March Madness: Who is the G.O.A.T. of Racism?

Who will our 64-team single elimination tournament crown as the Greatest Oppressor of All Time?

Which is worse: handing a noose to a lynch mob or electing a white supremacist president? Is a legislator who creates racist policies worse than a lone wolf who commits an act of racial terrorism? Segregationists or redliners? The Klan or COINTELPRO?

Unlike some people, I believe that America has always been great. Even if the current administration manages to completely dismantle the democratic principles and civil liberties for which Black people fought, they can never take away the admiration and pride that I have for the most innovative country that ever existed. Even if you don’t believe in the myth of meritocracy and American exceptionalism, you have to admit:

We are exceptional racists.

Unlike … well, every other social, political and economic issue in the world, some people believe we can solve racism by not talking about it. (Unless, of course, you talk about DEI, CRT, wokeness or whatever new word they co-opt as a euphemism for “not white” ). Thankfully, that protocol no longer exists.

Now that the country has collectively decided to completely abandon the idea of a “more perfect union,” we wanted to pause to remember the trailblazers and pioneers who took an idea conceived in Thomas Jefferson’s basement (next to his raping table) and turned it into a thing to behold. While we hold all these great white men in high esteem, the capitalist ethos on which this great nation was built demands that we ask the most American question of all:

Who is the racism GOAT?

Of course, crowning the most American American of all time depends on how you define racism. For some, racism is synonymous with hate and ill intent. They don’t mind erasing Black history, stripping away equal rights and ignoring racial disparities. Even if the results of their actions have a disproportionately negative impact on one racial group — as long as they aren’t screaming the n-word and beheading a Black infant while wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe — in their minds, they can’t be racist.

Others, however, define it by deferring to something called a dictionary:

Racism:

1. a. a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race, or:

   b. behavior or attitudes that reflect and foster this belief : racial discrimination or prejudice

2. the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another, or:

   b. a political or social system founded on racism and designed to execute its principles

Whether you consider it to be a belief, a behavior or a system or a feeling that white people never get because they don’t see color doesn’t matter (Apparently, your retinas stop working when you grow up in a Black neighborhood listening to Earth Wind & Fire while dating a Black guy in college before adopting a negro baby). We want you to help us crown the Greatest Oppressor of All Time.

We selected 64 competitors in four distinct divisions:

1. Politics and government: This includes elected officials, judges and appointees who served in local, state or federal government roles.

2. Organizations and companies: Corporations, civic organizations and any group that has an official membership.

3. Influencers: Media personalities who platform racists, billionaires who fund racism and the pioneers of racist movements.

4. Mobs and movements: Loosely defined racist campaigns, extremist movements and collectives that embody a racist ethos

You can see the whole bracket with updated scores here. Only subscribers to ContrabandCamp can vote.

Here’s how our GOAT tournament bracket works:

Each day, we’ll focus on one division. Readers will have three days to vote on each matchup, and the winner will move on to the next round. At the end of the competition, we will crown the G.O.A.T. of white supremacy.

It’s like March Madness, but for racism.

Here are the first-round matchups in the Politics and Government division:

Happy voting:

When overall No. 1 seed Thomas Jefferson was 45, he impregnated his dead wife’s 15-year-old sister. To be clear, Jefferson was not “a product of his time.” Interracial relationships were illegal in his home state, and he had to coerce a teenage Sally Hemings back to America from France so he could continue enslaving his own children. He believed that Black people were “inferior to whites in the endowment of the body and mind.” He hired someone to torture Black boys as young as 10 to prepare them for forced labor, but fired him because he did not whip the boys enough. Even though he wrote the Declaration of Independence and was one of the most powerful men on the entire continent from the day America was born until the day he died, Thomas Jefferson never formally freed an enslaved person in his life.

Not one.

Not even his children.

Theodore Bilbo was an elected politician who spent 40 years representing the state of Mississippi.

I mean … that should be enough, right?

As governor, Bilbo supported lynching. During his time in the U.S. Senate, Bilbo wanted to use New Deal money to send Black Americans back to Africa. He is the only elected official mentioned in the Haynes Report finding the causes of the Red Summer of 1919. He boasted about his Klan membership. He was one of the original creators of the “great replacement theory.”

Andrew Jackson was so famous for using the toughest tree he could find to beat a Black women he enslaved that people started calling him “Old Hickory.” He paid slave catchers an extra $10 for each lash they delivered to runaway slaves. He wanted to use federal postal laws to arrest abolitionists for mailing anti-slavery pamphlets. He built his presidency on the cornerstone of “Manifest Destiny” — the idea that God wanted white people to own America. When the Supreme Court ruled that Indian removal was technically illegal, Jackson did it anyway.

Andrew Jackson is the single greatest ethnic cleanser in the history of the continent.

On Sept. 9, 1739, a group of enslaved Angolan warriors gathered outside of Charleston, S.C., to free all the slaves. The plan for the Stono Rebellion was simple:

We’re going to kill all the white people.

Unfortunately, one of the white people who got away was acting Governor William Bull. He returned with a makeshift militia, slaughtered the rebels, put their heads on spikes and deputized America’s first slave-catching team. A year later, Bull signed the Negro Act of 1740, which codified white supremacy in America and served as the template for every state’s slave codes. Before Bull, colonial slave law treated enslaved people as, well … people. But Bull’s greatest innovation in the field of white supremacy was one sentence in his Act for the Better Ordering Negroes and Other Slaves:

That all Negroes … and all their issue and offspring are hereby declared to be, and remain forever hereafter, absolute slaves…and shall be adjudged in law, to be chattels personal, in the hands of their owners and possessors.

