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The worship of the founding fathers... if you will permit me to generalize a little, I find Americans puzzling. When it is time to feel guilty, they are quick t

by deogeo 7y ago

The worship of the founding fathers... if you will permit me to generalize a little, I find Americans puzzling. When it is time to feel guilty, they are quick to put ash on themselves, and apologize for the racist, colonialist, genocidal foundations of their country. And in the next breath, they claim that to oppose diversity goes against the very ideals the country was founded on. How can one simultaneously hold such conflicting beliefs?

scarmig 7y ago
Lots of Americans believe different things. The people who think of America as a fundamentally white supremacist state are not the same people writing slogans like "America Has Always Been Great."
- deogeo 7y ago
  I got the distinct impression that there is a lot of overlap between those most likely to decry US history, and those that invoke supposedly foundational multicultural ideals to promote diversity.
eropple 7y ago
I do not have to think Thomas Jefferson was a saint to find value in the opening of the Declaration of Independence--when applied to all people. You understand that one can be very, very in favor of the stated aspirations of the American founding documents while understanding that the people saying them both did a lot of bad shit and had a provincial and shitty understanding of who those stated aspirations applied to, yeah? Those words are a call for us to do better, and part of doing better is understanding our often-shitty ancestry.
- deogeo 7y ago
  But I was not referring to only the declaration of independence, but to the US founding and history as a whole. For example, your naturalization acts were limited to "free white persons of good character", so it's pretty obvious the US was, for most of its history, a white ethno-state. It's fine if you want to change that (well, by now it has been changed), but it's just that - a change, not the continuation of some mythical welcoming-to-all America that never existed.

by deogeo 7y ago

scarmig 7y ago

Lots of Americans believe different things. The people who think of America as a fundamentally white supremacist state are not the same people writing slogans like "America Has Always Been Great."

deogeo 7y ago
I got the distinct impression that there is a lot of overlap between those most likely to decry US history, and those that invoke supposedly foundational multicultural ideals to promote diversity.

eropple 7y ago

I do not have to think Thomas Jefferson was a saint to find value in the opening of the Declaration of Independence--when applied to all people. You understand that one can be very, very in favor of the stated aspirations of the American founding documents while understanding that the people saying them both did a lot of bad shit and had a provincial and shitty understanding of who those stated aspirations applied to, yeah? Those words are a call for us to do better, and part of doing better is understanding our often-shitty ancestry.

deogeo 7y ago
But I was not referring to only the declaration of independence, but to the US founding and history as a whole. For example, your naturalization acts were limited to "free white persons of good character", so it's pretty obvious the US was, for most of its history, a white ethno-state. It's fine if you want to change that (well, by now it has been changed), but it's just that - a change, not the continuation of some mythical welcoming-to-all America that never existed.