To You, Who Thought America Was Different

(I posted this on Facebook, so I wanted to share it here as well.)

I’ve actually held back on saying something in a conversation I jumped into a couple of days ago. A friend of a friend, upon seeing the posts of white racists/supremacists, said the following:




“This just isn't what America is.. the violence from both sides needs to stop.. the beating of the people needs to stop.. this has just got out of hand.. yes I voted Trump but because I voted him. Doesn't mean I agree with what the other Trump people are doing.. this all has went to far. And if it keeps going on there will be no coming back from it.. we all really need to start praying because this is just the beginning.”

Two or three thoughts on that, but I just turned off notifications for the post so I could move on. But again: two or three thoughts. 1) She doesn’t have black or brown friends. She can’t possibly. 1b or 2) If she does, she unfollowed them the moment they started yelling “Black lives matter” because to her all lives do, and she doesn’t get why they’re singling out just black lives. 3) She had no need to listen to any minority’s accounts of racism or discrimination and feels any talk about it is divisive.

So to her, America has been sunshine and moonbeams, and seeing all these racist whites now attacking minorities after her candidate won the Electoral Vote, she doesn’t get it. It’s not America to her.

Okay, so just in case, here’s what America is:

America was landed upon by white settlers escaping religious persecution (the US portion, but lets not forget the white Spaniards landing further south and spreading murder and disease to the “Indians”). Upon landing here, they immediately pushed out and/or killed the people already inhabiting the land and claimed it as their own. They brought/bought/or kidnapped Africans to settle the land and take care of their children, marking them as 2/3 of a person and property. They also pushed the Mexican people from their land to the west and drew a line that said, “This is now America.” Then, when people finally decided, maybe it’s time to not have slaves anymore, half of the country tried to pull a Brexit so they could keep enslaving black people. And then propaganda articles demeaning black people popped up, and Jim Crow laws, and the Ku Klux Klan were born, and black men being hanged for a white woman saying they whistled at her, the death of Black Wall Street, and whites only clubs, restaurants, bathrooms, water fountains, pools, white people attacking black men and women who dared sit at the counter at their diners, firemen hosing black people with full power fire hoses, police dogs attacking, black children in integrated schools being yelled at by white adults, church bombings, churches being set on fire, and police brutality, and more police brutality, and a white boy walking into a Bible Study of a historically black church and shooting the churchgoers, and there’s so much more.

And you voted for Trump because--with all his plans to build a wall, and saying illegal immigrants are rapists, and Muslims need to be registered or thrown out, that black people have horrible schools, neighborhoods, and don’t have jobs, so what do they have to lose in voting for him--somehow you thought America wasn’t going to show itself for what it really was no matter the outcome? You somehow think people are going to be able to come together after your candidate just threatened to tear us apart? And did you feel these same people, who are now attacking minorities not ONE day after Trump became president-elect, weren’t the same people calling President Obama the n-word and a Muslim, and making dolls and pictures about hanging him, and that they should have come together with the rest of the country? Were you saying “Come together” 8 years ago? Because I don’t see anyone who would vote for Trump would have if they had believed in President Obama.

But good luck to you in thinking your candidate can bring us together.