We ugly as hell. It is time to stop pretending otherwise.

I saw this image online recently. It made me chuckle a little. "Become?!" I said to myself. "We've become some new thing? LOL" Clearly we don't know US history nearly as well as we should. 

Every January, we *celebrate* Martin Luther King Jr's birthday. Every January, folk quote the I Have A Dream speech (entirely missing the point of the words) because we don't really have any interest in facts that run contrary to the conclusions we have already formed. That and we don't really give a shite about the truth of our history. Here's the truth: MLK was much reviled in his day. Here's another truth: the same fools calling his name today, would have been screaming at Black folk back in the day. 

So every third Monday of January, we're all Kumbaya-ing and from the third Tuesday of January through the third Sunday of the next January, we go on out and act out our worst impulses on a regular basis. And then we have the temerity to pretend that what we're seeing in the US today is somehow new? Y'all need to stop playing. This is who we are. This is who we've always been. 

In the shadow of Charlottesville and the ugliness that occurred there, White America's rallying cry is, "This is not who we are!". Folkx are eternally confident - despite hundreds of years of evidence - that they nice. That "America is great because America is good". Lordt! What evidence supports this conclusion? Because all the data I've seen, and I've seen a fair amount, forces me to conclude that we ugly as hell and we need to stop pretending otherwise.  

Let's review some data shall we? For the purposes of brevity, I'm only hitting a few points of history. Lawd knows I could be at this for a week otherwise.

The Immigration Act of 1790, yes, I'm going way, way back, invited immigrants who were "free white persons" to become naturalized citizens of these United States after two years of residency. Never mind there were free persons of color here at that time, they were not invited to participate in America. No, this invitation was just for ytfolx, but somehow, today, hatred is not who we are? Exclusion on the basis of race - the entirety of what Charlottesville was about I might point out - isn't who we are? I must have missed something in my high school logic class, cuz that by my logic, it would seem to me that bigoted exclusionists is exactly who we are.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 successfully prevented Chinese people who had been living and working here, building this country's critical railroad infrastructure, from returning. Those who had traveled back to the land of their birth or who might need to do so, were free to leave. They just shouldn't expect to be able to return to America. This law must have harmed Chinese American families in incalculable ways but hey, who cares right? 'Murica! There's no arguing that this law had any basis in anything other than bigotry, and yet now after Charlottesville, we want to claim that we're not bigots to our core? Seems to me like this is bigots is exactly who we are. Y'all need to stop playin'.

In 1868, subsequent to the ratification of the 14th Amendment, Black men were entitled to the vote. They didn't much get it though. "Forces", most of them social (and violent) prevented their access to the ballot box. Lives were threatened, livelihoods were threatened. And yet now, after the ugliness is southern Virginia, we want to claim that bigotry isn't our stock-in-trade? LOL

And then there's the Immigration Act of 1917, also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act. Want to guess how that looked and who was most impacted by it? "One of the key aspects of the 1917 act was that people from what was called the Asiatic Barred Zone were restricted from entering the country....Any country not owned by the U.S. adjacent to the continent of Asia along specified longitudes and latitudes were restricted from immigrating." And yet we recoil in horror at 45's Muslim ban and bellow that "This is not who we are"? [see more here].

In 1965, fully 100 years after Emancipation, and 45 years after White women gained access to the ballot, the Civil Rights movement yielded the Voting Rights Acts of 1965. African Americans might have gained citizenship in 1868, with the ratification of the 14th Amendment; they might have been legally entitled to vote in 1870 (under the 15th Amendment), but it took one hundred whole years before they would be allowed to access that citizenship in relative peace. POC were supposedly free to access the power of the vote, in 1868 but it took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to make it so. And yet this Monday morning, after Charlottesville, we want to MMQB - Monday morning quarterback the weekend's violence as if it were a series of new and inexplicable football plays? Y'all need to stop playin'!

Since the re-election of Barack Obama - in fact, since before his re-election - Republican state legislatures have been rolling out voter suppressive tactics as fast as their fingers can write the odious laws. The goal has long been to deny the rights of 'the wrong kinds of people'. But how is that any different from what America has been all along? *Hint: it ain't any different. Why do they do it? Because they're bigots. That is all. The end. 

In 2016, the Dakota Access pipeline was re-routed. Whether you believe the explanations as to why it was re-routed, one thing is clear: the new route, through sacred Native burial grounds is deeply problematic. No amount of protest could stop the pipeline's eventual construction. Why? Because #BigotsRUs. Because Native people don't have rights. Because Chief Justice Taney (1857) was clear, "The Black [and brown] man has no rights that the White man is bound to respect". And we wanna pretend like the ugliness in Charlottesville is new? Environmental racism may simply be a new form of odious White supremacy in action, but it ain't nothin' new. 

Folks out here chanting about blood and soil. Whose blood? More importantly, whose damn soil? You stole the soil, you stole people to work the damn soil, and you shed copious amounts of blood along the way. And now you wanna act like you own something and ain't nobody else got any rights but you? 

Meanwhile the pearl-clutching types wanna split hairs about who's more violent than whom and pretend that there's some kind of immoral equivalence* across types of violence? Nah son. Try that with someone who hasn't read a page or two of America's real history.

A woman on a FB thread this morning was trying to blame Wall effing Street and the Deep State (I mean seriously?) for the violence in Charlottesville. Someone else I encountered was trying to blame George Soros. And of course, Barry O'Bummer. Oh and Hillary!

Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the donkey, y'all need to stop f--king playin'!

Stop it! Just stop.

This nation? Born and bred in blood and soil. Forget Jesus and Christian values. Neither of those things applies. Soaked in the blood of the exploited and oppressed is what America is. Soaked in blood and lies and an unwillingness to own the cold ugly truth. Hence Charlottesville. 

You want to talk about blood and soil? Let's talk, but let's just be damn clear whose blood, whose soil and who did the spilling and stealing of same. 

* immoral equivalence: the suggestion that all violence is equally bad; the suggestion that the violence to put down bigotry is the same morally speaking. as the violence of bigots. If this is the case, why then do we so revere the so-called 'greatest generation' that defeated Hitler?