the U.S. has used and continues to use against us.

We have an original free existence that we are able to reference, at least mentally, in contrast to the U.S. government’s use of a paradigm of domination against our nations and peoples that aims to assimilate us into “America” (as does Jones’s racial analysis aimed at “equality” for individuals).

Instead of Jones focusing on “domination,” and examining how it has played out in history, he uses the phrase “Doctrine of Discovery,” as if “discovery” is the problem to be solved, and as if that label, without any further explanation, is somehow illuminating. As an example, let’s look at how Jones applies the Doctrine of Discovery to the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America:

“Still, Tocqueville’s own moral imagination remained strongly shaped by the worldview of the Doctrine of Discovery.”

Suppose Jones had instead written the following words:

“Still, Tocqueville’s own moral imagination remained strongly shaped by the worldview of the Doctrine of Domination.”

This would have made it clear that domination and not “discovery” is the root problem that needs to be addressed. Jones continues:

“Intermixed with his [Tocqueville’s] commitment to the rising principle of equality, and coexisting with his sensitive portrayals of the injustices committed against Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, were firm convictions of European and Christian supremacy.”

The thirty-four words in the preceding paragraph excerpted from The Hidden Roots contain three examples of domination (“injustices,” “enslaved,” and “supremacy”). In the following excerpt from Tocqueville that Jones quotes, I’ve added words in brackets to emphasize the same pattern:

“Among these widely differing families of men, that attracts the attention, the [one] superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white or European, the MAN pre-eminently [above all], so-called, below him the Negro and the Indian. . . . If we reason from what passes in the world [system of domination], we should almost say that the European is to the other races of mankind what man himself is to the lower animals: he makes them subservient to his use [by his claim of a right of domination], and when he cannot subdue [dominate them] he destroys them [by means of domination].”

Here's a question that arises from the information provided by The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: Can a social, political, and economic system such as the United States that has been organized based on the claim of a right of domination in the form of imperialism, colonization, slavery, racism, genocide, bigotry, and supremacy, be accurately called a “pluralistic democracy”? Perhaps.

The horrendously vicious Roman Empire, which had, at one point, a million Roman citizens and some three hundred thousand slaves, manifested the above listed forms of domination. For the people classified as Roman citizens, it was an imperial order called a “democracy” (political rule by the elected few) which benefited them and their Elite sector of society quite well, at the cruel expense of the millions living under Roman domination.

The Roman Empire demonstrates that it is possible for “democracy” to be made compatible with the paradigm of domination. Yet, despite this, at the end of his book Jones says of his own community, “we [as “whites”] can no longer disingenuously pretend that democracy and the Doctrine of Discovery [Domination] are, or ever were, compatible.” (emphasis added) But is this accurate? What if it’s the case that domination and what he is calling “democracy” are very much compatible?

Jones’s book posits that for the vast majority of Americans, the Doctrine of Discovery has remained hidden from view, particularly for those classified as “white.” And he says this was true for him too, until a few years ago. It thus seems sensible to ask: How can it be said that the people who’ve had no knowledge of something (e.g., the doctrine of discovery) have been “pretending” that the thing they’ve known nothing about is compatible with democracy?

Jones continues: “We can no longer pay tribute to one [democracy] while benefiting from the other [the Doctrine of Discovery]. We must choose.” He further concludes:

“And if we choose democracy, it will require more than just confession by an unflinching few. It will require joining the work already underway to repair the damage done by this malignant cultural legacy [of discovery and domination].”

It stands to reason, however, that the need to “repair the damage done” by what he calls a “malignant cultural legacy” will end up being a perpetual need for repair. Why? Because the cultural legacy of domination he calls the “Doctrine of Discovery” is ongoing. This point leads to a couple of crucial questions: How does a society that has been following a negative and destructive mode of patterning, transform itself from within?

Won’t the afflicted society need to learn how to pattern itself after a different model than the one it has been patterning itself after? And is that even possible without having identified the model that will serve as the positive alternative to its present patterning? If so, then where is the other model that is not premised upon domination?

“Through that transformative engagement, we might finally illuminate the path that leads to a shared American future,” Jones says.

But he does not tell his readers what the path toward a shared American future might look like, perhaps because he doesn’t know what it looks like. The American society he pictures has millions of people on opposite sides of a wide and contentious divide, and he suggests no means of bridging the two which will lead to a “shared” future.

The vagueness of his conclusion leads me to believe that Jones was unable to figure out how to prescribe a solution to the ongoing problems of the “Doctrine of Discovery” and “White Supremacy.” Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that he remains, in my view, one remove from the correct name for the problem he is attempting to address: The Claim of a Right of Domination whose roots and structure are deeper than the claim of “white supremacy,” which is but one manifestation of the root problem.

Finally, calling for humans to no longer organize life on Mother Earth based on the claim a right of domination over all living things, when the global economy is now so heavily invested in patterns of domination, is to propose a task so daunting and so monumental that it seems mad to even suggest it. But this is the problem revealed by a close reading of the papal bulls of the fifteenth century and by an understanding of the Paradigm of Domination, which is the proper name for the Doctrine of Discovery.

Domination is the problem revealed by the language of the U.S Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. McIntosh, which is still considered “good law” in the United States, with its claim of a right of domination over non-Christian “heathen” Native nations and peoples.

Ending domination will not be a simple task. And it will not be accomplished by people simply “choosing democracy.” Indeed, I believe it will require a completely different understanding of human reality and experience. But that is a topic for another essay.

Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) is the director of the Indigenous Law Institute and Original Nations Advocates. He is author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery(Chicago Review Press), and co-producer of the documentary The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code, directed by Sheldon Wolfchild. He can be contacted at info@originalfreenations.com or at this substack.