Standing in the Shadows of Hate

It is hard to separate a present or future America from its past.

As much as some revel in our electing a Black president, tout the number of our wealthy People of Color, and brag about the progress that minorities have made, every day in America means living in a place where prejudice reverberates.

Starting from what writer-poet Caroline Randall Williams calls “rape-colored skin,” the legacy of forced miscegenation during slavery, Black Americans learn early that American history is the story of the told story and the real story.

As Black children mature, what seemed like a world of Crayola people becomes a caste system.

Complex questions abound.

Why does America have statues, monuments, and military bases named after traitors who started a civil war and their own country?

Why are so many American Whites enamored with the Confederacy? Why is Gone with the Wind the best-selling book in America after the Bible?

Why do White people love Black culture – how we talk, walk, dress, play sports, sing, and dance, but hate us so much?

Our country has always had a mass of contradictions.

America has contributed to the world some of the greatest documents ever written, texts devoted to freedom and liberty like The Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and our Constitution, yet it was one of the worst purveyors of chattel slavery.

America believes in showing more reverence to its flag than some of the people the flag represents.

America champion free speech around the world, except in America.

America segregated, redlined, restricted, denied the vote, and limited opportunities for Black people, while expecting them to fight the country’s wars and build the country’s infrastructure.

America resisted the Civil Rights movement, but allowed lynchings, land confiscations, and White-led riots that resulted in the deaths of Black citizens and the destruction of Black cities.

The FBI dismantled the Black Panthers, and infiltrated and undermined civil rights organizations, but never managed to destroy the Ku Klux Klan and other White Supremacist organizations.

America wants to banish affirmative action, DEI initiatives, and remove books that discuss racism and slavery, but has no trouble in allowing legacy college admissions, political gerrymandering that favors White conservative voters, and an archaic national election system that dilutes the vote of the majority in favor of a limited minority.

It touts itself as a bastion of freedom and liberty but has systematically curtailed the freedom and liberty of non-Whites since the first White immigrants landed.

And to add further insult to its injurious past, America has elected a spoiled, petulant malcontent who is systematically destroying the country from within, but not before he makes the lives of non-Whites even more miserable.

In future days, America’s history will astound but confound.

It will be lauded and derided.

It will be praised and scorned.

It is complex to live in a country of such brutal contrasts.

We move forward believing that the future will be better, better than bitter, evil past and present.