Preview
  • Teaching White Supremacy

  • America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity
  • By: Donald Yacovone
  • Narrated by: Cary Hite
  • Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (34 ratings)

Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Teaching White Supremacy

By: Donald Yacovone
Narrated by: Cary Hite
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $20.25

Buy for $20.25

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

A powerful exploration of the past and present arc of America’s white supremacy—from the country’s inception and Revolutionary years to its 19th century flashpoint of civil war; to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter.

“The most profoundly original cultural history in recent memory.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

“Stunning, timely . . . an achievement in writing public history . . . Teaching White Supremacy should be read widely in our roiling debate over how to teach about race and slavery in classrooms."—David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History, Yale University; author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Donald Yacovone shows us the clear and damning evidence of white supremacy’s deep-seated roots in our nation’s educational system through a fascinating, in-depth examination of America’s wide assortment of texts, from primary readers to college textbooks, from popular histories to the most influential academic scholarship. Sifting through a wealth of materials from the colonial era to today, Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which this ideology has infiltrated all aspects of American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity.

Yacovone lays out the arc of America’s white supremacy from the country’s inception and Revolutionary War years to its nineteenth-century flashpoint of civil war to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter. In a stunning reappraisal, the author argues that it is the North, not the South, that bears the greater responsibility for creating the dominant strain of race theory, which has been inculcated throughout the culture and in school textbooks that restricted and repressed African Americans and other minorities, even as Northerners blamed the South for its legacy of slavery, segregation, and racial injustice.

A major assessment of how we got to where we are today, of how white supremacy has suffused every area of American learning, from literature and science to religion, medicine, and law, and why this kind of thinking has so insidiously endured for more than three centuries.

©2022 Donald Yacovone (P)2022 Random House Audio
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Critic reviews

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

“How did the South 'win the narrative war' about race equality, as Bryan Stevenson has so aptly put it, following the Civil War? In fascinating, if deeply troubling detail, the historian Donald Yacovone has charted the creation and systematic implementation of the pernicious myth of white supremacy in the very classrooms of America where our youngest and most impressionable citizens are shaped. Examining an astounding array of textbooks in the 19th and 20th centuries, Yacovone in compelling prose has captured the nation’s deliberate fashioning of 'American identity' as fundamentally, inevitably, and unalterably 'white.' The most profoundly original cultural history in recent memory, Teaching White Supremacy places the development and institutionalization of American racial ideology squarely where it belongs: not in the slave South, but in the ostensibly free North, assaulting common perceptions of Northern racial exceptionalism.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

Teaching White Supremacy reveals in great detail the battle over historical memory in public schools and how the white elite has devoted extraordinary resources to perpetuating racist ideas in each generation through the K-12 curriculum . . . Yacovone documents the timeworn playbook guiding contemporary legislators in their campaign to censor teaching truthfully about racism and other forms of oppression in U.S. history . . . Those stories of resistance permeate the book and offer strategies and inspiration for those defending the right to teach outside the textbook today.”—Deborah Menkart, executive director of Teaching for Change and co-director of the Zinn Education Project

“[Yacovone] masterfully details how U.S. K-12 and college texts since the 1830s have inculcated whiteness as a national inheritance passed from generation to generation . . . accessible, thoroughly documented, and well-reasoned. . . essential reading for all interested in truly understanding America’s past and the systemic distortions to repress and restrict the historical narrative with an insidious ideology.”—Library Journal (starred review)

What listeners say about Teaching White Supremacy

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    24
  • 4 Stars
    6
  • 3 Stars
    3
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    25
  • 4 Stars
    4
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    24
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    3
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Thank you! Amazing book to stress the importance of what we don’t know, and HOW we can fix it! Great book.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

An Excellent Compendium

An excellent compendium of the white supremacist slant of high school and college history texts

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Accuracy At It’s Highest

This book is worthy of all school administration as the nation and world’s legacy of white supremacy is intersectional in every curriculum standard area of study. It should be required reading for districts and private institutions of all types.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

review of teaching white supremacy by john d whitmore, a retired public speaking/ english/ and drama high school teacher.

being my 1st audible. experience TWS required me too slow down to.8 speed and to stop frequently for note recording for further readings. Clear, crisp , articulation by narrator. i will be going back for selected references but this not like underlying or margin notes. require s skill in working this medium. thanks jdw

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Necessary literature

The narrator was dry and the author rambled off topic for pages at a time at various points but when the book stays on topic it is gut wrenching, extremely valuable information in terms of illustrating how white supremacy was reinforced by our education system. The examples and quotes mentioned in the book are pure gold.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Good, important material

Frankly, I was appalled at all the brainwashing through so many years and we are probably not done yet. I graduated from high school in 1954 so reached deep into my memories. Also I’m a Tennessean who has lived in Cleveland Ohio since 1958, so I compare North and South with knowledge of both. Thanks for recording. That made it more palatable to endure: sorry example after sorry example. Listeners and readers have pictured here a travesty of living together respectfully. We have to do better.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Disappointing

Not the book which is extraordinary, but the fact that we’ve made so little progress in the last 200 years. Reading portions of this book is like reading yesterday’s newspaper. May the Creator have mercy on us all!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Excellent...and he shows the North's true side

·There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America - Alex Kotlowitz

.The Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman - Shahrazad Ali

.Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution - Leonard Shlain

.The Myth of Male Power: Why Men are the disposable sex - Warren Farrell, Ph.D

.The Rational Male - Rollo Tomassi

·The Wretched Of The Earth - Frantz Fanon

·Dark Light Consciousness: Melanin, Serpent Power, and the Luminous Matrix of Reality by Edward Bynum

·Blacked Out Through Whitewash: Exposing the Quantum Deception/Rediscovering and Recovering Suppressed Melanated by Suzar

·Christopher Columbus & the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery & the Rise of European Capitalism by John Henrik Clarke

·They came before Columbus: The African Presence In Ancient America by Ivan Van Sertima

·Stolen Legacy: The Egyptian Origins of Western Philosophy by George G M James

·How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney

·The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard

·Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America by Cameron McWhirter

·Germany's black holocaust, 1890-1945 by Firpo W. Carr

·Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini

·The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

·The Willie Lynch Letter and the Making of a Slave by Willie Lynch

·Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X Kendi

·White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

·The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood by Tommy Curry

·They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie Jones-Rogers

·The Destruction of Black Civilization : Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. by Chancellor Williams

·The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

·Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon

·The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction by Daniel Brook

·Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino

·African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean
By Herbert S. Klein, Ben Vinson III

·The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

·John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights by David S. Reynolds

·Sex and Racism in America by Calvin C Hernton

· The Blackwoman's Guide to Understanding the Blackman - Shahrazad Ali

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Informative and interesting read

As a history teacher, this opened my eyes to just how white supremacist ideologies have lingered in our nation’s textbooks throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. There is so much information to gain from reading this book.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Everything was good except the epilogue

Should not have included the epilogue. Dropped it from 4 stars to 3 stars because of this.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!