Throwback Thursday: It's True. White People Built This Country.
We didn't steal the land or commit the atrocities like America's original venture capitalists. But the original design was terrible.
This article was originally published on July 19, 2018.
America is angry.
Conservatives are mad for the same reasons they wanted to oust Obama, Muslims, immigrants and anyone who doesn’t support the Russia-fellating, rust-colored dotard in chief: They want their country back.
Progressives believe Trump is destroying “their country” and the only thing that can save us are safety pins, pink pussy hats or politely resisting (not like that belligerent Maxine Waters). All of the outrage on the left and right stems from one fact:
White people built this country.
People who purchase their mayonnaise, jeans and running shoes all from one store have no reservations about reminding the world of their ownership of the country, regardless of which side of the aisle they stand
Many white people believe their forefathers and whatever values they now hold are what built this country. Some of them (the liberals, the allies and the Democrats) are more than willing to share their inheritance, but only if they can act as administrators of the estate.
They will acknowledge that white supremacy still exists and then try to convince you that the only person who can move America forward is an old white man (Bernie Sanders) or an old white woman (Hillary Clinton).
They will tell you the only way to change a 400-year-old system of oppression is to do the same things they did to create the 400-year-old system of oppression. They have faith in the American democracy because they have seen it work for them. Only for them. They place their trust and loyalty in the American values because America was built to work for them. Only for them.
Because they built it that way.
I live in a house.
I love my house. After viewing dozens of prospective residences, I finally settled on a home that had one previous owner. After I moved in, I noticed there was a leak in the kitchen sink. I replaced the white wall-to-wall carpet with wood floors. I ripped out the puke-green Formica countertops that matched the green-and-white wallpaper. I remodeled the bathrooms. I finished the attic and turned it into a studio for my daughter. I turned the basement into a mancave.
Although it was not perfect, I chose to live here.
One day, the previous owner of the home came to pick up some mail. He marveled at the remodeling and proudly explained how the house was built to his own specifications. I knew he hadn’t hammered the nails, installed the drywall and laid the carpet.
But it was my house now. Thanks to cousins and uncles who taught me how to build things, I had actually done the work with my own hands, and I was proud of it. So I showed him what I had done with the house he built.
“Damn,” he said half-jokingly as he looked around. “I think I want my house back.”
“You can have it,” I replied with a smile. “I’ll take a postdated check.”
America is a house.
To live in a house constructed from one’s own imagination must be a beautiful thing. Unlike every other segment of this nation’s population, Black people in America are the only ones who didn’t choose to live in this house. We were unwilling participants in this construction project. But more than any other group in America, we have been responsible for its upkeep because we live here, too.
It is our blood and sweat that is mixed into America’s foundation. It is our bodies that have served disproportionately in America’s armed forces. We took the first bullet in the Revolutionary War. We picked the cotton that made America an economic superpower. It is our bodies that give this country its military might.
We fought the Nazis that kept us free and scored the touchdowns that make America cheer. We gave America civil rights and every single form of American music. White women want Black women’s lips, hips and resilience. The whole country wants our soul. We taught this country how to dance, sing, run, jump and win. We gave America a Prince, a president and a King.
And we did it for free.
Even though we poured the foundation and hammered the nails, America is constructed from a white dream. White people were the original owners of this flawed house, and Black people have been trying to fix it ever since. We were the workers whose hands constructed this country. They may have purchased the laborers and signed their names on the deed to the land they stole, but this is our country. We paid for it.
They got to live in it for free.
Telling Black people, immigrants and Native Americans to leave the country that “white people built” is like a caveman trying to kick an Egyptian pharaoh out of the pyramids because his Cro-Magnon ancestors invented piling up rocks.
When they say they “built this” country, they are totally oblivious to the design flaws. The founders’ original operating system was terrible before the 1865 update. Sure, a few Caucasian developers pitched in to build America 2.0, but the financial software crashed so hard that the CEO had to make a New Deal and give white people free money. Hell, we didn’t even have a true democracy feature until we wrote it into the code.
If we made a list of everything that needed fixing in America, we’d have to go all the way back to when 50 white men declared their independence and proclaimed that they would build a new land based on the fact that every single human being deserved life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
41 of those 50 men owned slaves.
George Washington pushed for abolition but still beat, whipped and hunted down escaped slaves until the day he died, owning 123 slaves. Thomas Jefferson called slavery a “moral depravity” and “hideous blot.” When he left this earth, he owned 130 slaves.
They believed slavery was morally wrong, but still participated. They never intended for women to vote. They slaughtered the Native Americans. They raped our great-grandmothers. They lynched our grandfathers. The men who built this country believed in “liberty and justice” but ignored the part that said, “for all.”
The whole of America was never free until white people lost the deadliest war in American history in an attempt to hold on to slavery. They bombed buses, children and churches so their kids wouldn’t sit next to Black children in the schools they built, eat next to us in their diners or watch movies alongside negroes in their theaters.
Although America is the richest country in the world, poverty remains because the American dream rests on the foundation that greed is a necessary motivation for success. Half of this country would rather watch an infant starve than give it food stamps or welfare. They want their paychecks. Their money. Their country.
America wades in the blood of mass shootings and gunfire in social studies class because they refuse to deviate from its 200-year-old original blueprint. This country tolerates abhorrent gun violence because the Second Amendment gave them the right to own their guns, and you will have to take them from their cold, dead hands.
The injustice that feeds mass incarceration comes from a flawed Constitution they wrote. The education gap persists because of the history of segregated school systems built to their specifications. Wage inequality is due to their adherence to free-market capitalism, sexism and racism.
They built it that way.
Yet, they would have you believe that immigrants, “the Blacks” and non-Christians are what is wrong with America and getting rid of us—whether through deportation, travel bans, prisons or police bullets—would make this country great again.
But the flaw is in the design. This is the house they wanted and the system they created. They were the architects. We were simply the ones who changed the blueprint and did all the remodeling. We are still trying to fix the leaks and undo their shoddy handiwork.
If white people want credit for building this country, then they also have to take the blame for constructing a system of oppression and white supremacy. You can’t get praise for pouring the foundation but not take criticism for all the cracks. The applause for your forefathers’ accomplishments also comes with accountability for their atrocities.
The inequality is theirs alone. They built racism into the foundation. Inequality is in the structure. Poverty is part of their plan. You started the wars we fought and committed the genocides we survived. And, to be fair, Black people are willing to take credit for all of the massacres we committed, all the internment camps we authorized and all of the times we collectively withheld democracy, freedom or justice from a racial, ethnic or religious group.
But white people want their country back. They want it all back because they want to run it into the ground again. They are afraid we will tear down the parts that have always worked for them. Only them.
So, yes, white people built this country.
But this is our country.
It does not belong to them anymore. We are the ones who made it valuable. We paid the price in blood. In sweat. In tears. In bruised backs and calloused hands.
But if we’re being honest, Black people have no more affinity for America than I do for my house or my car. Then again, if white people loved their country, they wouldn’t keep trying to destroy it every chance they get. In reality, they have never believed that “All men are created equal.” They have sabotaged every effort to build a more perfect union and resisted every attempt to make this country great. They love the idea of liberty or justice, but not “for all.” Every nanosecond of their history proves they hate living in the “land of the free.”
But if white people want their country back, then give us reparations. Pay us for our work, our time, our lynched bodies, our stolen art, our enslaved ancestors, our murdered children and our kidnapped cousins. We’ll take a postdated check.
Or go back to Wypipostan and get the fuck out of our country.
See? We fixed it for you.