George Yancy: Trump Relies on Centuries-Old Notions of Whiteness to Activate His MAGA Base

Whiteness is baked into the US’s DNA. Can it be structurally dismantled?

I was appalled and sickened by the AI-generated image of the Obamas as apes on Donald Trump’s Truth Social account on February 5, 2026. Bear in mind that this shameless anti-Black vitriol came out on this year’s 100th anniversary of Black History Month. In response to the justifiable backlash to the racist image, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Leavitt, as a white woman, doesn’t get to define as “fake” what we as Black people feel when it comes to blatant portrayals of anti-Blackness. And she should be reminded that Black people also constitute the U.S. public. Black people don’t need the approval of white people to feel outrage and anger when it comes to being treated as “inferior” and “subhuman.”

The horrible image of the Obamas reminded me of a phone message that I received just last semester at my university. I’m often reluctant to press play given my own personal history with white people leaving vitriolic anti-Black messages at my school. The message was filled with hatred: “Ooh ooh, ahh ahh. Scumbag!” Believe it or not, there it was: monkey sounds. Trump and the person who left me that voice message are pulling from the same racist playbook.

The comparison of Black people to apes has a long arc in U.S. and European history. In his book, Images of Savages, Gustav Jahoda points to 18th-century white planter Edward Long’s obsession with the anti-Black myths that portray Black people as monkeys and apes. For example, regarding Black people, Long argued, “Their genius (if it can be so called) consists alone in trick and cunning, enabling them, like monkeys and apes, to be thievish and mischievous, with a peculiar dexterity.”

And we mustn’t forget the tragic story of Ota Benga who, in 1906, was held at the Bronx Zoo’s Monkey House for white people to see the so-called “missing link.” Benga was kidnapped from his home in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and brought to the U.S. The fate of Benga is an example that demonstrates that whiteness thrives off anti-Black myths and lies. In short, whiteness is parasitic upon the dehumanization of Black people. But what is this racial and historical construction called “whiteness”? For an answer to this question, I turned to the important work of historian Dr. Carmen P. Thompson, who is the author of The Making of American Whiteness: The Formation of Race in Seventeenth-Century Virginia. She has held visiting scholar appointments at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York and in the Black Studies Department at Portland State University.

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George Yancy: Describing the origin of your important book, The Making of American Whiteness, you state that it “came about out of a lifelong quest to answer two questions that have befuddled me since childhood, why European people selected persons of African descent for centuries of enslavement, Jim Crow and other institutional forms of racism and why the social order of America ranks Whites highest and Blacks lowest.” Why this racial hierarchy?

Carmen P. Thompson: We have the hierarchal system of white supremacy that exists today in the United States because of the belief, by white people, in the supremacy of people of European ancestry over all other racial groups, especially Black people. The American form of whiteness manifested itself in the United States out of the exergies of the U.S.’s origin as a European settler colony of England that began in 1606 when England formed the Virginia Company of London, an investment company, chartered specifically to colonize areas of what is now the United States, the first being the colony of Virginia. In 1607, English investors, pastors, carpenters, masonry men, and other workers left England and settled in Virginia, with the goal of colonizing it despite Virginia already being fully inhabited by Native peoples.

This act of sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, leaving their old world to make a new one, marked the first act in the embodiment of whiteness, laying the foundation for the system of white supremacy that we have today. For to form a stock investment company that was backed and supported by the English Royal government, the Christian Church, and business interests for the sole purpose of forcibly establishing an English colony — be it by enslavement, land theft, or massacre — speaks volumes about what England and English settlers thought of themselves vis-à-vis Native peoples, and the coming groups of enslaved Africans who arrived in Virginia in 1619.

