The Making of American Whiteness: How White Supremacy Was Built | #RolandsBookClub

#RolandsBookClub: The Making of American Whiteness: How White Supremacy Was Built

Roland Martin sits down with historian Carmen P. Thompson, author of The Making of American Whiteness: The Formation of Race in Seventeenth-Century Virginia, for a wide-ranging #RolandsBookClub conversation about how whiteness and white supremacy were constructed in America and how those systems continue to shape politics, power, economics, and identity today.

Thompson traces the roots of American whiteness to colonial Virginia, arguing that English colonization was deliberately organized around land seizure, exploitation, racial hierarchy, and the creation of a society built to privilege Europeans. She explains how wealthy white elites repeatedly used racial divisions and political concessions to keep poor white people aligned with systems that often worked against their own economic interests.

Roland and Thompson also connect that history to modern voting behavior, MAGA politics, the backlash against Black Lives Matter and DEI, the limits of fusion politics, white Hispanic identity, immigration, corporate power, and the continuing reluctance to name white supremacy directly. Thompson argues that understanding how whiteness was created is essential to understanding why racial power in America still operates the way it does.

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