Primary Sources: How DEI Built America
If you look at the actual history, white supremacy is the original DEI program
Instead of untold stories from Black history, ContrabandCamp’s Primary Sources series shares pure, uncut and rarely told stories from the past straight from the primary source.
Some stories don’t need whitewashing.
In 1749, French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon invented white supremacy.
To be fair, Buffon didn’t allege that white people were a superior race. As he explained in the third book of his 36-volume “Historie Naturelle,“ white people were the only race. According to Buffon, all other varieties of humans were “savages” who “accidentally degenerated from their original stock,” writing:
It is singular, that this variation of nature takes place only from black to white, and not from white to black. It is no less singular, that all the people in the East Indies, in Africa, and in America, where these white men appear, lie under the same latitude
Whites, then, appears to be the primitive colour of nature, which may be varied by climate, by food, and by manners, to yellow, brown, and black, and which, in certain circumstances, returns, but so greatly altered, that it has no resemblance to the original whiteness, because it has been adulterated by the causes which have already been assigned.
Nature, in her most perfect exertions, made men white; and the same Nature, after suffering every possible change, still renders them white:
Three causes, therefore, must be admitted, as concurring in the production of those varieties which we have remarked among the different nations of this earth:
The influence of climate;
Food, which has a great dependence on climate;
Manners, on which climate has, perhaps, a still greater influence.
In 1781, a collection agency sent letters to 13 white men who had cosigned a payday loan to start a new company called “The United States of America.”
Written by French Ambassador François Barbé-Marbois, the letters asked the governors of each of the 13 original states to answer a series of questions about the geography, culture and political climate of the 13 original states state. France had loaned money for the American Revolution and wanted each governor to answer one question:
“What y’all gon’ do?”
Virginia’s governor was excited. Although he was rich and famous, he finally had a chance to share his political beliefs and scientific research with France’s scientific community. Not only did his response answer all of Barbé-Marbois’ questions, but the governor’s anonymously published book formed the foundation of American democracy.
Notes on the State of Virginia is Thomas Jefferson’s only full-length book and the only book written by one of the seven men credited with being the “shapers of the United States”(George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison). Along with detailed descriptions of the geography, plant life and natural resources in Virginia, the book contained an entire section that rejected Buffon’s hypothesis that racial differences were caused by food, climate and “manners.”
To Jefferson, if Buffon was right, it meant the white people of America would eventually become “savages” like the Native Americans or as intellectually inferior as the enslaved Africans. Instead of ascribing white people’s superiority to environmental factors, Jefferson introduced an alternative theory:
White people are genetically superior.
So far the Count de Buffon has carried this new theory of the tendency of nature to belittle her productions on this side the Atlantic. Its application to the race of whites, transplanted from Europe, remained for the Abbé Raynal. 'America has not yet produced one good poet.'
The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life. We know that among the Romans, about the Augustan age especially, the condition of their slaves was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of America. The two sexes were confined in separate apartments, because to raise a child cost the master more than to buy one…
But in this country the slaves multiply as fast as the free inhabitants.
I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may posses different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them?
This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature, are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question 'What further is to be done with them?' join themselves in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort.
The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history.
When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.
— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
While historians often infer the Founding Fathers’ beliefs from private letters, essays and public speeches, Jefferson’s magnum (and only) opus is the most detailed look at the foundation of what became known as “Jeffersonian democracy.” And to Jefferson…
Slavery was an affirmative action plan.
Three years after Notes on the State of Virginia, the Virginia Assembly considered a bill that was written by Jefferson. Although it never became law, it would have done four things:
Freed enslaved Black people after a year of servitude
Banned free Black people from entering the state
Forced emancipated Black people to leave the state
Any Black person who lived in the state for more than a year would lose all protection of the law.
Negroes and mulattoes which shall hereafter be brought into this commonwealth and kept therein one whole year, together, or so long at different times as shall amount to one year, shall be free. [But if they shall not depart the commonwealth within one year thereafter they shall be out of the protection of the laws.
Those which shall come into this commonwealth of their own accord shall be out of the protection of the laws; save only such as being seafaring persons and navigating vessels hither, shall not leave the same while here more than twenty four hours together.
It shall not be lawful for any person to emancipate a slave but by deed executed, proved and recorded as is required by law in the case of a conveyance of goods and chattels, on consideration not deemed valuable in law, or by last will and testament, and with the free consent of such slave, expressed in presence of the court of the county wherein he resides: And if such slave, so emancipated, shall not within one year thereafter, depart the commonwealth, he shall be out of the protection of the laws. All conditions, restrictions and limitations annexed to any act of emancipation shall be void from the time such emancipation is to take place.
If any white woman shall have a child by a negro or mulatto, she and her child shall depart the commonwealth within one year thereafter. If they fail so to do, the woman shall be out of the protection of the laws, and the child shall be bound out by the Aldermen of the county, in like manner as poor orphans are by law directed to be, and within one year after its term of service expired shall depart the commonwealth, or on failure so to do, shall be out of the protection of the laws.
Had Thomas Jefferson changed his mind? Is this bill still in the archives of the Virginia legislature? And could a governor introduce a bill to the legislature anyway?
The answer is no.
Jefferson was still a white supremacist. You can’t find this bill. Even if you could, it wouldn’t have Jefferson’s name on it. Jefferson had ghostwritten the bill so it could be introduced by his most senior political adviser — James Madison — the guy who wrote the Constitution of the United States.
But because Jefferson wanted credit, he went back and made a revised copy of Notes on the State of Virginia. In the updated edition, Jefferson not only took credit for the bill, but he also revealed that the law initially had an extra provision:
An amendment containing it was prepared, to be offered to the legislature whenever the bill should be taken up, and further directing, that [slaves] t should continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expence, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniusses, till the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of houshold and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c. to declare them a free and independent people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they have acquired strength; and to send vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants;
It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race …
— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
That’s right. When they kicked the genetically inferior people out of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wanted to go looking for white people to replace them.
“A Bill Concerning Slaves” was the first DEI policy.
100 years later, after the Civil War, Louisiana held a convention to rewrite the state constitution created by formally enslaved freedmen. In the 1898 Louisiana Convention’s opening remarks, they spelled out the real reason for their gathering:
While most people point out that the “grandfather clause” in Louisiana’s 1898 constitution disenfranchised Black voters, the poll taxes, literacy tests and other restrictions did that. The grandfather clause actually protected white voters equity and inclusion.
And when they finished, they bragged about their new white DEI law.
On May 26, 1924, Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act. While it became known as the “Asian Exclusion Act,” the law actually created a quota system for white people that would preserve America’s racial demographics by using an “origin formula” based on the population of the 1920 census.
American immigration law would use these quotas until the National Origins Formula was toppled by civil rights activists in 1965. And if you’re wondering why they would use a formula from the 1920 census for so long, here’s the secret you’ve been waiting for.
If Donald Trump manages to make America great again, it will look like 1920. Because, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1920, America was whiter than it ever was or ever would be.
White supremacy is the original DEI.
God. It was an obscenity from the get-go.
I am horrified to comprehend how many years it took me to understand that.
Appreciate all you do 🙏🏾