How the founding fathers got the lower whites to buy into their racism

Banned Histories of Race in America

A quick reminder: George Washington was a dipshit. His letters show him openly admitting to operating outside the law as well as wanting to hide those operations from the voters. He’d condescendingly explain to life-long farmers that they shouldn’t get hay wet. Genius. He’s thought of as a brilliant military tactician and maybe it’s the thought that counts because out of his seventeen Revolutionary War battles, he only won six.

Washington was born into immense wealth which he continued to grow by joining the family grift: land speculation, a con so outrageous it could only be conceived by the elite. Basically, rich white men would just lie about owning land. They’d write laws and deeds and fill out various forms declaring their ownership of the land and then—this is the important part—they’d sell it.

Now, a big problem in selling land that you don’t own is that there’s a chance people might already be living on that land. As you might guess, over and over “settlers” would arrive to their newly purchased acreages only to find that no one had told them about the active indigenous populations who had been inhabiting those areas for centuries.

What did Washington and his ilk do to solve that problem? How did they keep the “settlers” they’d been conning from stringing them up? Or better yet, joining up with the indigenous peoples and tossing their elitist, grifting asses into the Atlantic? Well, racism, of course! It was their answer to everything!

Naturally, their own racism wouldn’t be enough. No, the elites would have to get the lower whites to buy into it as well. Yes, there was already a terrible racism against the indigenous, but it wasn’t sufficient. It had to be definitive. It had to be official. And so, once this country set out on its own, our actual Declaration of Independence would go out of its way to mention the indigenous population. No, not as people defending their homes or way of life or simply their existence, but as, “… merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”