Francis Adams and Barry Sanders spoke in ICC Auditorium last Thursday to publicize their new book Alienable Rights: The Exclusion of African-Americans in a White Man’s Land.

In a discussion that ranged from the quality of history education in America to the past and present of American race relations, the two authors argued that current perceptions of black Americans by whites are related to views of blacks from 1619 onward. “The depth of white revulsion at the prospect of intermingling with blacks . is the deep feeling which we believe white America maintains today, and has maintained throughout our history,” Adams said.

Adams began by explaining his and Sanders’ view regarding white America’s perception of itself in the world.

“White Americans believed early on that they were a very special race of people, that they were a chosen people,” Adams said. “In the North, where the Puritans were, there was a belief that they were the new children of Israel.”

This ideology, according to Adams and Sanders, was coupled with an ideology in the South that they call the “Anglo-Saxon myth,” that the Anglo-Saxon people were the best and “whitest” people in the world.

This view was personified by Thomas Jefferson, he added, who justified the American Revolution on the grounds that “he wanted to restore the old Anglo-Saxon law for the American people.”

The concept of white American superiority created a situation where those other people on the American continent – namely, blacks – were seen as inferior and undeserving of a respectful place in the new American state.

“So you can see, this idea of white specialness and black inferiority was planted very early, and was planted deeply in the White American psyche,” Adams said. “And indeed our impression now . is that it has never ended.”

Sanders, a professor of English and the History of Ideas at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., has previously written on topics such as the function of laughter in society, and the decline of literacy in the modern age.

Adams, an independent scholar, recently has returned to intellectual pursuits after taking a prolonged leave from academia to work on the 1973 mayoral campaign of Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale in Oakland. Adams also worked as a home-builder and later in the dining business.