HOW EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN GOT TO SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL

Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York: Basic Books, 2016) ("The story of black colonization has played a peripheral role in our understanding of the struggle against slavery. It has almost never featured in our analysis of another pivotal episode in nineteenth-century American history: the removal of Native Americans. [] "The parallels between black colonization and Indian removal are striking. Both came to dominate the national conversation in the two decades following the War of 1812. Both were premised on the idea that contact between non-whites and whites tended to 'degrade' the former, preventing them from achieving their natural potential and making equal citizenship all but impossible. Both promised a happier future for non-whites beyond the borders pf the United States in self-governing and prosperous offshoots of the American republic. Crucially, both were couched in terms of benevolence. Missionaries and religious reformers took the lead, anchoring their good intentions with a simple promise: colonization should be voluntary. When African Americans and Native Americans expressed wariness or outright opposition, the white architects of colonization instead that black and Indians would eventually realize the benefits of resettlement and willingly leave the United States. [] Andrew Jackson was so determined to remove native peoples form the southeastern states that he abandoned the pretense of consent, exchanging colonization for explosion. [] But this profoundly illiberal outcome took root in the same soil that had nourished black colonization: the insistence that racial segregation was a benevolent and far-sighted measure that would allow non-white people to thrive. If we place these efforts to rest black people and Indians in a single frame, an unsettling but inescapable truth emerges. White reformers, politicians, and churchmen believed that non-whites could only realize their innate potential as human beings--and perhaps even their quality with whites--by separating themselves from the American republic." Id. at 6-7. Thus, the "enlightened" American reformers embrace of "separate but equal," which we now realize results in separate and unequal. Be wary of reformers, liberals and progressives, they are often conservatives and reactionary in disguise . . . changing clothing when self-interests are threatened. Also see, Eric Foner, "Separate, Equal and Far Away," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/1/2016: "Viewing the story fundamentally as a problem of race relations obscures the crucial difference between the place of Native Americans and blacks in the emerging national economy. The bottom line is this: To fulfill their own aspirations, white Americans needed Indian land and black labor. That is why Indian removal took place but black colonization--apart from a few thousand souls--never did." Id.).