Initially, you were going to write a book about racism in the United States, focused on relationships, actions, events, and histories where Black and White people are entangled. But that really got expanded. What happened?
Well, research happened. Thinking about my own family’s history and kind of tracing that history all the way back was an important part of the journey. But, what I realized, for example, is that that focus was very much a kind of Black/White binary focus; and, being from the South, that was primarily the lens through which I was kind of viewing my family’s history.
But when I started digging further back, you know, the family lore kind of stopped with: “Oh, well, we got this land in the 1820s via this land lottery that the state of Georgia was performing. And then, you know, we set up a shop there. It was on my mother’s side of the family. There was evidence [among them] of people who were not the kind of wealthy planter class. But, they still enslaved other people, even as a kind of lower class subsistence farmer. But what I didn’t ever push back on was where did that land come from that was suddenly available in the 1820s and 1830s in a land lottery?
And, you know, once you kind of ask that question, it really opens up the aperture and you realize it came from the Cherokee, who were forcibly removed from that land and forced to walk what became the Trail of Tears. Upwards of 20% or more died on that trek all the way to Oklahoma.
So in the book I talk about my home state of Mississippi, but also about the Trail of Tears—and really the story behind that story, which is our relationship to the original inhabitants of this land.
You take us to the Doctrine of Discovery. What is just a very basic definition of that doctrine and where does it come from?
From 1450-1493 there were these papal decrees that were published at the behest of Western political powers, such as the kings of Spain and Portugal. What spurred them was the lands that were previously unaccounted for. And so the real question was: What rights do we have vis-a-vis these people in these lands? And it basically says that if you encounter any lands where the people are not Christian, you have permission and the blessing of the church and the power of the state to conquer, to kill, to subdue, and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.