That is to say, even more fundamentally,
that we cannot get the issue of White supremacy
out of our systems.
We keep trying to find more socially acceptable ways
to talk about what is tearing at our souls and social fabric--for instance, to try to make it an issue of
States' rights, rather than a strong central government--
but that soon boils itself down to White supremacy, too.
The notion of a Male dominated, White, Christian America lies beneath almost everything important to us as a nation. Politicians, we, say "That should be left up to the States!". And what does that really mean? It means things like, "Let the States decide whether schools should be segregated!" "Let the States decide whom should be allowed to vote, or whom should be deported, or whom should be allowed to claim in-State tuition rates!
Who are always the real targets of these statements? Blacks. Brown-skinned immigrants. Asians. Native Americans. Muslims. Sikhs. Nobody ever suggests that their own Irish-, German-, Scandinavian-, English-, French-immigrant ancestors should have been thrown back into the Atlantic. "Oh," they say, "my ancestors immigrated legally!" "Legally" means they got here on a boat with at least a few dollars in their pockets, and passed a ninety-second, eyeball health test for obvious diseases. My father got here that way: legally.
He still had a chowder-thick Norwegian accent when he died. Legally.
"Let's make America Great Again" does not really mean we should make America anything again. It means, "Let's make America Male, White, and Christian; not Women's Lib, multi-colored, and any other damned religion you do, or do not, choose." America never was male, White, and Christian. But male, White Christians like to think that it was.
We don't describe the atrocity of White people invading the continent and taking whatever they saw and wanted for themselves from the Brown-skinned people who had lived here for thousands of years. We describe the atrocities of Brown-skinned people who resisted the takeover of their land and lives. Then we say, grudgingly, that Cochise or Geronimo were really kind of . . . brave, I guess you could say, and stubborn, in how they fought back, commiting atrocities against us. Us: We White, Christian males.
Today it is mostly about the Solid South, or people wherever they are who think that Masculine, White, Christian America is at stake. That is a polite way of saying that the fundamentally atrocious notion of the American Civil War will not go away: that we want America to belong to White, Male Christians.
Never mind that our nation was founded to affirm that we were something newer and better than what most of those immigrants from Europe were deliberately leaving behind. They wanted religious tolerance, for instance, and it became Christian intolerance today. They wanted to be free men [sic] and it became second class status for women, and it became slavery and inhumane disregard for Native American people.
This is not about North against South. It is not about States' Rights. It is not about Republicans and Democrats. It is about never having given up the perverse notion that the Promised Land was for Male, White Christians. Only. Or mostly.
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