An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

the dehumanization of Native people was central to the founding political
theory of the United States. Indeed, to celebrate documents such as these,
without a critical eye, reveals that we fully accept the narrative of
Indigenous dispossession as inevitable.
The term “negroes” emerges only three times. Hamilton or Madison use
it in Federalist No. 54 to suggest that Black folks had been transformed into
property. The other use is to explain that they can help further the
representation for electoral voting, which did happen, in the form of the
Three-Fifths Compromise. The Three-Fifths Compromise counted enslaved
Africans as three-fifths of a person, an agreement that was made so that the
southern states could have what they considered an equal amount of
representation in the House of Representatives. Central to early US political
theory is the idea of sovereignty, especially who would belong and who
would not. White men desired to create a democracy based upon racial
inferiority, exclusion, and land expropriation, which all form the basis of
whiteness today. This, of course, set the stage for the many forms of
resistance that Black and Indigenous people used to maintain their land and
acquire their freedom.
THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE FORMATION OF WHITE
NATIONALISM
Thomas Jefferson was a wealthy slave owner. He was a white nationalist.
Neither of those statements should be controversial. He was also brilliant,
the author of the Declaration of Independence, and the third president of the
United States (1801–09). Black and Indigenous activists in the US and
people from around the world have quoted and paraphrased that damn thing
to death! While this document is often read as a key moment of the colonial
states’ formal breaking away from the British Crown, it is, in fact, deeply
anti-Indigenous. The document criticizes the king for not allowing the
colonists to populate the area: “He has endeavored to prevent the population
of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of
Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and
raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.” 9 Jefferson and the
co-signers were concerned about their right to be sovereign, but also wanted
to make sure that they could fill up the land that they had taken from Native
nations. Jefferson then charges the king with creating hostility from within: