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With Due Respect, America, WTF?
Claiming this is “not your America” isn’t good enough.
I’ve wanted to write this column for months now, years even. I couldn’t get around it until today when Tim Wise’s brilliant opinion piece, Yes, This Is Your America started trending. The power of his message immediately struck me.
It happens every time. Something awful transpires — something that indicates the venality of the nation’s leaders or certain of its people — and we are treated to the same refrain by swaths of the newly-shocked: namely, “This isn’t the America we know.”
Wise goes all the way into deconstructing this claim, taking as examples the planned debacle of the Katrina relief efforts, the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, the George Floyd protests, and last week’s terrorist attack on the Capitol. After a convincing argument that takes us from Reconstruction, through the Civil Rights movement to today, he concludes that this is the America that all non-white people have known since its establishment, the America they still know and fear.
All of which is to say: if you continue to insist that these awful things, which we are forced to endure every few years, are not the America you know, perhaps that is because you do not know her as well as you thought.
