This Week's Opening Thought: July 24, 2023

Trigger warning: Anti-Blackness, colonization, genocide, oppression, talk of sexual assault and other forms of physical harm.

This week’s opening thought: Seeing how education in the United States is leaning into the narrative that Africans “benefited” from chattel slavery by “earning valuable skills” and Native and Indigenous tribes and communities “benefited” from the interjection of white colonizers instead of acquiring unwanted generational trauma and oppression, let’s talk about who “benefited” from the enslavement and assault of Africans and the near genocide of Native American tribes and communities at the hands of white colonizers.

Here’s a hint: it ain’t Black, Native, and Indigenous folx.

When the raggedy-ass pilgrims came to what we now call North America, they came here with no skillset on how to be stewards of the land. They damn near died during their first autumn and winter on this unceded land. It was Native Americans, the rightful inhabitants of this land, who saved their asses, shared resources and survival skills, and tried to share their land with their new neighbors.

The pilgrims repaid the decency extended to them by killing them, distributing their lands among white people they deemed more worthy of the land, and killing and harming generations of their children through residential schools. Why?

Because they felt that Native communities would “benefit” from being forced into assimilation and conformity to white supremacy.

Ultimately, white folx colonized the entire continent, usurped all its resources for their own needs, and rendered Native and Indigenous communities invisible through oppression and erasure.

Africans were kidnapped from the shores of their continent and sold to white colonizers throughout the Western colonies to be put to work through chattel slavery. Chattel slavery quickly became the primary labor force in the United States, mainly because white people still did not possess the skills and abilities needed to be stewards and keepers of the unceded land they stole through violence and viewed Black bodies as expendable and subhuman. They proceeded to enslave, assault, murder, abuse, rape, and work Black bodies to death for hundreds of years until emancipation made it technically illegal. Once chattel slavery was abolished, white colonizers struggled to maintain the plantations and farms that generated their wealth because they still lacked the skills and experience to be stewards of the land. White people damn near bankrupted the country they built on the land they stole. Black folx, meanwhile, would continue to face similar traumas and violence to their personhood by white folx who did not view them as human beings.

This treatment persists for Black communities in the United States through laws, unfettered hate crimes, and systems intentionally built to harm and oppress Black communities.

This treatment persists even though Black folx are still exploited by whiteness on every level you can think of with no sustainable advancement for generations of the descendants of enslaved Africans.

Does it look like Native and Indigenous tribes and communities “benefited” from what white people have done and continue to do to their people?

Does it sound like Black folx have “benefited” from chattel slavery, abuse, murder, and oppression?

The resounding answer is, “Hell no.”

White society thinks that acting like the heinous crimes their ancestors committed and they currently benefit from allows for the space to rewrite history to make themselves feel better. But like a peanut butter and dookie sandwich, they’d be dead wrong to the point where you can smell how wrong they are from a mile away.

You can use as many alternate facts as you want, white people. It does not change the legitimate and well-documented facts of colonialism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, racism, and trauma your people continue to maintain and benefit from.

No matter how hard you try, you can’t burn or rewrite all the books. You're going to miss a few.

And most of y’all would benefit from reading some of the ones you miss, comparing notes, and opening your eyes and minds to the idea that white ain’t always right.