However, the prehistory of U.S. whiteness that came out of this hierarchal system of white supremacy derived its coherence from longstanding relationships, observations, and communications with other European nations — namely, Portugal, Spain, West Indies, and Netherlands — which for more than a century before England colonized Virginia in 1607 were active in the transatlantic slave trade. In fact, England modeled its colonization strategies from these observations so much so that in 1536, England established the English African Company with the express purpose of exploring the prospect of slave trading in West Africa. And by 1660, American whiteness was more than just functioning; it had matured, as evidenced by the settlement of eight English colonies in North America and the development of the Royal African Company, an English mercantile company chartered in 1660 to traffic humans in West Africa. Not long after this charter, England held a monopoly over the slave trade in West Africa for several decades — capturing, enslaving, and transporting more Africans to the Americas than any other European nation in the entire history of transatlantic slave trade.

It was out of this enterprise of African enslavement that the embodiment of whiteness and the ranking system of white over Black took shape. Examples include the bigoted names Europeans used to describe Native and African people, while referring to themselves as Christians or simply by their surnames. What was especially disturbing that speaks to the present matter of the Trump administration’s depictions of President Obama and his wife Michelle as apes is that this white supremacist trope depicting African-descended people as animals dates back to European settlement in Virginia. One instance found in 1659 in Virginia involved a farmer who named his cow “Negar Nose.” Others were found in the chronicles of English author Richard Ligon, whose observations of Black women in the Caribbean were published in his book, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, which stated their “breasts hang down below their navels, so that when they stoop at their common work of weeding, they hang almost down to the ground, that at a distance you would think they had six legs.”

This sort of hierarchical othering is a common feature of colonizers. According to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s book, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, colonizers assert the right to name the land (“Virginia”) and its subjects (“Indians”). He goes on to explain that names have everything to do with how we identify objects, classify them, and remember them. So in the case of Europeans identifying African people as “Negros” or even classifying them as “animals,” this naming established a hierarchical ranking in civil society — namely, that Africans were “inferior” to whites. So, yes, we have evidence of the hierarchical system of white supremacy exemplified through European colonization and naming practices in Virginia that demonstrate their embodiment of whiteness dating at least as far back as the 17^th century.

This next question is no doubt related to the first. Talk about why European people selected persons of African descent for centuries of enslavement, Jim Crow, and other institutional forms of racism.

The answer to the question of why Black people were chosen for enslavement is whiteness, although many historians and scholars would have us believe it was because of labor needs, or that African societies already had various degrees of freedom as a feature of their society, or that it was a result of the unintended consequence of the explosive demands of plantation economies in the Americas. This is not to say that these were not elements in the selection of African people for enslavement and the development of the transatlantic slave trade; they were, but only minor factors. Whiteness was the major factor. For surely there were enough Europeans who could have been enslaved to meet the demands if the transatlantic slave trade was purely about labor. And yet European people were never pressed into anything more than indentured servitude. Why? Because European colonizers did not view enslavement as part of the European character even for their “lowliest brethren” with whom they held a common culture and language. And as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o instructs us, the work of the colonizer is to remake the land and people in its own image.

Indentured servants and other poor Europeans already were members of the colonizers, land, culture, and genealogy; thus, there was nothing to remake other than convincing poor Europeans to relinquish their autonomy to their wealthier colonizing countrymen in exchange for legal protections against permanent bondage, the opportunity to own land, and the freedom to be masters of men themselves. In fact, Virginia leaders instituted precisely such legal actions by limiting the length of European servants’ indenture to ensure that the social position of poorer Europeans would never be as low as that of a slave. Thus, it was this type of white supremacist logic that was in effect in 1660 when England held a monopoly over the slave trade in West Africa for several decades during which time, as previously stated, England captured, enslaved, and transported more Africans to the Americas than any other European nation in the entire history of the transatlantic slave trade.

Likewise, the logic of white supremacy in 1660 was foregrounded in 1536 with the aforementioned founding of the English African Company, demonstrating that the English government held a belief in the “superiority” of Europeans over Africans more than a century before it held a monopoly over the transatlantic slave trade in 1660, and more than 70 years before it colonized Virginia in 1607 and Bermuda in 1609, having brought enslaved Africans to both of these colonies in 1619 and 1616, respectively. Thus, there were two core assumptions upon which European identity rested since England began colonizing Native lands and enslaving Africans bound to the Americas: that whites ranked “higher” than Blacks, regardless of class; and that whites never would be enslaved. All of this is foundational to the choice to enslave Africans rather than Europeans during England’s colonization of Virginia.

