'Divided We Stand: Racism from Jamestown to Trump'

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif., Oct. 3, 2017 /PRNewswire/ The recent controversy, fueled by President Donald J. Trump, over athletes taking a knee during the National Anthem, has exposed what has always been a divide in American culture over race and racism.

White supremacy is not new. Quite the contrary. In his new book, author David R. Morse details how the "whiteness" of America came about, and how racism has been a constant in our national narrative, beginning with the founding of Jamestown to the current administration.

From the beginning, Africans were enslaved, and later, oppressed by lynching, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and most recently, police shootings.As different groups have arrived on American shores, the response has all too frequently been harassment and attempts to limit their numbers. While the pendulum has swung many times in the last 200 years, all too often the norm has been resistance or hostility toward those who are different than the dominant, Anglo-Saxon group.

The book cites both primary and secondary sources to make a cogent argument that people of color or ethnicities that are different from the country's white Anglo founders are always viewed with suspicionthat they are taking jobs from whites, bringing crime, or overloading public services. As well as taking a look at history, the book offers a vision of where we are headed as a nation.

"Morse's expertise in multicultural marketing research, combined with his superb handling of scholarly literature, make this book a readable and learned primer on the question of race in contemporary America," says Afshin Matin-Asgari, professor of Middle East History at California State University in Los Angeles.

Along with chapters for specific ethnic groups, Morse also explores the implications of race and science and the new interest in using DNA to establish ethnicity. The history of many of these ethnic groups shows that eventually most have been accepted and assimilated into American society, so that slogans like "No Irish need apply" disappear. In some ways, that assimilation history means that people forget how immigrant groups struggled for acceptance.

The book is currently available from Paramount Publishing, Inc.

About the Author
David R. Morse combines his passion for social justice, love of history and knowledge about multicultural communities in both his professional and personal lives. He is President and CEO of New American Dimensions, and he holds multiple degrees, including a Master of International Management degree from Thunderbird, the American Graduate School of Global Management; and a Master of Arts in History from California State University, Los Angeles.

Morse is the author of two other books, "Multicultural Intelligence: Eight Make-Or-Break Rules for Marketing to Race, Ethnicity and Sexual Orientation," and "Kissinger and the Yom Kippur War."