“White supremacy has no place in America,” President Biden said Tuesday in Buffalo.
Except that it does, and it’s what America was founded on.
Not trying here, in pointing that out, to disrespect our president, who was trying to comfort a community, and a nation, rocked by the hate-motivated mass shooting that left 10 African American Saturday afternoon supermarket shoppers dead.
We can add another danger of being Black in America to the list: shopping for groceries while Black.
The president’s sentiment is well-meaning, but the president is wrong.
America is all about white supremacy.
Just ask the originalists on our Supreme Court who like to limit the powers of the federal government to what our Founders were thinking in 1787, and who might want to soon weigh in on how the Constitution those Founders signed off on enshrined slavery.
And, no, we absolutely don’t want them to weigh in there, knowing, from the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, how that could end up.
The right to vote in our founding Constitution was reserved to white male property owners.
Slavery wouldn’t be outlawed until after we fought a war with ourselves more than 70 years later.
Women wouldn’t get the right to vote until all the way down the line into 1920.
Blacks, largely, wouldn’t effectively be able to vote until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which the originalists have spent the past couple of decades trying to defang, to the point that, we’re not yet back to Jim Crow, but we’re well on our way.
“Our nation’s strength has always come from the idea — it’s going to sound corny, but think about it, what’s the idea of our nation? That we’re all children of God, all children — life, liberty, our universal goods, gifts of God,” Biden said Tuesday.
That’s what we seduce ourselves into believing about ourselves.
I’m a University of Virginia alum who loves me some Thomas Jefferson, who notably wrote the famous – or maybe infamous, given the realities behind them? – words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
The Jefferson who wrote those words in 1776, as we know, owned slaves then, and still would when he died 50 years later.
The hallowed Grounds of my beloved alma mater that he founded were built on the backs of slave labor.
Those same hallowed Grounds were then used by white supremacists, “very fine people,” in the words of Biden’s predecessor, in 2017, to launch a haunting, torch-fueled political rally evoking images of 1930s Germany.
“Hate and fear,” Biden said Tuesday, “are being given too much oxygen by those who pretend to love America, but who don’t understand America. To confront the ideology of hate requires caring about all people, not making distinctions.”
Actually, to confront the ideology of hate, we have to allow ourselves to come to a national reckoning on what America was at its founding, in 1787, all the way back to 1607.
America was built on a foundation of white supremacy; we can rebuild it on a foundation that embraces the diversity that the white men who met in Philadelphia in the 18th century could never have imagined was possible here.
The results in our most recent state elections in Virginia, which turned on the promises of the eventual winning gubernatorial candidate to remove this reckoning from our K-12 education, lest the white young’uns end up with psychological scars from being confronted with knowledge of their privilege, tell us that we’re nowhere near where we need to be yet.
The kid with an assault rifle who shot up the supermarket over the weekend is just the tip of the spear.
The battle we seem destined to fight unfortunately probably forever is with ourselves and our soul.
Story by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
