White Supremacy Is Nothing New: How an old hierarchy keeps finding new language, from slave codes to Project 2025

In Episode 4 of Season 2 of Surviving Trump, host Bella Goode traces a straight line through American history to show that white supremacy did not reappear under Donald Trump—it adapted.

From the first slave codes in colonial Virginia to Jim Crow, redlining, “law and order,” and today’s “election integrity” and “replacement” politics, the same hierarchy has been rebuilt again and again. The language changes. The goal does not. Each time democracy expands, new terms and new strategies emerge to preserve racial power.

How the Pattern Works

This episode walks through the major turning points where progress triggered backlash. After Reconstruction and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, white terror groups used violence and voter suppression to undo those gains. When open racial language became unacceptable, poll taxes, literacy tests, segregation laws, and court rulings like Plessy v. Ferguson restored white rule without ever saying “race.”

In the twentieth century, the same hierarchy reappeared through redlining, the selective use of the GI Bill, and coded appeals to “states’ rights,” “neighborhood integrity,” and “law and order.” Civil-rights victories were met with new language designed to protect the same power structure.

From Code to Politics

In the digital age, those ideas moved online. White-power movements found new reach, conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement spread, and coded language gave way to louder rhetoric. Trump accelerated the shift by turning whispers into slogans—using words like “invasion,” “animals,” and “take our country back.” This opened the door for figures once considered fringe, including open white nationalists, to move closer to the mainstream.

Why This Matters Now

This episode shows why moments like a high-profile interview with an openly pro-Hitler extremist are not glitches. They are signals. They show how far these ideas have traveled—and how normalized they have become.

Most dangerous is not the loud rhetoric, but the quiet version: policies described as “race-neutral,” appeals to “heritage,” census changes, immigration crackdowns, and voting rules that quietly reshape who counts and who holds power.

Project 2025 in Context

Project 2025 is not a break from history. It is the latest update. It takes centuries-old ideas about hierarchy and rewrites them into modern policy—using federal agencies, administrative rules, and executive power instead of slave codes or segregation laws. The mission is the same: protect white dominance in a changing democracy.

Resistance and Responsibility

This episode also tells the other side of the story. Every resurgence of white supremacy has been met with resistance—from abolitionists to civil-rights organizers to today’s journalists, educators, and activists. Progress has never been automatic. It has always

