By Lennox Orion
“America was built on enslavement and genocide.”
I have said this phrase so many times I fear it is beginning to lose it’s bitter taste. I have said this so many times the bodies no longer fall out of my mouth. Imagine if those pillaged and exploited before us could be seen—in bondage, working in death camps, Native mother’s children being snatched from their homes. When I say America was built on enslavement and genocide I want you to see them—to conjure up the ghosts of this land.
This is the America we learn of through The 1619 Project and through listening to indigenous communities and elders. Through reading essays on the linkages between enslavement and capitalism and the ways in which the modern debt system is derived from the mortgaging of Black people. Through the images of indigenous youth fighting as protectors of the land and the water.
America has been singing a bloody song since its founding. But only the ones who were bleeding heard it. New folks are waking up to the sound of America’s bloody song being sung in the streets. The screams of George Floyd asking for his mother removed the culture of complacency among some white folks for whom ignoring Black Lives Matter became socially taboo. Being forced to see images of the murdered on Instagram, on murals painted in the streets, on protest signs—everywhere you went was his face staring back at you. White folks are hearing the cries of Black Lives Matter and beginning to reckon with being settlers on stolen land in a country that has always been on fire.
Just as white Americans are beginning to learn of their own history as oppressors by forming book clubs and reading the same three titles across the nation, President Trump decides to ban federal anti-racism training, beginning his assault on anti-racism work. His explanation for the banning of truth-telling is that anti-racism is un-American. Trump preaches to his followers that the reckoning on race and histories of white supremacy will upend their America. He wants them to fear the bogeyman in the night, the possibility that they could lose their power, their status, the inheritance of superiority gained from their fathers. So he retorts this not so concealed dog whistle of being against un-American retellings of history when he is concerned with losing his power—his superiority.
That same week there was an explosion of think pieces and tweets condemning his actions from liberal politicians to academics, assuring us that anti-racism is at the heart of America. That doing anti-racist work is an American ideal. These are the voices that champion reform over abolition. The ones that post BLM in the windows of houses in communities they gentrified. These think pieces come from people who are also concerned with the loss of power and having to face their own participation in white supremacy. If America is at its core anti-racist then they can hold love for their country and be passive allies in the fight for justice—it requires no work if the goal is already won. Again I am wondering if they too hear me when I say America was built on enslavement and genocide.
To be anti-racist is to be anti-America. Anti-racism is fighting and clawing and educating our way to a world without white supremacy, colonization, and capitalism. America is the embodiment of white supremacy. At its heart, it is made for the preservation of whiteness and capital and for the destruction of all else.
When people claim, “This is not America!” in response to increased white supremacist violence, I remind them that you can not remodel a house with a rotting foundation, built atop a graveyard and tell me its safe to live there. If your anti-racism is concerned with upholding the mythology of America then you are not an anti-racist. When we cower away from accusations that anti-racism is un-American we perpetuate falsehoods that any type of liberation can exist under the banner of America.
I call on all of those who claim themselves to be anti-racist. Those who say that they are invested in the change. I implore you to change your definition of change. Begin to unpack and divorce yourself from notions of patriotism and nationalism. Instead, begin dreaming: of a post-America; of an indigenous land without borders; of communities without police. Dream that one day, after four hundred long, torturous years, we will all be able to say that this is the land of the free—and it will be true. America was built on enslavement and genocide—our futures will not be.