During George Wallace's tenure as an elected official (1946-1967), terrorists bombed more than 50 homes in one neighborhood in Alabama. Aside from jailing Martin Luther King Jr., herding Black children into makeshift concentration camps, using state troopers to attack nonviolent protesters and promising to defend institutional racism “forever,” Wallace was a pretty decent governor. After all, he was right about one thing:

George Wallace “will never be outniggered again.”

President Woodrow Wilson was a pioneer in inequality He resegregated the federal government, used the U.S. military to occupy Haiti, supported the Klan and singlehandedly rewrote the Lost Cause myth into American history. He hired a young librarian named J. Edgar Hoover to target “radicals” while ignoring the violence that became known as the Red Summer of 1919.

Make your pick:

Which one is worse?

The president who started the program that allegedly resulted in the crack epidemic (Reagan) or the president who ended the “40 acres and a mule” program? (Johnson). Was Reconstruction worse than the War on Drugs? Which mass incarceration system was worse: the convict leasing system that followed the Civil War (Johnson) or the mandatory minimums instituted after the Civil Rights Movement? (Reagan). Is the guy who dismantled government assistance by demonizing “welfare queens” (Reagan) worse than the guy who shut down the Freedmen’s Bureau? Is a president who wants people to “admit that the white race was superior to the Black” worse than the guy who called people “monkeys from those African countries”?

You might be surprised about the last one.

Before serving in the Senate for three decades, Jesse Helms built a career helping other racists get elected to office. He coined the campaign slogan “Wake Up, White People” and warned against politicians that supported the “mingling of the racist.” An early pro-lifer, he wanted to give due process to fetuses, but not Black people. He opposed the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and the King holiday. He created a private force to intimidate Black people at the polls and sent racist postcards to Black voters.

Senator James M. Mason was so racist he had to leave the country. He wanted to expand slavery across the country and pushed for Virginia to leave the union to create a separate slaveholding country. During the Civil War, Mason traveled the world to get other countries to recognize the Confederacy. When the Union Army took over a luxurious plantation to use as an office, Black soldiers found it belonged to Mason and burned it down. They also burned down his other residences, but they had a good reason:

James M. Mason wrote the Fugitive Slave Act.

Donald Trump nominated the justices who struck down affirmative action and abortion, but FDR put a literal Klansman on the Supreme Court. Roosevelt’s New Deal created the racial wealth gap; Donald Trump is dismantling the policies that were created to fix it. Trump wants to deport Mexicans; Roosevelt’s Mexican Repatriation Act actually did it. Roosevelt created redlining; Trump is just letting it continue. Roosevelt used the “blue ticket” to kick Black and gay people out of the U.S. military; Trump uses DEI. Both are in favor of using executive orders to put people in concentration camps. Both filled their administration with Nazi sympathizers.

But only one man can win.

This intra-state rivalry features two top-tier white supremacists and the most powerful legislators of their era. John C. Calhoun served as vice president, secretary of state, representative and senator and was perhaps the most influential pro-slavery politician in American history. Calhoun’s nullification crisis gave pro-slavery Confederate states the justification they needed to secede from the Union and left the Democrat-Republican Party because of their support for gradual emancipation. John C. Calhoun was the first politician to weaponize the filibuster to protect white supremacy. He voted against every bill that compromised the right to own slaves and defended it to his death.

As he died, his mentee James Mason read Calhoun’s speech on the Senate floor advocating for slave states to leave the Union.

Segregationist Strom Thurmond was perhaps the most powerful senator in American history. He abandoned the Democratic Party because of his opposition to integration, giving the GOP the justification for the party’s racism. His filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 still holds the record as the longest in history. Because of he believed God hated race-mixing, he voted against every civil rights law that came before the Senate and asked the FBI to “discredit” Martin Luther King Jr., whom he hated.

Strom Thurmond had a Black daughter.

This first-round matchup embodies the essential question of this tournament:

What kind of racism is worst?

As Andrew Jackson’s chief legal adviser, Roger Taney argued constitutional rights for free Black people were “a matter of kindness and benevolence rather than right.” As attorney general, Taney was literally the person who authorized Jackson’s ethnic cleansing plan for Indian removal. As a Supreme Court justice, he even drafted an opinion striking down the Emancipation Proclamation, hoping someone would challenge it. But his legacy can be encapsulated in one of the most famous sentences in legal history.

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect — Roger Taney, Dredd Scott, Plaintiff in Error, v. John F. A. Sanford

Ben Tillman was a South Carolina governor, a U.S. senator and a cruel slave master.

He was also a mass murderer.

In response to the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, Tillman came up with a way for white supremacist terror cells to protect themselves by forming “rifle clubs” using the Second Amendment as a shield. Leading up to the election of 1876, Tillman created the “Edgefield Strategy” to help his white supremacist colleagues overcome the state’s majority Black voters.

What if they just murdered all the Black people?

Tillman led two racial massacres (Hamburg and Ellenton) and murdered a Black state senator while he was praying. When his racial terrorism didn’t work, Tillman rigged the local election and the Electoral College. To settle the presidential election, the Compromise of 1877 essentially granted the Southern States the right to institute Jim Crow. “I, as the exponent and leader of the revolution which brought about the change, am here to take the solemn oath of office,” Tillman said at his 1890 gubernatorial inauguration. “The triumph of democracy and white supremacy over mongrelism and anarchy … has been most complete.”

Good luck deciding!