The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy with Robert P. Jones
Brad speaks with Dr. Robert P. Jones, President of PRRI and author of the new book The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future.
Beginning with contemporary efforts to reckon with the legacy of white supremacy in America, Jones returns to the fateful year when a little-known church doctrine emerged that shaped the way five centuries of European Christians would understand the “discovered” world and the people who populated it. Along the way, he shows us the connections between Emmett Till and the Spanish conquistador Hernando De Soto in the Mississippi Delta, between the lynching of three Black circus workers in Duluth and the mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota men in Mankato, and between the murder of 300 African Americans during the burning of Black Wall Street in Tulsa and the Trail of Tears.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I have today both a return guest and a very illustrious guest, and that is Dr. Robert P. Jones, here to talk about his new book and all the other great work he does.
So let me just say, Robbie, thanks for being here.
Thanks, Brad, and I'm happy to be back.
So, your book is appearing in the world, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.
Super excited to talk about it today.
I'm sure you're excited for it to launch and to appear after months of working on it and years of thinking about it and so on.
Let me tell folks about you before we jump into the conversation.
You're the President and Founder of Public Religion Research Institute, PRRI.
Folks will know PRRI because we quote it on this show all the time, all of the great data and the great findings from your organization.
You're also a leading scholar and commentator on religion and politics, have written all over the place, including The Atlantic, Time, Religion News Service.
People can often see you on TV, MSNBC, CNN, and other places.
And you're the author of two great books before this one.
White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy and American Christianity, which won the 2021 American Book Award, and The End of White Christian America, which won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and which I have used in my classes many times.
You're also a regular Substack Newsletter writer, Robert P. Jones, And friends, if you've not subscribed to this sub stack, you should.
Robbie, you write regularly, you write great stuff, and it's something that appears in my inbox all the time and I look forward to.
So let's talk about the hidden roots.
That was very generous.
I was going to say, that was a pretty good bio you have.
I hope you feel proud.
I hope you, you know, on days of, we all have bad days or days we're frustrated.
I hope you just come back to your bio and think, I've done some things that are pretty cool and I feel good about it.
The book is The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.
You really take us through the hidden roots of white supremacy in United States history.
You trace this to the doctrine of discovery, which we're going to talk about in a minute.
The doctrine of discovery in your mind is really kind of the fountainhead of the types of egregious actions we see in American history taken against Native Americans and also those of African descent.
But before we jump into all of those details, part of the kind of pretext of your book was you were going to write a book about racism in the United States, focused on, you know, relationships and, and actions and events and histories where black and white people are entangled.
But that really got expanded into something a little more kind of wide.
What happened?
What took you to this place?
Well, research happened, right?
And some reflection based on that research.
So that's right.
I mean, the last book was really way too long.
A big part of that book was memoir.
And so thinking about my own family's history and kind of tracing that history all the way back.
And so that was a Um, important part of the journey, but, um, just what I realized, for example, is that, you know, that, that focus was very much a kind of a black, white binary focus.
And, and that's really being from the South.
Um, that was primarily the lens through which I was viewing my own family's history.
But even there, 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.
On my mother's side of the family, there was evidence of, you know, people who were not the kind of wealthy planter class exactly, but still enslaved other people, even a kind of lower class subsistence farmer.
Um, uh, kind of set up.
But what I didn't ever push back on was where did that land come from?
Um, that was suddenly available in the 1820s and the 1830s at a land lottery.
And, you know, once you kind of ask that question, it really opens up the aperture, right?
And it's like, oh, well, that land came from the Cherokee.
Who were forcibly removed from that land and forced to walk and other ways across what became called the Trail of Tears, which upwards of 20% or more died on that trek all the way to Oklahoma.
So in the book, I talk about, you know, my home state of Mississippi, but also about the Trail of Tears and Oklahoma, and really this intertwined history of not just a sort of white or people of European descent connections to African Americans, but the story behind that story.
And that is our relationship to the original inhabitants of this land.
So much to jump in here.
This is what happens though, friends, in research.
You set out to write a book that looks like this, and then you trace some family history that lands you in the 1800s.
And lo and behold, somehow you find yourself in the 1400s.
And so that is really how the book works.
You take us to the Doctrine of Discovery.
If you're a historian, if you're a student of American history or European history, world history, you're going to know about the Doctrine of Discovery.
But let's start here.
