Joel Olson Quotes

Despite the popular perception that race is “natural” or “timeless,” the biological notion of race is a modern European invention. When race was invented, however, it was invented as “the child of racism, not the father,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, and “the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.”442 Whiteness has never existed independent of its location at the top of the racial hierarchy. Thus, as Joel Olson explained in The Abolition of White Democracy, “ ‘White’ or ‘Caucasian’ is not a neutral physical description of certain persons but a political project of securing and protecting privileges…

Joel Olson demonstrated that whiteness is intricately bound to U.S. notions of citizenship, arguing that there is no contradiction between the constitutional ideal of freedom and the peculiar institution of slavery because the freedom of whites has long been made through the unfreedom of others.