An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

The Native person could not truly enter into democracy because, “as he
delights in his barbarous independence, and would rather perish than
sacrifice the least part of it, civilization has little power over him.” 28 Of
course, we should challenge Tocqueville’s idea of “civilization,” but it was
powerful, as Native people from the nineteenth century and even today
continue to try and assert their humanity against centuries of Indigenous
stereotypes suggesting that Native people can never be modern. Tocqueville
was also a prophet of race relations.
While Tocqueville argued that Indigenous people were disappearing, he
made it clear that “the most formidable evil threatening the future of the
United States is the presence of the blacks on their soil.” 29 He further
stated, “I do not imagine that the white and black races will ever live in any
country upon an equal footing.” 30 Tocqueville believed that white
Americans’ antiblackness would never cease, and thus, they and Black
Americans would not be able to live together, at least peacefully. He
predicted that “if [Black people] are once raised to the level of freed men,
they will soon revolt at being deprived of all their civil rights; and as they
cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily declare
themselves as enemies.” 31
Tocqueville predicted the civil war that would happen less than thirty
years from the publication of his book. However, Black people were and
continue to be enemies to US democracy because their exploitation for the
development of racial capitalism in the US required a constant subjugation
—and it was always morphing to meet new labor needs. From enslavement
to Jim Crow to the New Jim Crow, Black people have struggled for their
humanity, and belonging as citizens. And when they openly declared that
the United States’ racist, capitalist state was an enemy of Black people—
and all people—the state used every tactic to imprison, exile, and murder
them.
If the Federalist Papers and Democracy in America are the roots of
ideological white supremacy, then why do we hold them in such reverence?
How can we teach them to our youth without sacrificing historical truths
that have contemporary consequences? This nation was built on
enslavement and dispossession, and the political documents that we hold as
sacrosanct, while brilliantly conceptualized in some ways, are also