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America is a racist nation, but we don’t want to be
Is the title of this article controversial? To anyone who has spent some time in honest study of our history, the first part of it, at least with regard to our founding and many of the years since, as obvious. The colonists stole land from the indigenous peoples and built new societies on the backs of slaves. For a hundred years after the Civil War, black Americans still lived in a condition of effective servitude in the states that had rebelled and were treated as lesser people in much of the rest of the country. And to this day — the murder of George Floyd being only the latest example — our institutions are tilted to one degree or another against anyone whose percentage of ancestors from western Europe are not seen as high enough. The fact that there is also a tilt against any Americans who are on the lower end of the economic scale only emphasizes the point here, since pitting poor whites against racial minorities is a key tactic for preserving the privileges of those in power.
But do we want to be this way? Hillary Clinton was mocked for referring to a basket of deplorables, and Joe Biden may have offered what will be his equivalent moment by saying that ten to fifteen percent of the population are “just not very good people,” but what gets missed often here in the reactions to such labeling is the fact that a lot of the Americans that are targeted by…