What is just a very basic definition of that doctrine and where does it come from?
Yeah, well, let me first say I've got a PhD in religion.
I'm not a historian.
I'm trained in sociology, but I knew very little about this despite having a PhD in religion.
And, you know, maybe I'd heard the term, but it certainly didn't register to me as anything really significant for our current predicament, our current divides and political strife.
But really, the more I started digging around on this, I was like, oh, actually, the things we're arguing over today are history.
Our origin story.
It goes directly back here.
So, you know, to kind of just boil it down, The Doctor of Discovery, it came to be called that.
It's a series, actually, of Papal documents that were issued really over a period, the kind of last half of the 15th century.
So starting around 1450 and capping in 1493.
And they were these papal decrees that were being, they were asked to issue these documents by the Western political power.
So by Spain, the Kings of Spain and Portugal.
And what spurred them was the quote unquote discovery.
of these lands, where there were all these people and 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 they were essentially asking for a moral and religious justification for conquest.
That's really what it boiled down to.
And what's really remarkable about these documents is that they're really not pulling any punches.
And again, these are official edicts of the Western Church, and this is before the Catholic-Protestant split, right?
So there is no Protestant versus Catholic Church all of Western Europe is under the Pope's authority at this point, and he really acts like it's the closest thing to international law that really existed at this time, right?
And so they're appealing to get this ruling, and it's really stunning.
And it basically says this, that if the church proclamation says, look, if you encounter Any lands where the people are not Christian, and that is the defining characteristic.
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 then like this, even these like phrases, like the one that really stands out to me is also to Reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, right?
That is in the document coming out of the head of the Christian church at the time.
But it puts into play this idea that because Christianity is superior to every other religion, That European civilization and people are superior to all others on the planet, and there's a religious mandate, in fact, to carry out this conquest in the name of the king and the church.
One of the things that I think is so important in learning about this doctrine of discovery is for folks to really see the legitimacy, the authority that religion is giving to what we now call racism.
And so when we talk about Christian nationalism on the show, when so many other folks, including yourself, are commenting on our contemporary situation, This historical set of documents really reminds us that there was a time when it was just openly saying, if you meet people who are not Christian, you have the authority coming from the Pope to perpetually enslave them.
That is what it says.
And they're called enemies of Christ, right?
That's the definition.
I think you've answered this a little bit, and I think there's people who are going to already have put together the two threads, but how does the doctrine of discovery really lead us back to both anti-Black racism and the attempt at genocide and the forced removal of Native Americans?
In other words, if you're going to study those two things in the United States and Yeah.
Well, you know, it is the thing that unleashes the entire colonial project, right?
was the United States, how does the doctrine of discovery help us to understand the treatment of Native Americans and the enslavement of people of African descent on this continent? - Yeah.
Well, it is the thing that unleashes the entire colonial project, right?
Including the transatlantic slave trade and the conquest of the Americas.
So again, it is the version of Christianity that lands on these shores, right?
That is the dominant expression of Christianity that lands here.
So it really permeates, you know, everything there is.
And so all these ideas that we have—manifest destiny, the idea of America as a new kind of promised land or a new Zion—these are all read straight out of this idea of The doctrine of discovery and the idea that this land was somehow divinely or providentially reserved for the exploitation by this one people group from Europe.
But it's remarkably present, right, in our founding documents.
So even the Declaration of Independence has got this phrase about merciless savages, right, in the country.
The Constitution explicitly excludes Native Americans.
from the rights in that document.
And then it comes right up through, it's incorporated into U.S.
law through Supreme Court decisions.
And, you know, it's cited as recently and by none other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg, right, in a Supreme Court ruling where footnote one, you know, and this is a majority ruling, you know, against a Native American tribe, cites explicitly the Doctrine of Discovery as a reason why their rights really aren't things that have to be respected.
It's astounding, absolutely astounding.
The book is organized into three case studies and it's a really great and helpful way to organize a book like this because I think you really bring out how these two things, you know, anti-black racism and the treatment of of indigenous folks on this continent are connected.
The case studies are in Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Minnesota.
How was the doctrine of discovery, so let's say in Mississippi, that's your home state, you've already mentioned Mississippi, how was the doctrine of discovery used against Native Americans in the Mississippi Delta?
