Yesterday morning I googled the question, “Which two signers of the Declaration of Independence became presidents?”, as it appeared in a virtual Jeopardy game I was watching for work. Several clicks later, a string of words in a search result preview caught my eye: a blanket judgment today against American slave owners in the 18th and 19th. I sensed some bs.
Washington was a slaveholder. In New Orleans, in the late 1990s, George Washington Elementary School was renamed Charles Richard Drew Elementary School, after the developer of blood-banking. I don’t see how we can take down the name of the man whose leadership brought this nation through the Revolutionary War and who turned down a real chance to be the first king of the nation.
I realized I was reading racist propaganda and paused to check if I had stumbled into KKK territory. I was on https://www.smithsonianmag.com viewing an article written in 2002 by late American historian Stephen E. Ambrose. The arrogance in the author’s tone was familiar and painfully clear.
“But he was a slaveholder,” students sometimes say to me.
“Listen, he was our leader in the Revolution, to which he pledged his life, his fortune, and his honor. Those were not idle pledges. What do you think would have happened to him had he been captured by the British Army?
“I’ll tell you. He would have been brought to London, tried, found guilty of treason, ordered executed, and then drawn and quartered. Do you know what that means? He would have had one arm tied to one horse, the other arm to another horse, one leg to yet another, and the other leg to a fourth. Then the four horses would have been simultaneously whipped and started off at a gallop, one going north, another south, another east and the fourth to the west.
“That is what Washington risked to establish your freedom and mine.”
This historian’s casually catastrophic logic makes plain a truth about this country. White people are not sorry. In this nation’s lore there is no humility. The ends justify the means. True remorse about the conditions that facilitate whiteness is developed with silence and softness. In America there is no remorse. The legacy of conquest may sometimes feel bad, but never enough to be given up in repentance. The bizarre tribalism of whiteness continues to seek salvation through its blood medium. There are no sins for which a white man should not be celebrated.
In grade school they teach that we live in the most advanced country in the world. Whiteness is rooted in the belief that others should be grateful for this destiny, perpetuated and enjoyed by the Europeans of recent history. None of the books they give us address why the founding fathers are honored and their legacies suffer no real damage from participation in a deeply evil, demonic way of life. Instead we meet their disciples, a people made rugged from carrying the thankless burden of civilization. Armed with a messiah made in their own image, they manifest catastrophe.
Villainy is patriotism. In American history, participating in slavery is not enough, by itself, to tarnish the reflection of a human being. Being a person who decidedly kidnapped, raped, beat, tortured, maimed, imprisoned, bought and sold actual human beings is not enough to cast a shadow over your judgment and the legacy of what you created. White America is hardly sorry for exploiting enslaved laborers to farm their crops, build their homes, and nurse their egos. They aren’t sorry for the babies in cages or the public executions. Theirs is a hypnosis brought on by fear of vulnerability. Apologies aside, actions say they’d do it all again to feel safe. The presence of guilt is an excuse to bury truth, but never for reparations.
Attempts like Ambrose’s to justify America’s ongoing colonialism and imperialism are rooted in the belief that the narcissistic psychopaths who founded this country are architects of a new world. There is no America without this racism, no ownership without displacement, and no wealthy founders without black bodies to use as capital. The myth of America as a beacon of progress reflects the sustained xenophobia that has defined European migration across the globe. Wherever they plant their flags, native grows foreign. Genocide is most digestible when the subjects are not human.
Today family and friends of Walter Wallace Jr. held his funeral. They gathered to lay him to rest on a beautiful, sunny Saturday in rapidly gentrifying Philadelphia, to the melody of citizens cheering and horns honking excitedly in the streets. The country that killed Walter today celebrates the hope that it will live to see another day.
And so it goes for black people. From its birth to its preservation, America sacrifices black people and dances beside our graves. Should the land where we lie become profitable, there are no qualms against disturbing black people dead or alive to develop condos and corporations.
If my people are America’s backbone, we are positioned to be broken. We owe nothing to whiteness. Our only hope is to reject any debt it claims.
