An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

lasting in its impact than that with Thomas Jefferson.” 20 However, people
like the Black nationalist David Walker, author of David Walker’s Appeal
(1829), called out Jefferson’s Notes for the racist beliefs of the author.
Walker wrote, “Mr. Jefferson, a much greater philosopher the world never
afforded, has in truth injured us more, and has been as great a barrier to our
emancipation as any thing that has ever been advanced against us.” Walker
followed up, writing, “I hope you will not let it pass unnoticed.” 21
TOCQUEVILLE: ETHNOGRAPHER OF WHITE SUPREMACY?
Tocqueville was an astute ethnographer of US democracy. Political theorists
and historians typically discuss his conception of democracy and its
relationship to the political and cultural politics of a developing nation.
However, Tocqueville wrote at the beginning of chapter 18, “The absolute
supremacy of democracy is not all that we meet with in America; the
inhabitants of the New World may be considered from more than one point
of view.” He was also concerned with the Black and Indigenous experience.
However, he wrote that “he had never been able to stop in order to show
what place these two races occupy in the midst of the democratic people
whom I was engaged in describing.” Tocqueville was very much concerned
with the relationship between whiteness and US democracy—something
that critical race theorists of the twentieth century were also concerned
about. 22
Tocqueville placed the histories and current realities of African and
Indigenous peoples together within the context of US democratic
institutions. “These two unhappy races have nothing in common; neither
birth, nor features, nor language, nor habits,” he wrote. 23 However, their
relationship was fortified “in their misfortunes.” Three core misfortunes
touch both peoples. They both “occupy an inferior rank in the country they
inhabit; both suffer from tyranny; and if their wrongs are not the same, they
originate, at any rate, with the same authors.” The authors of their peculiar
predicaments were wealthy white men. Tocqueville’s ethnographic reading
of the US revealed the deep impact of white supremacy on Black and
Indigenous peoples. He articulated the point of enslavement and
colonialism: to exploit and destroy. Tocqueville, perhaps a nineteenthcentury
prophet of American democracy (rooted in dispossession and