Seeing as Juneteenth (17-19 June) will soon be upon us, I thought I'd repost this. (I can't believe that a year has flown by so quickly. They seem to get shorter as I get older.)
I’ll readily admit that my knowledge of American history (particularly when it comes to the oppression of BIPOC) is a little sketchy in places. So I conflated Juneteenth (the fact that certain places didn’t emancipate slaves for 2.5 years after they should have, because Lincoln made an exception for slave-owners who cooperated with the government) with the Tulsa massacre. However, I hope it counts for something (however small) that I at least knew it was something horrific to do with racist and oppressive BS, that no-one in their right (or is it left?) mind would be so callous or insensitive to wish anyone happiness/celebration while remembering that. I wonder how many white Americans can honestly say the same. It seems that I am at least one step ahead of them, having bothered to read up on American history. Most just take what they learned in K-12 and accept it as the whole truth. K-12, though? That strikes me as a class for advanced students. It seems to me that the average American isn’t much more intelligent/educated than the average K-9. (It’s one of the reasons why I’m proud to not be an American.)
Too Little, Too Late
Honestly, more white Americans know the history today than did a month ago, and more knew last summer than did the year before (or the year before that), which is definitely … something in the right direction?
Yeah, it’s frigging sad, and infuriating, though. Your schools don’t teach you this shit, or about Tulsa, or about Rosewood, or Rosa Parks, or about the legacy of lynching, or anything much beyond “slavery was really bad and then we fought a war to get rid of it and then it was mostly better and then Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech and made it all the way better”. (Sometimes it’s even worse. I know someone who had a friend who grew up in the South and though he admittedly didn’t pay a ton of attention in history — with no serious repercussions because he’s white — it was at least into his twenties before he realized that the Confederacy lost. He thought that they must have been fighting to end slavery instead of keep it! I mean, how problematic and appalling is that?!)
You don’t teach kids about indigenous genocide, either. They don’t learn about how their government has (sometimes quite literally) stabbed them (and the first nation’s people) in the back over and over again. Growing up, I didn’t learn about how Lincoln ordered the largest mass hanging in US history, executing 38 people who had fought because they were starving as a result of their lands being stolen (not just their original lands but part of what they had been forced onto, too) — and that a bunch of the names we saw everywhere like Ramsey and Sibley were dudes who were heavily involved in that “conflict”, but I was taught the gist of the atrocities committed by men like Custer when the West was lost. It is very definitely lost. Arkansas has gone bye-bye for good, Dorothy.
Your sh!t’s messed up from top to bottom and side to side.
Your whole education system is garbage, not just your History. Your countrymen (collectively) can’t spell, have poor reading comprehension, struggle to identify their own country on a map (never mind anyone else’s), are still stuck in the 1960 as far as race relations go, have no grasp of basic Physics or Biology, lobby against teaching evolution in schools (as opposed to Creationism), ad infinitum, ad tedium … Yet I, an individual from a Third World country, have a better education (Cambridge syllabus) than the average individual from what is allegedly The Greatest Country in The World™ Hmm … Something doesn’t add up here (but then again, my country’s Maths literacy is a known weakness). #JustSaying
Houston, we have a problem!
Honestly, if my country of origin was one that once housed the thousands of minds that successfully worked out and executed the challenge of going from near-Earth orbit to manually landing a craft on the moon and getting it back to Earth without incident in less than a decade (using technology less powerful/accurate than the average pocket calculator, nog al); a feat so statistically improbable as to be practically impossible … to this sordid state of affairs, I would either retreat to the backwoods and whittle while seriously contemplating my ancestors’ poor life choices or I would diligently apply myself to getting a proper education through online courses. I certainly wouldn’t run my mouth about how great my nation is when it’s clearly appallingly and embarrassingly backward. Only an idiotic, ignorant, arrogant motherfucker does that. This is far beyond something rotten in the state of Denmark. So yeah, I’m very much anti-American and I’m definitely not ashamed of it.
Now, I realise, of course, that generalisations are generally wrong and not every American is an illiterate and poorly-educated backwoods hillbilly, but Fook Mi, the smart ones are needles in the haystack (and it’s a very big haystack).
Perhaps if your government spent as much on mitigating its education, housing, medical aid (health insurance), unemployment and potable water shortage crises as it does on exploring the Universe and persecuting/murdering BIPOC (particularly non-Christian ones) around the world while claiming to be “liberating” them of anything other than natural resources (particularly gold, diamonds, oil and tungsten) and their lives while foisting cheap crap on them, I might not be such a harsh critic. But don’t mind me; I’m just an anti-consumerism anarchist with no idea of how the world really works.
Having worked for some morally bankrupt organisations myself, I’m certainly in no position to criticise, but I do think it’s at least a little hypocritical for someone who worked for Baby Killers International to wish BIPOC a restive and peaceful Juneteenth.
The idea that it’s made a holiday is all well and good, but the government still allows cops to murder minorities. It’s a consolation prize and a hollow one at that. Not teaching why it’s even a holiday in the first place is all sorts of problematic, but only in America does this chicanery occur. The government has been scared to death of its people (all of them) since the 60s (which is a good thing). Now, they’re seeing a lot more whites side with BIPOC than did back then. The only thing keeping them safe is their brainwashed right-wing. This is beyond disturbing.
The Greatest Country in the World
“We’re The Greatest Country in the World!™”
Americans love to declare that, with a straight face and hands on hearts puffed up with pride. It's not true, though; far from it. But pride goeth before a fall.
I'm sure I don't need to point out that the problem with the above video is that, although it starts bold, strong and provocative, it rapidly wanders off course and into dreamy/wistful nostalgia for a past that never was as rose-tinted and positive as it's made out to have been.
Maybe sixty years ago you could broadly claim America was heading in the right direction and maintain a straight face (if you ignore a lot of problematic shit like abusing Oppenheimer’s genius in order to commit war crimes). It certainly isn’t any more. Why; what the heck happened to a nation that used to be an inspiration? Well, you didn’t just rest on your laurels; you destroyed them with your profligate corpulence, the result of too many trips to fast food joints instead of bothering to learn basic cooking skills. Meanwhile, the rest of the world struggled and persevered to become what you once were. Unfortunately, we bought into the nightmare of consumerism and greed you packaged and sold to us as The American Dream™.
So, in short: Fook you very much! Enjoy your highly problematic holiday, if you can, all while consuming Coke (which used to contain cocaine), nutrient-devoid cardboard “food” and heart-attack-inducing “energy” drinks, white America!
Lead image: Photo by Muhammadtaha Ibrahim Ma'aji from/on Pexels