The great white hoax Two centuries of selling racism in America

Racism has been a constant aspect of American society from the days of the Pilgrims, but as racial prejudice became incrementally less amenable to the American aspirational ideal, it had to be packaged to make it acceptable. Kadish examines the history of this phenomenon, calling it the Great White Hoax. He defines it as starting in the 1830s, with white America repeatedly conjuring and voraciously consuming false evidence of two perennially useful falsehoods: doctored proof of the racial inferiority of nonwhites and invented conspiracies against white supremacy. The hoax was employed successfully against Chinese laborers, by the Ku Klux Klan against Black and Jewish people, against the Irish during their diaspora, even today, as MAGA weaves its fear-mongering stories about Black, brown, and LGBTQ people. Kadish sheds a necessary light on some largely forgotten, tragic periods of American history; readers will come away with the impression that our current state of racial unease should not be surprising. This book provides the valuable lesson that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

In this eye-opening debut study, Kadish, an American studies professor at Pace University, aims to show that MAGA-era racism is "less an aberration than a return to form" by pointing to a long history of white supremacist hoaxes in the U.S. Noting that many of the country's major xenophobic, racist, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic movements were galvanized by "forgeries, impersonation," and "bogus" data, Kadish explains that these hoaxes always had two goals: proving the "inferiority" of nonwhite races (which in earlier times also meant non-Protestant), and proving the existence of conspiracies against the white race (à la the "great replacement theory"). Among Kadish's examples is the 1835 autobiography of Maria Monk, in which she claimed she had been raped by a Catholic priest while living as a nun and had fled her convent to avoid having her baby ritualistically strangled. Though revealed immediately as an anti-Catholic hoax (it was penned by the Protestant clergyman who actually fathered her child), it remained a bestseller for nearly two decades. Other examples include the work of Thomas Dixon, who wrote the novel the film The Birth of a Nation was based on, and Henry Ford's spreading of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Kadish concludes by raising troubling concerns about how AI could lead to a "Great White Hoax era with a more thorough top-down, Soviet-style truth control." This meticulous and captivating account makes a disturbing case that America is easily swayed by racist cons. (June)