A Racist Past

One thing many white Americans struggle to do is to deal honestly with the past. It’s uncomfortable. It’s troubling. We don’t like the image it paints of our forebears. We’d rather hold them on a pedestal and worship their glory than to face the reality about their racism, bigotry, and chauvinism. That is a disservice to us all. As the famous maxim says, “Those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it.”

And repeat it we are.

Let’s go back as far as we can in our “American” history, to the arrival of the first settlers to the “new” world. We called them savages. We broke our promises, destroyed our treaties, and stole their land. Then, when they finally had the drive to fight back, we decimated them, all in the name of establishing a “city on a hill.” Taking cue from the conquest of Canaan in the Old Testament, we wiped out as many as we could, and those we could not were driven off their ancestral lands and forced over and again to relocate, each time to less desirable land.

Then, as we were committing ethnic genocide against the indigenous people of this world, we replaced their brown bodies with black ones, stolen from their lands, their homes, and their livelihoods and forced to toil for our benefit. We dehumanized them, claimed they weren’t completely human, and distorted the words of the Bible, a Bible that was no stranger to the African continent, to belittle, overpower, and subdue them.

Then, as if that wasn’t enough, once freedom for slaves was achieved through violence and bloodshed of a Civil War, we continued to enslave them through the slavery of the criminalization of Black skin and to oppress them through Jim Crow laws and segregation. As they struggled for equality and for equity, we drew red lines through neighborhoods, refusing to loan money to people of color, meaning that wealth and equity could not be built. We raised taxes on their property so we could then steal what was rightfully theirs. We denied them access to capital then blamed them for their poverty.

We imprisoned those who nonviolently struggled for dignity; we claimed they were violent, trouble-seeking hoodlums. We lynched them, their bodies hanging in the trees as a testament to our hate-filled hearts.

With every minor step forward we’ve devised more subtle forms of racism. We over-police their neighborhoods, and criminalize their children. When they die at police hands we claim they should have complied, or that they somehow earned their death.

Not only is our thinly veiled white-supremacy aimed at those of African descent, but we share it with all those who don’t look, act, or speak like us. We demand people speak English, even though there is no national language in the United States. Then we belittle people who speak with thick accents, calling them ignorant even though they are working to master their second, third, or fourth language.

We call a global pandemic the “Chinese Virus” then lash out against Asian communities with hate a vitriol. Then we refuse to take basic precautions, spreading the virus and worsening it’s impact, all the while blaming and othering innocent people.

We separate ancient tribal lands, dividing indigenous communities with walls in the desert. We violate sacred burial grounds and sacred mountains with pipelines and kitsch monuments, then we act as if they are anti-progress because they oppose destroying their temples or their homelands.

The list could go on. We scapegoat all Arabs as terrorists, all those with black skin as dangerous, and all those of Latinx decent as lazy.

If there truly is an original sin of the United States, it is white supremacy. It is a sin we have never dealt with. In the name of “moving forward” and of “letting go of the past” we’ve allowed this sin to fester. Instead of outlawing signs and symbols of it we claim they are our heritage, and fly them high on the interstate. We name our roads, college buildings, and counties after people like Ben Tillman, John Calhoun, and Andrew Jackson; people whose words and actions against the racial and ethnic other should disqualify them from our memorials.

Instead of lifting up the voices of those who opposed such evil, we lift up its greatest champions, and then we wonder why racism, ethnocentrism, and white-supremacy still plague us.

It is long past time for us in the United States to be honest about where we came from. We need to lament our history as we rightfully remember the atrocities that gave rise to our nation. We need to remember our history rightly and erase the memorials to evil that deface our landscapes. If we don’t do this we can never move forward to a more just and equitable future.

The future is in our hands, will we do what is necessary? Or will we continue to ignore, white-wash, and romanticize our vile and hateful past?