The government-backed endorsement of the objectification of African people and the elevation of lower-class whites over them was necessary to satisfy poor whites whose buy-in was needed to advance a national vision of white supremacy that kept wealth in the hands of the ruling elite. Thus, by willingly relinquishing their self-determination to the wealthy in exchange for guarantees that their social position would never be as low as that of a slave meant that England could proceed with enslaving Africans and establishing a social order where, at best, poor Europeans would have opportunities for landownership and good jobs, and at worst, they would still have a social position above that of African people, enslaved or free. This was the quid pro quo that existed and still exists among and between whites. It established the fundamental relations between white people that paved the way for their shared identification with whiteness that manifested itself in the social organization of Virginia, and by extension the United States, around white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

Since then, historians and scholars have used every tool available to promote the belief that Europeans are “superior” to Africans. And the effort has been relentless and coordinated. So, whether it was as Jacob Carruthers states in his book, Intellectual Warfare, the fabrication of the biblical curse of Ham into a myth that justified the enslavement of African people or the “immense psychic and intellectual energies eradicating the significance of Nubia for Egypt’s formation, of Egypt in the development of Greek civilization, [and] of Africa for imperial Rome,” that Cedric J. Robinson notes in his seminal book, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, the doctrine of white supremacy was institutionalized into England’s logic of the capture and enslavement of African people that led to the racial hierarchy of white over Black and everyone else in-between that exists today.

Your work provides an analysis that helps us to understand the making of U.S. whiteness. Talk about the specific social, political, and ideological dynamics that have continued to shape and reinforce U.S. whiteness in our contemporary moment.

The resiliency of whiteness from settlement in Virginia to today has to do with what the late philosopher Charles Mills called the racial contract or what I call the quid pro quo between poor whites and the wealthier ones that guaranteed the former legal protections by the latter that resulted in social and psychological benefits that made continually voting against their economic interests worthwhile to poorer whites. Thus, the persistence of whiteness in America after enslavement and Jim Crow ended was because there exists what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “wage of whiteness,” which is more psychological than monetary. And this psychological wage of whiteness, combined with the institutionalized white supremacy that is embedded in the operation of American institutions and reinforced in everyday life, is what makes whiteness so enduring generation after generation.

The clearest demonstration in American society of the ways in which the psychological wage of whiteness and institutionalized white supremacy are bound in the racial contract is during election season when white political candidates for city, state, and federal offices dog whistle the collective behavior expected of the masses of whites. Consider, for example, President Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy dog whistle used in his 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns that was designed to increase his political support among white voters in the South, despite the economic damage his policies caused, by appealing to their racism against African Americans.

Another dog whistle used to increase the white vote is the “welfare queen” dog whistle used by President Ronald Reagan in 1976, which associated Black single mothers with intentionally having children so they could live extravagantly off American taxpayers. Here, “American taxpayers” was code for white taxpayers. Along the same line, there was the dog whistle of the predatory Black man that George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign built around a Black man named William “Willie” Horton who committed a crime soon after being let out of prison. The campaign used a deliberately darkened photo of Horton to promote its law-and-order, tough-on-crime program as a contrast to that of his democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, who Bush campaign operatives predicted would release Black men like Horton from prison to prey on “the American people,” i.e., white people. Democratic President Bill Clinton likewise tried a similar appeal to bolster his support among white voters during his presidential bid for a second term when he signed the 1994 crime bill, which produced the “three strikes” policy that led to the mass incarceration of Black folks.