Yeah, you know, I think one of my favorite sentences in the book is, that sounds like a hyperbolic overstatement, but I really think it stands, is that, you know, I begin with Emmett Till and his murder in Mississippi, but, you know, he was born in 1941, but I write in the book that his story begins 400 years before that.
Right?
With Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador, showing up on the banks of the Mississippi in the early, early contact with Native Americans there, which was violent and bloody conflict there.
And so I think when I've really stayed focused on the Mississippi Delta, and what's notable there is that what has to happen first, again, before Uh, you know, the kind of whole antebellum scene that we kind of often associate with places like the Mississippi Delta can even exist.
There has to be, there are people there, right?
So there has to be this removal of, of killing and removal of indigenous people there.
And so there is, along with.
Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, all these kind of southeastern states that had Native American populations in the early 1800s begin to be pushed off the land and then forcibly pushed off the land under Andrew Jackson's presidency.
It was largest forced migration and The continent's history, some 80,000 people forced from their homes.
And again, maybe 20% of them die on the en route to getting pushed into what is now Oklahoma.
So that cleansing has to happen.
And it only happens really in the name of the moral kind of force and justification comes from Christianity.
This idea that these phrases like savages, uncivilized, heathen, right?
Those barbarians, like those kinds of languages come right out of this idea of Christian superiority and justify this horrific treatment and violence toward Native Americans.
And then right behind that, Right, once the land is kind of cleared of those original inhabitants, comes enslavement, right?
Because the land has to be turned into farmland, productive farmland.
And so right behind that are people of European descent make staking claims to land, in many cases like my ancestors, getting it for free from the government.
If you were of European descent and agreed to come down and homestead, you could just get a plot of land.
And And then used enslaved labor to turn that land into extreme wealth in many, many cases.
So there's a direct line here, and I think that's the new thing for me.
Of course, there's a way in which I knew that, but I think seeing the direct connection and that it's the same logic, I think that's the thing.
It's the same moral and religious logic fueled by this really dominant form of Christian understanding and worldview.
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It's astounding to think about forced migration of 80,000 people from the Mississippi Delta and then the importing of people from another continent.
I mean, it's astounding to think you would tell one group of people, you are forced to leave, go, we will walk you to Oklahoma so that we can have this land, and then we are going to import people and forcibly bring them from another continent so they will work the land for us.
I mean, when you think about it in those terms, it's astounding.
And then we arrived back at Emmett Till.
So you just talked to us about the, you know, the forced removal.
You've talked to us about enslavement.
How does this all end up with the murder of Emmett Till, a young boy in his early teenage years from Chicago, who's accused of doing something very minor harassment or, or, or glancing at a white woman.
And he's eventually murdered.
How does Emmett Till tie into the history you just told us?
Yeah, well, you know, if we kind of start with how does he get it?
How does his family get to Chicago?
His mother was born in Mississippi, in the Delta, not far from, you know, these other events that we're talking about, right, in the Mississippi Delta.
And why does her family end up in Chicago?
Well, her family was part of the Great Migration.
Uh, uh, as many, many families from, there was like a, a whole pipeline.
The Warmth of Other Suns tells the story like very beautifully.
People fleeing the Jim Crow South, right?
Because the South had, had thrown off this very brief period of reconstruction after the Civil War.
And it just started re-implementing segregation, voter suppression, uh, racial terrorism and the like.
And so their family fled to Chicago and he was actually back visiting his relatives in Mississippi.
That, that's how he got back.
He was visiting his uncle in the Delta, not far from where his mother was born.
And so then you ask what kind of a society is set up so that, yes, this kind of even minor infraction, he's a teenage boy and he evidently whistled at a woman running a store.
And he is tortured and killed, kidnapped in the middle of the night out of his house Tortured and killed by two white men who were subsequently tried and exonerated within an hour.
The jury deliberation by all white men took less than an hour.
And then they later confessed to the crime, but were never punished because they had been acquitted.
So how do you set up a society like that?
I think many of you have heard that story and it's so horrific and so brutal and so painful, but it becomes much less surprising.
When you see it against the backdrop of a worldview fueled of kind of white supremacy, fueled by this version of Christian understanding rooted in the doctrine of discovery.
So just to bring all of this to the present, friends, we've talked about the Doctrine of Discovery from the late 1400s, talked about your family history in the 1800s.
We've talked about Emmett Till and the woman who accused Emmett Till just died in April of 2023.
So it brings us all the way into 2023.
