Hierarchy Books

“The document that heralded our national revolution, the Declaration of Independence, was penned by Thomas Jefferson. Within that text, he did not cover any Indigenous peoples, or White women, or Black folks with the grace of liberty.

Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Yet the presence of that “we” that held “these truths to be self-evident” in those words that are considered sacred spoke an absence: Non-White, non-male people didn’t establish this nation. They merely lived here.

I won’t descend into tortured explanations for Jefferson’s wording. (I will leave that to his apologists.) He was who he was—a rich man who would own approximately six hundred enslaved African Americans during his lifetime—and he wrote what he wrote: All men are created equal. Jefferson meant White men, not Indigenous men and not Black men—despite the fact that Crispus Attucks, an Afro-Indigenous man, was the first to fall in the Boston Massacre in 1770, an essential lead-up to the Revolution. “Men” did not include women, either, of any cultural background. Jefferson’s purpose in the Declaration was to establish White men as ultimate fathers, second only to God. White men as the authors of the limbs and blood and lineage of this nation. Jefferson didn’t need to state his purpose—his purpose is implied.

This was the brand of patriarchy created in this nation. Though patriarchy surely existed around the globe, our United States’ brand of that system was never meant to include—or benefit—anyone else but White, straight, cisgender men. The laws and practices of this country placed those men on the top of nation’s hierarchy.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings