Still Not Proud of America

I wrote a piece four years ago called Why I Can't Feel Proud of America. It echoes for me every fourth of July, as inevitably some conversation or other arises, often with a family member, about the "progress" we've made.

The most basic fact that the Declaration of Independence the holiday commemorates was intended for a select few, and came part in parcel with the transatlantic slave trade and continuous genocide of indigenous people who already lived on this land should give more of us not only pause, but outright rejection of this holiday.

- "12 million Indigenous people died in what is today the coterminous United States between 1492 and 1900." {source}

- "for 366 years, European slavers loaded approximately 12.5 million Africans onto Atlantic slave ships. About 11 million survived the Middle Passage to landfall and life in the Americas." {source}

These, of course, are not "just" historical facts. To focus on the myth of progress is to overlook the ways in which these founding truths seep into every single aspect of the America we know today. The primacy of Whiteness literally touches everything. The catch is that if you are White, this can make it harder to notice, since it is the default and the "norm."

Do you worry about being "that person" in your family who is "always harping" on "this stuff"?

I write these phrases in quotes, because sometimes I have felt this way myself.

I haven't always been graceful in my communication, and also continue to learn that holding myself to some kind of standard of making sure I'm "getting it right" is often a veil for trying to make sure I'm making others comfortable as I raise fundamentally uncomfortable truths.

Noticing where we want to continue to center the stories of progress and advancement makes us -- I am speaking from a White perspective here -- feel better about America.

It lets us off the hook from having to truly confront the fact that while yes, those stories matter, the fundamental mechanisms of the American ethos and operations, from education to health care to the military to the justice system to wildly disparate double standards when it comes to everything from drug use to crime to everyday existence, have not changed since those "founding fathers" did their thing.

White people are beneficiaries of these realities.

It is our human responsibility to learn about them, name them, call them out, listen when BIPOC tell us about their lived experiences, and not gloss over the living legacy of centuries of brutality, evident in every pocket of our society and our very bodies.

So no, I am not proud to be American.

But I am an American, so I will continue to write, to fight, to live in full consciousness of the many unearned advantages my life reflects, to be receptive to being corrected and called in, and to invite you to look at where you continue to uphold the America you want to believe in as opposed to the one we're actually living in.