Carolyn Bonham Bryant, accused, is the one who made the accusation against Emmett Till and really set off all of these events.
So it reaches all the way into our current time.
Yeah, and I'll add one more.
I mean, that's maybe a more hopeful note to this big arc here is that, so I'm in D.C.
and I had the privilege just a few weeks ago of attending the reception after President Joe Biden signed a new proclamation establishing a new national monument that's going to be the Emmett Till and Mamie Till Mobley National Monument.
It's going to be under the auspices of the National Park System.
And it's going to be jointly located in the Mississippi Delta, where these events happen, and in Chicago, where he grew up.
This means that we're going to have, like, the federal government then supporting, under the National Park System, the telling of this story, right?
And for so long, this story was really forgotten and suppressed in Mississippi.
And that was part of the work, you know, in the book, I interview And spent some time hanging out with some of the folks that were about, like, making sure they told this story in the Delta on the ground.
And that work has really blossomed and resulted in this amazing new national monument so that this story—there's no chance at this point that this story will not be known and this part of our history won't be known.
And it's a great line, actually, that Kamala Harris had in the things she said, you know, let us not be seduced into thinking that we're going to be better if we forget.
We're going to be better if we remember, we're going to be stronger if we remember.
And I think that's one of the key things why this work is important.
Well, that leads right into a question I want to ask in a minute about CRT and book bans and how those are all part of the family history of the Doctrine of Discovery.
I do want to make one observation, though, which is that still in Mississippi, we have what seem to be vestiges of this way of thinking.
At least, at least from my view, some people may be familiar with the fact that there The state of Mississippi is basically taking over Jackson, right, and other parts of the state, right, in a way that really kind of tramples on the autonomy of majority black cities in the state and seems to kind of be a callback to a time when, you know, powerful white folks in state houses were kind of controlling the entire state.
So, you know, we can still see some of this in Mississippi politics, if I'm not mistaken.
No, I think that's right.
And just this week, we're seeing it in Tulsa.
Yeah.
There's also an attempt by a white state superintendent to take over the Tulsa public schools, right?
In a very similar way.
And I think it's, you know, I think it's why it's important to tell these stories because, you know, we have been here before.
And in many ways, these kinds of events, I think, are the last ditch effort as the country is changing.
So, you know, you talked about this line from Kamala Harris about, you know, we're not going to be better if we forget.
including violence in many cases, to this old world where white Christian people were at the center, at the top of the pyramid, et cetera.
So, you know, you talked about this line from Kamala Harris about, you know, we're not going to be better if we forget.
And in fact, by remembering we are better because we face history and hopefully we'll do better.
I'm thinking about the panics over critical race theory, book bans, dramatic changes to school curricula in places like Florida and Texas and across the South and across the country, really.
Is the Doctrine of Discovery at play in those things?
Can we trace some of the impetus for these kinds of moves to the spirit of the Doctrine of Discovery or is that just kind of going too far and it's all too far removed?
I mean, I think we can.
I think it's at play.
And what's at play, though, is really preventing us from seeing that for what it was, which was the blessing of the Church on racial violence.
And that's a hard thing to see, I think.
But I think it's an important thing to see if we're not going to repeat those mistakes In the future, but it is this kind of cover-up this you know attempt to forget to kind of forced amnesia like it is quite remarkable really and I'm Reminded of this searing quote from James Baldwin that I always like rings in my ears whenever this topic comes up That he he talks about
What black people thought about white people, and what he says is that, you know, there's a way in which we thought about, and he is saying, we thought of people as being the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.
And the sense that we have lied to ourselves for so long, right, that we don't even know who we are anymore.
Right, that we've not been willing to tell the truth about our lives, about the world, about our past.
And, you know, that can only lead to a kind of psychosis, you know, and I think we're seeing that in our politics.
Everything from the willingness to believe these wild conspiracy Uh, theories to going to such great lengths, uh, to like not count AP history as a high school credit, uh, in the state of Arkansas and in Florida doing some very similar, uh, things.
Um, these are fairly extreme responses.
Uh, and I think they're the, the, maybe the better word is desperate.
responses to kind of keep it covered up, right?
Because I think if it all sees the light of day, it's just purely unjustified.
And they know that, and I say we, maybe we white Christian people know that things are going to have to change and that we're going to have to be held accountable for some of these things and in a way that changes the way things are in the future.
