The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States

The “centuries-long White... genocide against Indians” was central to the creation of racial identity in America, according to this trenchant study. Historian Silverman (This Land Is Their Land) argues that “at the outset of the colonial era, European settlers did not yet conceive of themselves as Whites” but rather identified as “Christians” (as distinct from the “savages” they sought to displace). However, over decades of violence, land theft, and “the development of a slave system that initially targeted Indians as well as Africans,” Euro-Americans increasingly justified their genocidal ambitions through a newly imagined logic of a “natural” hierarchy of peoples. As Silverman tracks the ideology of race developing in the language of those invested in frontier politics and Indian removal, he challenges recent scholarship positing that “racial ideology” was “an elite production” emerging from the realms of science and theology. It was the “lower-status Whites,” such as smallholding farmers, miners, and soldiers, who were the direct beneficiaries and “vanguard” of the “conquest of Indian country.” As such, they were the “greatest proponents of genocidal anti-Indian racism.” Repeatedly emphasizing that “racial meanings” were “the result of people pursuing their own immediate material... interests,” Silverman makes a powerful case that this history is crucial to understanding what motivates today’s resurgent “violent, conspiratorially minded” white nationalism. It’s a clear-eyed, forensic accounting of America’s original sin. (Feb.)