Last, but certainly not least, Donald Trump spoke and is still speaking the language of whiteness in American politics in ways that activate whites to respond and willingly vote against their economic interests but in support of the racial contract between them. A few recent examples date back to 2011, when Trump questioned then-President Obama’s birthplace, insinuating that he wasn’t born in America; casting him as alien and foreign, which led to the so-called “birther movement” that was a dog whistle to white nativism and nationalism. Trump used a similar approach in the 2024 presidential campaign when he said Kamala Harris wasn’t really Black. And if that wasn’t a loud enough dog whistle of whiteness for you, during one of their presidential debates he ridiculously claimed Haitian people in Ohio were “eating the dogs.” This last one leads us back to the earlier mention of the AI-generated video showing the heads of President Obama and his wife Michelle on the body of apes.

The politics of whiteness that are repeated in the political strategies of past and current presidents since the 1960s are meant to galvanize white folks and remind them in implicit and explicit language of their obligation to uphold the quid pro quo and vote against their interests in exchange for assurances that no matter how dire their economic outlook that, in the end, their whiteness will be protected by America’s two-party system against the threat that Black advancements might someday overtake their economic position in the racial hierarchy. Right now, the Republican Party and specifically the MAGA wing of the party are speaking to the quid pro quo of whiteness the loudest. And it has worked to perfection because white voters have not voted more than 50 percent for a Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Indeed, both parties, Democratic and Republican, are two sides of the same coin of whiteness. Nonetheless, the consistency of whiteness (whether liberal, conservative, or MAGA) across generations shows how whiteness is baked into the DNA of this country; manifesting itself in enumerable ways, big and small, within American society such that it only requires acquiescence among the masses of whites for whiteness to regenerate. The quid pro quo between wealthy and poorer whites that guarantees white people social position at the top of the racial hierarchy in American society has been (and still is), as James Baldwin said, the price of the ticket for whiteness since European settlement in Virginia.

To play on the title of your book, what would the un-making of American whiteness involve? I’m not simply thinking about reform or improvement. What do you think needs to happen to abolish — completely dismantle — American whiteness? In our current moment in the U.S., I think that is an absolutely crucial question, especially given the white backlash against Black people.

Frankly, George, I do not think it is possible to unmake American whiteness in a capitalist enterprise like the United States that is built on what Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 said are the three evils of American society: racism (or what I call white supremacy), excessive materialism, and militarism. However, for Black people in America, to whom much of American whiteness is targeted, any attempt to unmake whiteness requires a return to our ancient African and pre-European contact heritage, history, and ways of knowing; to liberate our minds from the Eurocentric values of white supremacy, materialism, and militarism that has so weakened our ability to think our way out of our current situation in the United States.

In other words, Black people must, as Jacob Carruthers challenges us, engage in an intellectual warfare against whiteness first by embracing an African worldview rather than a European one. This, Carruthers explains, is done by intense and aggressive study, research, and teaching of African history, culture, and languages by African-descended people and using these as weapons for Black liberation. Otherwise, to me, the best that Black people specifically, and other non-white people more generally, can hope for in this life and under these systems, and with this history, is to fight (organize, mobilize, and strategize) like hell to extract and hold onto whatever gains and resources we can.

But, I personally don’t believe we can ever unmake or dismantle American whiteness in the material, structural sense. We can only hope to mitigate some of the effects of it. For to abolish it would mean this nation as we know it would no longer exist. It would have to be rebuilt and reconceived into something brand new that is the opposite of the three evils of American society that King spoke about. And this still won’t be enough to totally abolish whiteness because the embodiment of whiteness will remain in the white masses even if there are no physical or institutional structures from the old system to reify it. This is because, as Du Bois has taught us, whiteness is as much psychological as it is material. So, unfortunately for the foreseeable future, whiteness in America is here to stay. However, for Black people, my immediate hope lies in the building and support of Black institutions to serve Black interests rather than white ones.

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First published in Truthout. Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

GEORGE YANCY is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. His most recent books include a collection of critical interviews entitled, Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and a coedited book (with philosopher Bill Bywater) entitled, In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (Roman & Littlefield, 2024).