#choctawremoval — Public Fediverse posts

Promulgated in papal edicts, the 🔺Doctrine of Discovery🔺
proclaimed the superiority of Christian civilization and authorized Europeans to claim ownership of any newly “discovered” lands inhabited by non-Christians.

The doctrine became part of U.S. law in an 1823 Supreme Court ruling that held the U.S. government had “an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy.” 

Robert P. Jones views the doctrine as a “Rosetta Stone” for understanding the “sense of divine entitlement, of European Christian chosenness, [that] has shaped the worldview of most white Americans.”

To show how whites’ sense of entitlement has played out in America, 👉Jones's book "The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future" examines three localities, each the site of white outrages against African-Americans:
🔸the Mississippi Delta, site of the 1955 murder of Emmitt Till;
🔸Duluth, Minnesota, where in 1920 a mob of more 10,000 whites lynched three Black men; and
🔸Tulsa, Oklahoma, where in 1921, whites descended on the prosperous Black district of Greenwood, burning homes and businesses and killing between 100 and 300 people.

In each case, the whites responsible faced little or no punishment.

These atrocities were foreshadowed by earlier white violence in those areas toward Native Americans.

🔷A century before Till’s murder, the U.S. government forcibly removed the Choctaw people from the Mississippi Delta, clearing the land for white settlement and a plantation economy exploiting Black slave labor.

Jones then shares tales of white depredations against Native Americans in Minnesota and Oklahoma.

🔷In 1862, some Dakota people in Minnesota rebelled against white mistreatment and treaty violations. At the end of the five-week uprising, the U.S. government hanged 38 Dakota men after sham military trials, most lasting “only a minute or two,” Jones notes, in the largest mass execution in U.S. history

🔹As for Oklahoma, Jones writes poignantly of the Osage people, who suffered forced assimilation, violence at the hands of white mobs hungry for their land, and then, after oil was discovered, a “Reign of Terror” in which whites systematically swindled and murdered them.

#whitesupremacy #racism #EmmittiTill #greenwood #doctrineofdiscovery #ChoctawRemoval #Indigenousrights
https://www.texasobserver.org/the-origins-of-white-christian-supremacy/