It really feels like there is a sense in which we've gone from the doctrine of discovery to the doctrine of forgetting.
If you can forget, then you will have a generation of students, especially white students, who will not know the histories that created the inequalities of the present.
And if you can instill and cultivate that ignorance, that forgetting, then that's a winning strategy to keep the status quo.
It almost feels like forgetting is a pedagogical practice at the moment.
The art of teaching is the art of excising.
And that's really scary, but it really shows the psychosis, I think, that you just mentioned.
Yeah, and the fear, I think, really.
The fear of our own past.
I mean, what healthy nation is afraid of its own past?
I mean, you know, I spent some time in Berlin earlier this year, and everywhere you go,
There's a beautiful big memorial to the Holocaust victims in the middle of town, even on like random sidewalks around the city there are these little brass plaques, right, on cobblestones where there was a Jewish family abducted, kidnapped, or killed, and it has their names, their birth dates, their death dates, what happened to them, like all the stuff that they actually know as a way of just
Going about your everyday lives, trying to kind of reckon with that past.
And again, not to, I think the point of this is, I think it's often lost on people, not to beat people up or want to make white people feel bad or feel guilty, but it's about getting to, well, it's about kind of being liberated from that past and getting to a better moral place that, again, we might stand together on.
Well, and I want to move into kind of the book's treatment of reconciliation efforts in Mississippi and Minnesota and Oklahoma.
It strikes me that I cannot get away from this point, as you were talking, that there are a lot of people in the country right now who would tell us we need to move on from the past and not be teaching kids about Chinese exclusion, about the Middle Passage, about Japanese incarceration.
But if you dare take down that Confederate memorial, I am going to lose my mind.
Like it's on one hand, they're telling you, our kids don't need to remember that stuff.
On the other hand, it's like, if you dare take down that memorial, I used to live in Memphis, Tennessee.
If you dare take down that Nathan Bedford Forrest memorial, I am going to lose my mind because that is my America.
However, do not dare teach my child.
The other memories that we have as a nation because they're too young for that or it's inappropriate or it's going to make them feel bad.
It's amazing stuff.
Let's talk about reconcil- Oh, go ahead.
Sorry.
I'll just make one comment on that.
I mean, it's worth noting, right?
You know, we call these things memorials, right?
And the reason for that is because they evoke A certain kind of memory, right?
They have a story that they tell.
And, you know, I spent a little bit of time at the headquarters for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, digging through archives.
When you read back through the minutes of meetings, the rationales for, and they were raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to put these monuments up all over the country, but they were pedagogical.
In nature, right?
They actually had two programs.
They had a monument program, but the other major program they had was a textbook program where they were trying to get Confederate-friendly histories into public schools all across the world, really across the country, certainly across the South.
They had like a selected list of approved books, and they were trying to get them into the curriculum, including into black schools.
Uh, right.
To kind of tell this rose colored glass story about, uh, about, uh, the South and the Confederacy.
So these, it's not sort of a, like a passive active thing.
I mean, the whole Confederate Monument Project was a, like, uh, very active, very intentional pedagogical project to tell a white supremacist history.
Yeah.
And to make that a part, literally a part of the landscape.
You know, like I, one last point that I was in, I was in Virginia last week.
And drove through Orange, Virginia, which is near James Madison's former plantation, where he enslaved a number of people.
But Orange is the county seat, and the courthouse is there.
And there are two things on either side of the courthouse.
One says, Madison's too, right?
Got a founding father, all that stuff about our constitutional freedoms.
And on the other corner is a gigantic Confederate monument, still standing on the same corner of this courthouse in Orange, Virginia.
And I think we're still living with these contradictions.
You know, you talk about memorial and I once had a, I was once in one of these settings where you're at a dinner party and somebody makes the mistake of bringing up You know, Confederate memorials.
Yeah.
And I'm not really one who's good at not speaking his mind and making things awkward.
And so, yeah, we really got into it.
And he finally looked at me after the whole dinner party was ruined and everyone was just watching us argue.
And he said, well, if the Confederate memorials go away, what will I have for my ancestors?
What will I have from their life and experience?
And my response was, You'll have all the stuff you have.
You'll have pictures and journals and memorials.
You'll have a memorial inside your house.
I just don't think that publicly we all need to memorialize your family because I don't think that's something we should do collectively in our memory.
That's all.
There's a difference between remembering your kin and honoring them in some way and all of us publicly doing it, I think.
