America’s longest war

Photo via CBS News/60 Minutes

May 31,1921 is a day that has lived in the minds of Black America for 100 years. Now, the rest of the world is beginning to come to grips with what it has been like to live Black in America. The Greenwood Neighborhood was one battle in what has been America’s longest war, the war against Black America.

I can already hear the huffing and puffing that I’m making this up, but if you’re not a Black American, the odds are that you’ve never heard of the following incidents linked here. This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the attacks that Black America has suffered. There are many that never get talked about and have been swept under the rug of revisionist history in America. As one former Attorney General said about history, “history is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who’s writing the history.”

This is why the whole argument over Critical Race Theory is laughable. CRT is no ooga booga boogeyman that’s going to destroy America. Look at the Britannica Encyclopedia definition for proof.

Critical race theory (CRT), intellectual movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour. Critical race theorists hold that the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.

So, CRT isn’t teaching America to hate White people. CRT suggests that we’re all biologically alike and the idea of White America and Black America is something we’ve created that doesn’t exist. The problem with this is that some folks are highly invested in the idea of racial separation, and they will use those divisions to gain/maintain wealth and power in this country regardless of the damage it causes along the way. It’s hard to explain this to people who are incapable of thinking critically on their own and rely on shit peddlers like Mr. Rufo here to do their hard thinking for them.

So, when you damage that “brand” of trying to find peaceful coexistence and make it toxic, what alternative do you leave for those of us who want to peacefully coexist? Bet you didn’t think that far, did you, Mr. Dumbass?

Now, back to what I said is America’s longest war. This whole notion of White supremacy has been a part of this country since Whites came here to colonize the Western Hemisphere. Once again, I know I am going to rile up some people, but the truth isn’t always a pleasant walk through a valley full of lilies in bloom. Whether intentional or not, white settlers imported labor or used indigenous people to do the hard manual labor they were incapable of doing themselves. They had trouble with native crops, so they used Native Americans to grow them. There were rice farms in the Carolinas that were productive because of imported African slave labor with expertise in farming rice.

America’s history has been written to sanitize it of instances that paint the majority in a bad light. The burning of Black Wall Street, Rosewood, and other Black neighborhoods isn’t taught in our history books. The successful coup in Wilmington, NC where a mixed government was deposed with a white supremacist government taking its place isn’t a well known moment in American history either. There are no chapters in American history on Sundown Towns or the Negro Motorist Green Book that explain how travel or even living has been difficult for Black America.

So, consider this whenever you hear people talking about a race war in America. There has been a war ongoing in this country for its entire existence and then some. Not all wars involve guns, tanks, and bombs. The Cold War is a perfect example. Look at those who fear the most by living in a society where we’re all one and the same, and you’ll find those who are active participants in America’s longest war.

America is lucky in that Black America only seeks to exercise our hard earned rights of being American. There’s no movement to exact revenge for the past atrocities committed against us. We only want acknowledgement of the past and a national atonement for how we’ve been wronged and blamed for what’s been done to us. There are still living survivors of this war, and it’s in America’s best interest to end this now before Black America decides to stop turning the other cheek. The last thing this country needs is a very physical and deadly war.