From Bacon’s Rebellion to the Last Stand: Whiteness, Hegemony, and the Politics of Desperation

Written by Kino Smith

There are moments in history when power does not reveal itself through confidence, but through panic.

America is in such a moment now.

The familiar question continues to surface, often framed cautiously, as if it might detonate on contact. What is the benefit of the construct of whiteness to Black people, weighed honestly against the harm it has produced historically and continues to produce?

The answer has never changed.

Whiteness was not constructed to benefit Black people. It was not designed to stabilize democracy, reward merit, or produce justice. It was engineered to resolve a recurring crisis for empire: how to extract land, labor, and resources while preventing solidarity among the exploited and avoiding accountability for violence.

What has changed is not the function of whiteness, but its condition.

It is no longer confident. It is defensive.

And that is what makes this moment dangerous.

Bacon’s Rebellion and the Invention of Division

To understand the present, we must return to one of the most misunderstood uprisings in American history: Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676.¹

The rebellion was not merely a dispute between colonial elites. It was a multiracial uprising of poor Europeans, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans against a planter class that monopolized land, labor, and political power. Contemporary records and later historical analyses confirm that enslaved Africans and white servants fought and fled together, revealing a moment in which class solidarity briefly eclipsed racial distinction.²

This convergence exposed the central vulnerability of early colonial capitalism: cross-racial solidarity among the exploited posed an existential threat to elite rule.³

The rebellion was ultimately crushed, but its lesson was codified in deception with violent precision. Colonial authorities did not simply punish dissent. They redesigned the social order inventing whiteness to prevent such coalitions from ever re-emerging.

Over the following decades, Virginia lawmakers enacted statutes that permanently enslaved Africans, made that status hereditary, and simultaneously expanded legal privileges to Europeans regardless of poverty. This process culminated in the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, which formally distinguished “white” persons from enslaved Africans in law and consolidated racialized, hereditary slavery as the foundation of colonial governance.⁴

This marks the moment whiteness becomes operational in America.

Not as culture.Not as identity. As counterinsurgency.

Whiteness functioned as a technology of division, deliberately engineered to prevent multiracial solidarity from ever again becoming a political threat.⁵

Whiteness as Hegemony

From that point forward, whiteness functioned not merely as a social descriptor but as a governing logic. It structured access to land, citizenship, credibility, and protection, allowing elites to maintain power through separation rather than consent.

In this context, hegemony describes how systems behave when legitimacy erodes but power remains intact. When consent weakens, coercion increases. When narrative authority falters, enforcement intensifies.⁶

The pattern is historically consistent.

When legitimacy is stable, whiteness softens.When legitimacy erodes, whiteness hardens.

In the nineteenth century, this logic was cloaked in Manifest Destiny, an explicitly racialized doctrine that framed territorial expansion and Indigenous dispossession as divine and civilizational necessity.⁷ In the twentieth century, demographic anxiety was translated into eugenics and immigration restriction, presented as scientific management of population rather than racial domination.⁸

Courts enforced this logic administratively, most clearly in cases such as Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), where the Supreme Court ruled that legal whiteness was not a biological fact but a matter of social recognition and exclusion.⁹

At every stage, the language shifted. The hierarchy remained.

George Floyd and the Disruption of Moral Equilibrium

The murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the global protests that followed did not dismantle this system. But they did something historically significant.

They disrupted the tacit moral equilibrium that allowed whiteness to function without being named.

Even where corporate statements and institutional acknowledgments proved performative, the scale of public recognition mattered. For the first time in generations, racial hierarchy was widely treated not as residue of the past but as a present structure demanding explanation.¹⁰

From a hegemonic perspective, this rupture was intolerable.

What followed was not reflection, but retrenchment. Not reform, but reaction.

This response is visible in the rapid rollback of DEI initiatives, the legal dismantling of affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC (2023), and the reframing of civil rights remedies as unconstitutional favoritism rather than corrective justice.¹¹

These developments reflect a system under legitimacy stress reverting to preservation through control.

The Return of Unapologetic Power

When narrative authority fails, hegemonic systems return to first principles.

