Aristocracy in America: Tocqueville on White Supremacy

This article builds upon recent contributions to the growing literature on Tocqueville and race by exploiting underappreciated parallels in Tocqueville’s thought between European feudalism and American racial subordination. We show how four key features of Tocqueville’s conception of feudal aristocracy—heritability, membership, privilege, and exclusion—provide the foundation for an implicit account of white supremacy. In this way, we demonstrate that Tocqueville conceived of the United States as a racial aristocracy, specifically, an aristocracy of whiteness. By reconstructing Tocqueville’s structural account of white supremacy, we dispel the myth that he held a “prejudice” or “anomaly” theory of racism. Tocqueville’s views on race, therefore, have more in common with those of W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Mills, for example, than Gunnar Myrdal. Finally, we explore the advantages of conceiving of whiteness as a form of aristocracy rather than property.