An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

13. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1982), v.
14. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 138.
15. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia.
16. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia.
17. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 139.
18. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia.
19. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 140.
20. Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 40.
21. David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal: To the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in
Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (1829; repr., New York: Hill
and Wang, 1965), 27.
22. Alvin B. Tillery Jr., “Tocqueville as Critical Race Theorist: Whiteness as Property, Interest
Convergence, and the Limits of Jacksonian Democracy,” Political Research Quarterly 62, no. 4
(December 2009): 639–52. Tillery Jr. writes, “Tocqueville’s belief that social relations and the law
are the source of racial differences is the first place where there are similarities between his ideas and
the critical race theorists. Tocqueville also shares the criticalists’ positions that white privilege is
endemic in American culture and that both the laws and outcomes in democratic theory politics are
functions of this social reality. Moreover, Tocqueville joins the critical race theorists in positing that
the American race system generates negative externalities for whites. Finally, Tocqueville’s analysis
of the manumission laws shows that he developed a nascent conception of the interest convergence
theory” (640). I would be curious to know how critical race theorists like Derrick Bell and Kimberlee
Crenshaw would view this comparison. I do agree that Tocqueville offers a solid analysis of US
social relations, democratic theory, and the political, cultural, and social function of white supremacy.
23. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Bantam Dell, 2004), 385.
24. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 385.
25. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 385.
26. Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1986), 2.
27. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 387.
28. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 387.
29. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 340.
30. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 432–33.
31. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 438.
CHAPTER 3. ENSLAVEMENT, DISPOSSESSION, RESISTANCE
1. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 727.
2. Jervis Anderson, “Ralph Ellison Goes Home: The Author of ‘Invisible Man’ Revisits His
Oklahoma Childhood,” New Yorker, November 15, 1976,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1976/11/22/going-to-the-territory (accessed March 2021).
3. Joe Gioia, Guitar and the New World: A Fugitive History (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 99.
4. For a wonderful history of land ownership and Black and Indigenous histories, see Chang, The
Color of the Land.
5. Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Vintage
Books, 2006), 122–23.
6. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, xvi–xvii.
7. Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 5.
8. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 57.