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For everyone trying to say America isn’t a racist country and is founded on freedom, the people who defined that freedom gave speeches and wrote volumes of books espousing that freedom belonged to the white race. Just so happens people learned to stop being so blatant.
The defining debate in the founding era and subsequent years was whether any race besides the Anglo-Saxon was capable of self-government. It continued WELL into the 20th century and is now buried beneath layers of rhetoric.
To even scratch the sanitized surface of America’s history, though, is to find some of the most blatant and apparent instances of white supremacy. You don’t have to search very hard to find it and recognize how we’ve gotten here.
But the rhetorical trick of dog whistling white supremacy has been so potent and successful that Trumpism has emerged to take that prejudice and bring it out from behind closed doors. It mirrors periods of American history where white supremacy reignites and determines direction
The main weapon in all of this is the contradiction of hiding behind the idea of freedom for all while actively believing only the white race is capable and deserving of that freedom. That’s the American story and until we break that we’re going to keep making the same mistakes.