Transcript

Bella Goode: 0:03

Hi there, I'm Bella Goode, and this is Surviving Trump. When Tucker Carlson sat down with Nick Fuentes, a man who praises Hitler and dreams of an all white America, it wasn't just another viral interview, it was a signal, a reminder that ideas that many of us assumed were buried in the past have once again found oxygen in mainstream politics. As historian Heather Cox Richardson often writes, every generation of Americans has collided with the same tension. The promise of democracy on one side, and the pull of racial hierarchy on the other. Today we're tracing that collision back through time from the first slave codes to the coded politics of law and order all the way to movements. Now trying to revive those ideas under the banner of heritage and patriotism because white supremacy didn't reemerge under Trump, it adapted, it waited for openings, and it found one. To understand today we go back to before the constitution. In 1705, Virginia wrote a set of slave codes that divided society along color lines. Africans enslaved for life, their children inherited as property and whiteness legally defined as power. This was the moment race became law. Not biology, not culture, but statute. Ministers preached divine order. Early scientists invented racial hierarchy on paper, and the economy grew on the backs of people, stripped of humanity. By the time Jefferson wrote, all Men Are Created equal. The definition of men was already narrowed by color and class freedom for some bondage for others, not a contradiction to the founders who benefited from it. It was a design. After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments tried to break that design. The country tried to dismantle the system that had defined who counted and who didn't. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment made formally enslaved people, full citizens and guaranteed equal protection under the law. And the 15th Amendment gave black men the right to vote. Together these amendments were meant to break the old design, a design that kept power in the hands of white landowners by denying freedom, citizenship, and political representation to millions of black Americans. They were an effort to rebuild the country on new terms where rights weren't determined by race. Unfortunately, the backlash was immediate white supremacist militias, the clan, the white league. The red shirts terrorized black voters and overthrew reconstruction governments. By the 1890s, white lawmakers had figured out how to rebuild racial hierarchy without ever saying the word race. They imposed poll taxes that poor black voters couldn't afford. They created literacy tests that were intentionally impossible to pass. They added grandfather clauses that excused white voters from those same tests if their grandfathers had been allowed to vote. Something no formally enslaved person could claim they passed segregation laws that separated every part of public life by race. Together, these tools restored white political control while pretending to follow the constitution. The case of Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896 locked this whole system into place In that case. The Supreme Court ruled that segregation was perfectly legal as long as the facilities were supposedly separate but equal. Everyone knew they weren't equal. That wasn't the point. The ruling gave the states a constitutional green light to segregate schools, trains, neighborhoods, hospitals, parks, and nearly every public space. It transformed racial separation from a local practice into a national legal doctrine. that doctrine became the backbone of what we now call Jim Crow. And Jim Crow wasn't just a set of laws, it was an entire system. A social order built to keep black Americans economically vulnerable, politically powerless, and physically segregated in nearly every area of life. They're called Jim Crow Laws because the term Jim Crow was already a racist caricature long before the laws existed In the 1830s, a white minstrel performer by the name of Thomas Dartmouth Rice created a blackface character that he called Jim Crow, portraying black people as lazy, foolish, or inferior. The character became popular and Jim Crow turned into a shorthand slur for black Americans. So when Southern States built a full legal system of segregation after reconstruction, people began calling it the Jim Crow system, a name that captured both the racism of the laws and the dehumanizing stereotypes that justified them. And even after Brown versus Board of Education in 1954 began dismantling the structure, the logic didn't disappear. Today's push for race neutral government echoes the same pattern language, that sounds fair, but erases the ability to detect discrimination at all, make the data disappear, and the inequality disappears with it. Anyway. By the 1920s, the Klan wasn't fringe, it was mainstream. Half a million members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in full regalia. Governors and senators ran on clan endorsements. Their slogan was 100% Americanism. Their targets, black Americans, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, anyone not considered real Americans. Meanwhile, fascism rose abroad. In 1939, 20,000 people filled Madison Square Garden for a pro-Nazi rally beneath a portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. After World War ii, the world saw where racial ideology leads overt white supremacy lost legitimacy, but of course it didn't die. Instead, it just reinvented itself. The GI Bill. Built the postwar middle class, but it redlined and blocked black families from those same neighborhoods. Redlining was a government backed practice in which banks and federal housing agencies drew red lines around black neighborhoods on maps and labeled them. High risk. That label made it almost impossible for black families to get home loans, even if they had good credit and stable jobs. So while the GI Bill opened the door to home ownership for millions of white veterans, black veterans were routinely denied the same opportunity, shutting them out of the very neighborhoods where post-war middle class was being built. Segregation wasn't just social, it was financial. Whole communities were locked out of wealth building for generations. White supremacy changed the vocabulary, neighborhood integrity, states rights, law, and order, but the purpose stayed the same. Preserve the