White Supremacy was in the Minds of Settlers
For one to dismiss the idea of Manifest Destiny, and more importantly the ideology of white supremacy, is a crucial mistake being made by some researchers today. The power of white supremacy that was attached with God (Manifest Destiny) has not been studied to a great degree. The imagined difference between “races” became more and more exaggerated in the minds of whites as hundreds of battles were being fought to murder native people and push the borders of America westward. Native American scalps were sold as souvenirs and the body parts of mutilated women and children, both Indigenous and African, and were used to decorate the hats and horses of white militias. Andrew Jackson was guilty of this. Books of all sorts and newspapers stories, editorials, and drawings pushed the idea of white supremacy and made it a force for conquering and an engine of settlers coming to Texas. Additionally, the Haitian Revolution magnified hatred against Blacks as grotesque images of Blacks flooded the minds of whites. Not to take this into consideration is a gross mistake especially when the flood of Anglo settlers coming to Mexican Texas is reduced to the centrality of economics.
Texas settlers did illegally flood into Texas to gain wealth from the cotton trade but they were also led and fed by the white supremacist ideas of the time which was wide spread in the culture of people with lighter skin. Sick! With the genocidal practices of white militias and slavery existing side by side, it became necessary to justify the horrors of slavery with the ideas of white superiority. The racist images that flooded the minds of whites increased brutality and eventually led to the social policies written into law or practiced by whites as tradition. Using black women as “breeder slaves” was a common practice on plantations to name one such atrocity that was accepted as a norm. The poison of white supremacy was everywhere and cannot be dismissed as a minor influence for white settlers all across America and those coming to Texas.
The horrors of slavery included using black babies as “alligator bait,” burning blacks alive, chopping up their bodies and feeding them to hogs, pouring salt on wounds as torture, stealing black bodies from graveyards, and more of the things that white terrorists inflicted on Native Americans and Black People. Sometimes Blacks were poisoned when they refused to pick cotton or back talked an overseer or slave driver. Sometimes black people were pulled apart using two horses or tied up so and buried up to the neck while ants were thrown on them. Women were raped by slave masters and if pregnant the women might be whipped under the fetus fell from her body where it might be chopped up before her eyes. At other times, as soon as they babies were born, they were ripped away and sold by the pound at auction blocks—and yes, this kind of horror took place in Bexar County and especially in East Texas.
This is what they want to hide to create the myth of a “great democracy.” You cannot have a real democracy unless these issues are exposed and taught to the public. Trying to erase the horrors of slavery and white supremacy will not solve a thing and will only led to more hatred with injustice being denied or sugar coated. All of this must be taught so that this country can rid itself of racism and racial hatred. Hiding these horrors only makes it possible for brutality to continue.
