Is America foundationally racist?
Is America’s proud identity of an economic and global superpower, the young nation of rebels and revolutionists, the “land of the brave, and home of the free,” and so forth and so forth so fragile that it cannot acknowledge its institution of racism and its blatantly racist foundations without making the white readers of this article grit their teeth and assume an air of discomfort? Is the challenging of that superiority or even simply the acknowledgment of the inequalities among the races so discomforting that you maybe don’t want to continue reading this piece which will probably make you uneasy? If these questions apply to you- or even if they don’t yet you understand that to many readers they do, then you already understand that this is a nation rooted in racism and watered with subtle yet constant reminders of the inequality of the races. If the object of this piece, to force the acknowledgement of the instilled racism this country was built upon, makes you uncomfortable, then you are the target audience, do keep reading . . . and it’s okay to be uncomfortable, we all are.
The founding of America is attributed to the white fathers who painted the picture of freedom- the Washingtons, Lincolns, and Jeffersons of proudly taught white american history. What is equally as relevant and yet unequally taught is that the easel, canvas and blood used to paint this image was given, or rather, taken from the black Americans whose lives and dignity our American foundation was built upon. It was the blood of slaves which poured over this land and made the soils of america fertile, bearing endless fruit.
Black labor was an inarguably large part of the building of america. These African Americans which were the plows and devices used to cultivate this land were slaves, and they were slaves because of a systemic racism which saw them as inferior to their white counterparts. Indentured servants who, at a time, equaled that of enslaved workers, over time gained enough legal distinctions from their black counterparts sowing the seed of an epidemic internalization of black inferiority (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism).
America’s financial prosperity was quite literally built on the backs of black bodies which have been neglected and underscored for generations, an underhanded way of denying black Americans the history which most resonates with them. In the 1619 Project, a New York Times collage of a near entirely black medley of authors attempting to take back and redefine an otherwise white defined history of slavery and its persistent effects on americans white and black, author Nikole Hannah-Jones explains how history belongs to the definers, not to the defined. “The world revealed to me through my education was a white one. And yet my intimate world- my neighborhood, the friends I rode the bus with for two hours each day to and from the schools on the white side of town, the boisterous bevy of aunts, uncles, and cousins who crowded our home for barbeques and card games was largely black.” This is just one lense through the infinite looking glass which is the black American experience and it has been undoubtedly altered by the racist upholdings of the American slaveholders and bystanders of the tainted American history and origin. If the foundation of America had not been built on racism’s haunches, the stories of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor would not be two names in an ocean of names of black Americans treated as less than human because of a systemic notion of white supremacy.