hierarchy through policy instead of explicit hate. The 1950s and the sixties brought a wave of resistance, the NAACP used the courts to attack segregation directly. Their legal team, including Thurgood Marshall, filed case after case, challenging unequal schools, voting barriers and discriminatory laws. Those lawsuits laid the groundwork for landmark rulings like Brown V Board of Education, which struck down school segregation. Then there was the Freedom Riders. The Freedom Riders were interracial groups of young activists who rode buses through the deep South in 1961 to test whether the states were obeying federal desegregation orders. They faced violence, arrests and firebombings, but their actions forced the federal government to actually enforce civil right laws on interstate travel. There was also the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the SNCC, organizing sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement, where young black activists peacefully occupied, segregated lunch counters and refused to leave. Their goal was simple. Expose the injustice of segregation by challenging it directly without violence. The sit-ins spread across the south, drawing national attention and forcing businesses and politicians to confront the reality of Jim Crow. Ordinary Americans demanding that the country honor its own constitution, their victories. Brown versus Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act struck at the legal pillars of segregation, but politics adapted. Of course, starting in 1968, Richard Nixon's campaign figured out something powerful. You don't need to say segregation. Or race to tap into white voters' anger over civil rights progress. Instead, they built what became known as the Southern strategy, a political playbook that turned racial resentment into a winning electoral message. Phrases like law and Order. The silent majority sounded neutral, but everyone knew what they meant. They were signals to white voters who felt unsettled by school integration. The end of Jim Crow, rising black political power and the first signs of demographic change. It was race, politics, ENC coded language. It reshaped the Republican party for the next half a century. Reagan perfected the strategy when he launched his 1980 general election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and yes, you heard it correct, Philadelphia, Mississippi. He chose the exact place where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964 for helping black Americans vote. That location wasn't random. It sent a signal to white voters who still resented the civil rights movement. The same was true of his stories about welfare queens, which painted black women as cheats, draining taxpayer money. Reagan wrapped these messages in talk of fiscal responsibility, small government, and patriotism. The language sounded cleaner, but the underlying message stayed the same. Reassure white voters that their status and cultural dominance were being protected. The vocabulary changed, the purpose didn't, and just as an aside. I voted for Reagan. I was part of a generational Republican family, and of course now I look back and think I didn't know any better. I was stupid and ignorant Anyway, moving on. Then came the internet in the two thousands white power movements found fertile ground online through forums, message boards, fringe websites, incubators for militias, and the alt-right. In 2017, Charlottesville exposed that ecosystem men with tiki torches, chanting you will not replace us. The great replacement conspiracy, the belief that elites are orchestrating the elimination of the white race, moved from obscure chat rooms to primetime cable, political rallies and congressional hearings. And of course that brings us to Donald Trump. He didn't create this ideology, but he's certainly tapping into a racial narrative that has been building for decades. His language has stripped away the veneer words like invasion animals and taking our country back turned hidden code words into a blaring siren. He made demographic fear, not just acceptable, but central. To Republican politics and that shift created space for openly white nationalist figures like Nick Fuentes to move from the fringes into the conversation. Fuentes is what happens when years of coded resentment are replaced with blunt, unapologetic extremism. The end product of a movement that keeps redefining who belongs. In America across four centuries, white supremacy has worn many faces. Slave codes, Jim Crow Law and Order State's rights, real Americans, election integrity. The Great Replacement Project 2025. The vocabulary shifts, but the mission doesn't. Every era follows the same rhythm. Progress, backlash, reinvention. Each time America expands democracy, those invested in hierarchy, find a new language, a new mechanism, and a new way to protect the same old idea. White supremacy is in an accident in our system. It's one of the oldest operating principles, and each generation has had to challenge it to keep democracy alive. But there's another aspect too, and that's resistance for every clan march. There was a counter march for every law written to exclude. Another was written to fight back from abolitionists to freedom writers, to today's journalists, educators, civil rights advocates, and community organizers. The pattern is the same. White supremacy survives through adaptation, but so does democracy. The danger isn't just overt hate, it's the quiet, oozing, oozing when old ideas slip into race neutral policy into census changes, into attacks on immigration, into talk of heritage and tradition. That's why understanding this history matters, because once you see the pattern, you can't unsee it. So white supremacy is not new. It's America's oldest conspiracy theory. A myth of divine hierarchy used to justify violence, exclusion, and control, but every time it returned, Americans of Conscience stood up to stop it. Barack Obama put it simply. Democracy is not self-cleaning. It's self-correcting. But only when we do the work. In our next episode, we look at how these same ideas, the ones that justified slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow are being rewritten into modern policy through Project 2025. Because in 2025, white supremacy hasn't disappeared. It's been given an instruction manual. Thanks for joining me today. This is Bella Goode, and you're listening to Surviving Trump.