Over the last few years, there has been a claim that "someone" is dividing the country. Pres Obama has been blamed. Hillary Clinton has been blamed. Trump has been blamed. I'm just gonna put it out there, and people can agree or disagree. I don't give a fuck.
THE UNITED STATES HAS NEVER IN IT'S HISTORY BEEN A UNIFIED COUNTRY.
From the way Native Americans were treated, to the slave trade, to Jim Crow and segregation and the Japanese internment camps, this country has had fissures splitting us into groups. The only commonality is the one group responsible is the first to deny they caused the divide. I have no idea what fairyland they live in, but this country is built on trying to keep people in certain places. Let's discuss some of the myths surrounding this nonexistent divide.
Everytime race comes up; the deniers do two things. They claim minorities are stuck in the past or try to equate their life to that of the minorities. They are wrong on both points. I read recently where someone said we don't get to decide if we experience racism or bigotry. It happens simply because we are and it strikes without warning. Some people will judge me just by the melanin in my skin. Some people will discredit my intellect and wrap me in a persona far from who I am because of the darkness of my skin tone. I have no control over this, yet I am the blame for this. This is the life myself, and other minorities have lived for generations. Though life has moved on it became an undercurrent of society, and the worst of it is done behind closed doors. It has never been eradicated. Further, to even think anyone experiences or suffers as minorities have is preposterous. If you think giving a company a tax break for hiring a minority is a slight against you, I have news for you. There are not enough jobs in the world to account for the years of living in chains, the intentional blocking of education and the lives lost just for trying to live as citizens of this country. The US can never atone for what it did to us, but the blatant attempts to minimize what was done as if it's a dirty little secret does not make it go away. It only makes that pill impossible to swallow.
Do you want to know why there's a divide? There's a divide because blacks are the only people in this country who had to have their freedoms legislated. Not even the Native Americans had to have law upon law signed and executed just to live and thrive. After the Civil War, this country left newly freed slaves at the mercy of night riders. Thousands of blacks lynched just because they were free to live as human beings. The North wasn't much better. Though they didn't have lynchings, they still treated blacks as second rate citizens. For years porters, cooks, and washerwomen were the only jobs available to blacks outside of their own communities. As years went on and the country began to mature, blacks were still denied basic rights. Jim Crow laws had separate schools, eateries, and doctors. Blacks would start a train ride in one compartment and have to move to another, most often a cattle car, no matter they paid the same fair or more. Intermingling with other ethnicities was illegal and punishable by jail time or death. Blacks were railroaded in court cases because the lawyer was on the side of the accuser and their juries had none of their peers. Most often those charges were false. People wonder why we still point out when a black person is the first to achieve something? The question shouldn't be why we do it but how is it this is just now happening. Years of indignities heaped on top of a legacy started because of greed.
The biggest part of this that no one has ever called out the government on its lack of remorse. Our government officially apologized to Holocaust victims and every year supports vigils in remembrance. There is even a date on the calendar for remembrance. Those camps had nothing to do with us. Our government made an official apology to Japanese Americans and their descendants who had been interned in camps during WWII. President Reagan authorized reparations of $20,000 to all survivors. In their atonement to the Native Americans, reservations have governments separate from the national government. The lands belong to them and the US government can't or shouldn't tell them what to do with it. Our government brings hundreds of refugees into this country and provide them with the means to start a new life free from the persecution of their homeland.
Yet, to blacks, we get pandering legislation which still leaves a lot to the discretion of people who would hold us down. To get relief, we have to be willing to spend hours in court and have to come up with indisputable evidence we have been wronged. My ancestors were promised 40 acres and a mule. Never got it. Not once has the government officially apologized or showed any remorse for the dichotomy created by slavery. You want us to go home? We have no home. Your ancestors took us from our home and changed us. Miss me with that crap about Africans selling us into slavery. They couldn't have sold us if you weren't looking to buy. You know how demand works right? I know the government will never apologize. They will never stand in front of the world and say this country traded in human flesh and disenfranchised a whole race of people. To make matters worse, they eliminated the slavery enterprise and still didn't care because now, blacks were of no use to them. They never cared if we thrived. They mostly wish we would just go away. But we can't, won't.
Everything I have typed here is painful. It's as painful for me as it is for you. I know that, but until you are willing to have this conversation without reservations or justifications, the divide will exist. I saw an argument that if Muslims are so peaceful why don't they police the ones who are giving them a bad name. When did anyone ever police the Klan? When has anyone ever stood up and said: "That's bigotry, and you should be ashamed." NEVER. That's why the division exists. America is one huge hypocrisy. We love to tell other countries how they should live and spread "freedom", but we refuse to sweep around our own front door. We are the cause of the divide.
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