“Pledge Of Equality”?

Brilliant piece by Asha, including a strikingly efficient video that summarizes the enduring contagion of white supremacy in a nation originated in a pledge of equality. The white nationalists are trying to condemn us not to learn from history by trying to erase all traces of it. https://t.co/hfQzWFrVZT

— Bill Carter (@wjcarter) May 3, 2023

For white male property owners. And the ones invested in agriculture, who owned slaves, and needed them to be rich white male property owners. There was no pledge of equality for women, slaves, or the natives. The slaughter of the natives was unabated through the next century. Equality came for them, such as it still is, only late in the 20th century.

There was never so much a pledge of equality as there’s been a fight for equality. A country literally formed in white supremacy was never “pledged to equality.” That sentiment is another erasure of history.

Indeed, the idea that only now we are erasing history is a symptom of the constant effort at erasure. 19th century dime novels about “gun fight” and “quick draw” contests were purest fiction which, like the lie of “Manifest Destiny,” placed white men at the center of history, and all others (women, non-whites) on the margins.

Is this really news?

We erased the history of Native Americans. Even Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee couldn't unearth that. We erased black history so thoroughly that I was taught the civil war was over “states rights,” and I didn’t hear about the Tulsa Massacre or the Tuskegee experiments until well into my adulthood. The Harlem Renaissance? Barely heard about it. Rock ‘n’ roll was what Elvis and the Beatles invented. And so on.

Don’t get me started on the erasure of Mexican history in Texas and California and Arizona. The cowboy, the great American icon, is actually the “white” version of the vaquero. Most of the terms we associate with cowboys are even Spanish.

Is the white supremacy at the dark heart of American history really news? Really? Just how white are you?