Also, to remember that those weren't just like honoring figures.
If you look at the words on the Confederate monuments, right?
This one in particular that's in the courthouse, on the county courthouse lawn, it says on there, they fought for the right.
Right?
If you went to Richmond, before the Jefferson Davis Memorial was torn down, there was this huge column that had a woman, a bronze woman with her finger pointing to the sky, and under it in Latin, it said, God will vindicate.
Yeah.
These were not passive, oh, we're just going to honor these people.
They were like, no, these were propaganda pieces, white supremacist propaganda pieces.
That's right.
Somehow we got in a Confederate memorial.
Sorry.
No, we got to bring it back to reconciliation.
One of the things I really appreciate about the book is the sustained attention given to attempts to find a better, you know, shared American path.
What does that look like in Mississippi?
What are the ways that you've already mentioned the Emmett and Mamie Till Federal Monument, National Monument, I should say.
What are the other things happening on the ground there that people may not be aware of and how do they point us to a better future?
Well, I think this is where I find some hope, actually, was hanging out with these people who, on the ground, have been trying to tell these stories of white racial violence and help the community heal and come to terms across lines of race.
So in Mississippi, it actually started, interestingly enough, with an African-American who was one of the first African-Americans to be elected after the Voting Rights Act was passed, and black people could actually register to vote.
in Tallahatchie County.
He was one of the first round of kind of wave of black elected officials on the local level.
His name was Jerome Little and what was remarkable about him is he grew up in that area and it wasn't until he was serving in the armed forces overseas in France that he learned about the story of Emmett Till.
Even though it happened, like, down the road.
That's how, like, complete the forgetting it was.
And so when he got back, I mean, he set out, he said, look, we're going to tell this story.
And it turned into kind of a multiple decade thing, but it, you know, it turned into people coming up.
And what's, I think what's so moving about those stories is that these, you know, it's a very small community.
The county seat, Sumner, Mississippi has like 600.
People and it's very rural is very poor is not a lot of resources available for people to tap.
And yet what we had was sons and daughters descended from enslavers and sons and daughters descended from the enslaved and sharecroppers.
Coming together, who know each other's family history.
These are not like anonymous things in small town America, right?
These people know their relatives.
And yet coming together with all this fraught history and saying, we are going to make a better place for the next generation.
And it starts with telling the truth about this very fraught history.
Uh, that we've been so quiet about.
We're going to tell the truth about that.
We're going to stand together and build something new.
And it's, and again, it was not quick.
I mean, this was like a couple of decades of work on the part of this group.
Uh, not, and I tell the story in the book, not smooth either.
Rocky, fraud, as anybody who's done this kind of community organizing work knows.
Uh, it never goes, never a straight line, but yet persistence over time.
Uh, and now we have this.
A new national monument that's going to be there to permanently tell the story.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
Again, I think one of the great virtues of your book is just the time you give to these stories of people on the ground in these three locations.
And it's easy, I know for me personally, it's easy for me to diagnose the problems, to lament them, to analyze them unflinchingly, but there's also the need to give hope in the face of all of that and to cultivate that hope.
I need to let you go, but before that, what's the best ways people can keep up with what you're doing, places you might be talking about your book, and anything else?
Yeah, well, I've got a little mini fall book tour.
So I'll be in Mississippi.
I'll be in Minnesota.
I'll be in Tulsa.
So kind of look for that.
You can find that posted on my Substack.
It's robertpjones.substack.com or you can get to it at white2long.net.
Either place will take you there.
And I'm writing regularly, kind of updates from the road, other kinds of commentary as we move through the fall and then into election season next year.
And then the book's available wherever books are sold.
There's an audiobook, there's Kindle, ebooks, hardcover.
However you want to read it, it's available.
But anyway, thank you, Brad, for the conversation.
It's great.
No, thanks for coming by.
I know you're busy, you're in great demand, and just really appreciate your insight.
And friends, check out the book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.
You won't regret it, and I guarantee you're going to learn a lot about a long history from even before this country was the United States.
As always, find me at Bradley Onishi, find us at Straight White JEC.
We do this show three times a week.
We don't have any outside funding, no big grants or university money coming our way.
So if you can support us on Patreon or Venmo or PayPal, that is all in our show notes.
Otherwise, we'll be back later this week with It's in the Code and the Weekly Roundup.
