This Is Exactly Who We Are
It’s the end of the year again, and I have little doubt that many people are celebrating. After all, that’s what they always do this time of year, with traditions such as the Ball Drop in Times Square. Lots of people will stay up until midnight to watch it turn from 2024 to 2025.
However, I don’t really feel like celebrating this year. From the other side of the year divide, we’re a lot closer to Donald Trump becoming President again and all the hell that will entail. If anything, I’m dreading the new year. That being said, this isn’t the purpose of today’s blog post.
I recently saw a post on BlueSky that I’ll link here . It basically argues that those people waving Confederate flags and swastikas (a symbol that’s come to represent one of the most horrific events in Europe’s history) aren’t “real Americans”. The poster asserts that “we literally had a war about each of these things.”
It’s incredibly tempting to believe that these asshats waving Confederate flags and wearing Nazi shirts are going against what the country is supposed to represent. I would rather not believe that I live in a country based on hate as opposed to love for our fellow citizens. Moreover, I think many of us would love to think events like Charlottesville are an aberration.
Political cartoon from the Boston Globe.
There’s just one problem, however: It’s not true.
Now, I don’t want anyone reading this to believe I’m defending those who brandish symbols associated with hate. On the contrary, I think their views are despicable and have no place in a supposedly civilized society. Unfortunately, I also believe that we need to contend with the world as it is, not how we might like it to be.
This leads me to my thesis: The hateful ones represent our country more accurately than those protesting against them.
The reality is that the United States was built upon white supremacy. Many of the Founding Fathers, a bunch of white men that a great number of people (not all of them conservative Republicans) love to admire, endorsed this view. A decent percentage of the 1787 Constitution’s signatories owned slaves.
Even after the United States officially became independent from Great Britain, systemic racism didn’t end. In fact, it got worse, to the point that some on Reddit believe things would have been better if America lost its revolution. But that’s beside the point for now.
Eventually, the country fought a civil war over slavery. Now, lots of people even now will tell you the civil war was about states’ rights, but the important question is: A state’s rights to do WHAT? The answer, of course, was “to keep black people as property.” The Civil War was the deadliest conflict in American history (and the deadliest event period until the COVID-19 pandemic), with over 600,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians losing their lives.
It’s helpful to contrast the United States with another country that has a dark history: Germany. I don’t need to remind you what the German government was responsible for in the 1930s and 1940s, but there’s a key difference between Germany and the country across the Atlantic that played an important part in defeating them: There are no Nazi monuments today in Germany. In fact, there are laws against symbols associated with the movement, and even if you don’t face legal consequences for admiring Hitler as a “skilled leader”, you’ll still face social consequences for sure.
Robert E. Lee memorial carved into Stone Mountain, Georgia, USA. Nothing like this exists in present-day Germany.
Officially, American slavery ended in 1865, but the Jim Crow laws mandating things like racial segregation and poll taxes sprang up like poisonous mushrooms not long afterward. It’s worth noting that most of the Confederate monuments in the South today were built not during the Civil War or immediately afterward, but rather during this era. They were meant to make certain people feel a certain way, despite what Marjorie Taylor Greene might think.
It took a hundred years after de jure slavery ended for the Civil Rights Acts to be passed, and today’s Supreme Court is taking a sledgehammer to them. Even before SCOTUS became 6-3 Republican, however, systemic racism was alive and well in this country. We have near-constant stories of police brutality, for one, and there are more subtle examples such as redlining, which leads to many majority-black neighborhoods living in neighborhoods with higher levels of environmental pollution.
Let’s go back to the Germany example. What many people don’t know is that the Nazis got lots of ideas from the United States. Now, the U.S. is not entirely to blame for the events in Europe - the perpetrators of the Holocaust knew what they were doing and made a constant, conscious choice to continue doing it. But we also need to remember that what happens in America does not exist in a vacuum, especially when the ability to get information up to the minute is far more pronounced now than it was in the 1940s.
So what I hope I’ve demonstrated here is that systemic racism has always existed in the United States, long before Donald Trump entered politics. When Trump said that the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017 had “very fine people on both sides”, lots of commentators on the left were very quick to insist that this is not who we are. America is a country of immigrants, they say, and we celebrate diversity.
Needless to say, the 2024 election begs to differ. Of course, we also need to acknowledge that even if Trump hadn’t won, none of these problems would have been solved. That’s not to say that they won’t get worse in the next four years, of course. But if we want to prove that we’re not a deeply racist country, we have to earn that reputation rather than constantly asserting that it exists.
Because it doesn’t.