Modern governance increasingly echoes older forms of domination: immigration enforcement framed as invasion defense, protest framed as disorder, diversity framed as dilution, and accountability framed as persecution.

In 2025, the Department of Homeland Security’s public dissemination of John Gast’s 1872 painting American Progress , a canonical image of Manifest Destiny, sparked widespread criticism from historians and civil rights observers. The image, long associated with westward expansion, Indigenous displacement, and white civilizational destiny, was used in official DHS messaging about homeland and heritage.¹²

So, while intent can be debated, it definitely demonstrates continuity.

The same justificatory grammar once used to normalize conquest and exclusion remains available and operative under pressure.

Global Dependency and the Limits of Force

This logic does not stop at national borders.

American power has never been self-sustaining. Its economic rise and geopolitical dominance are inseparable from the extraction of Black and Brown labor, intellect, and natural resources across the globe.

U.S. policy toward Venezuela illustrates this pattern. Regardless of one’s view of its government, extensive economic sanctions tied to strategic oil interests have produced severe civilian harm while failing to generate political resolution. Scholars and humanitarian organizations have documented how coercive economic measures function as tools of dominance rather than diplomacy.¹³

This is not an aberration. It is structural dependency enforced through power.

A system built on extraction cannot survive by severing itself from the sources of its own sustenance. Nor can it maintain dominance indefinitely through coercion alone.

The Full Cycle

The Bacon’s Rebellion parallel now comes full circle.

Bacon’s Rebellion revealed the danger of solidarity. Whiteness was constructed to prevent it.

The George Floyd era revealed the danger of moral clarity across racial lines. Retrenchment followed.

The conditions that produced whiteness are reappearing: widening inequality, declining legitimacy, global interdependence, and multiracial consciousness. The same forces that once threatened elite control are again visible.

The response is familiar.

Not reconciliation.Not redistribution.But a desperate attempt to restore hierarchy through exclusion, lawlessness, and force.

This is not confidence. It is decline behavior.

What Reckoning Would Require

Reckoning is not symbolic apology. It is institutional transformation.

Legally, it requires accountability for civil rights erosion and the restoration of protections dismantled under claims of neutrality.Economically, it requires repair for extraction and exclusion, not merely inclusion within unequal systems.Narratively, it requires honest historical accounting that treats racial hierarchy as design, not accident.

Anything less is delay.

And delay, historically, has only deepened fracture.

The Question That Remains

So the question before America is no longer abstract.

Can a nation built on division survive without the labor, creativity, and resources of those it marginalizes?Can it maintain global influence while rejecting the very world that sustains it?Can whiteness be preserved without destroying democracy itself?

History suggests the answer.

Hegemonic systems that refuse reckoning do not stabilize. They fracture.

Whiteness, as a governing construct, cannot be reformed. It can only be dismantled or enforced.

And enforcement is always temporary.

The true origin of this country is not innocence or destiny. It is power, extraction, and control. Its survival, however, has always depended on those it seeks to subordinate.

That is the contradiction at the heart of this moment.

The final question is not whether whiteness can endure.

It is whether America can survive clinging to it.

History will not ask what we intended. It will record what we defended.

And the cycle is closing.

Footnotes

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Bacon’s Rebellion,” https://www.britannica.com/event/Bacons-Rebellion

2. National Park Service, “Race, Slavery, and Freedom in Colonial Virginia,” https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/race-slavery-and-freedom.htm

3. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (W.W. Norton, 1975).

4. Library of Virginia, “Virginia Slave Codes of 1705,” https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/dbva/items/show/51

5. Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1 (Verso, 1994).

6. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (International Publishers, 1971).

7. Smithsonian National Museum of American History, “Manifest Destiny,” https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/manifest-destiny

8. Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation (University of California Press, 2005).

9. Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922); United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923).

10. Pew Research Center, “Global protests after George Floyd,” https://www.pewresearch.org

11. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. ___ (2023).

12. The 19th News, “DHS criticized for posting Manifest Destiny imagery,” https://19thnews.org/2025/07/dhs-american-progress-painting-white-womanhood/

13. Center for Economic and Policy Research, “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment,” https://cepr.net