Why can’t you think of something positive? Why do you always focus on the negative? Why can’t you look on the bright side, and think about all the “good things” that America has done? Why do you hate America? What’s wrong with you?
It wasn’t even all that bad.
Hell, maybe we should bring the old days back, and make convicted prisoners into cheap farm workers since we’re deporting all the “illegal aliens” finally. We’ll put you all back to work, you lazy, unappreciative entitled bastards.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I hear when I read shit like this:
"The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of 'WOKE.' The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future," claimed Trump.”
[...]
The GOP president went on to promise, "We are not going to allow this to happen, and Iave instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities, where tremendous progress has been made. This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the 'HOTTEST' Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums," he closes.
Trump's own campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again," suggests that there was a time when America was not great.
Fortunately, not everyone is as fucked-in-the-head as our current White House Resident.
Cases in point:
Trump attacked "woke" museums for addressing the troubling history of the United States, particularly the kidnapping of people of color from Africa, their forced labor, and the torture and rape they endured.
"Trump thinks we've done enough remembering about how bad slavery was. If you've doubted his racism and inhumanity - you can stop doubting now," wrote former host Keith Olbermann on X.
"Slavery was very, very, very bad, and I hope that view continues to be reflected in our national museums," said deputy opinion editor James Hohmann at the Washington Post.
"Why doesn't the Smithsonian talk more about how (sic) the upsides of slavery?" mimicked journalist Aaron Rupar.
"Trump wants to cover up slavery like it’s in the Epstein files," former campaign reporter and White House correspondent Sam Youngman.
Legal analyst and Substacker Aaron Parnas questioned Trump's demand that museums talk about "the Future."
"Also, why would museums talk about the future?" Parnas questioned.
The group Republicans Against Trump called the claim "Insane."
"So now he wants to force them to discuss how 'good' slavery was?" questioned ex-Republican Rep. Joe Walsh (IL).
Professor of human rights law Steve Peers mocked, "MAKE SLAVERY GREAT AGAIN!"
"Dear Democrats, the president of the United States being pro slavery is a 'kitchen table issue' to this Black man," said reporter Oliver Willis.
Others linked Trump's comments to Jeffrey Epstein's "sex slavery," alleging that Trump was a supporter of it while he was palling around with the man.
And this on CNN:
"Kristen, the president on social media, just escalated his attacks against the Smithsonian," said anchor Boris Sanchez. "Of course, he's ordered a review of everything inside these museums in Washington, D.C. What is Trump saying?"
"Yeah, and just a reminder to our viewers, he ordered this review," Holmes noted. "The White House said that this was an order to make sure that our historical museums, the U.S. historical museums, were aligned, essentially, with the Trump agenda. But then he put out this post, and it's not surprising because he uses the word 'woke.' But there are certainly elements of it that I think many people will take issue with."
Regarding Trump's post, she continued, "I think it's probably clear from here that the part that many people might take issue with is the idea that the Smithsonian is somehow saying how bad slavery is, when slavery was a very dark part of the United States' history. It also appears from this that he wants to take out reference to slavery, or to use the word, 'how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been,' which is not entirely clear what that means."
"But these museums do exist in order to tell the story of the United States and of America, and of our history and culture, and the tragedy of slavery is certainly a part of that," she added. "This is really exactly what people were concerned about when they first heard about this review, that it would somehow remove critical parts of American history. Of course, if he is talking about removing reference to slavery, that would fall right into that category."
The African-American Smithsonian Museum doesn’t just focus on the “negatives” of Slavery. it also highlights the triumphs of Africans in America as well.
The Smithsonian Museum of African American History walks through the struggles of those who were kidnapped and brought to the United States to work as slaves. However, as one ascends the floors, the exhibits hold up the abolitionist movement, the successes of civil rights, and celebrate those who continue to fight for equal rights.
The Musem also highlights the accomplishments of African-Americans both collectively and singularly. From building their own network of Historically Black Collleges because they were being systematically excluded from the Ivy League, to building their own unique culture, our own unique cuisine and dialect, dozen of musical forms such as BeBop, Blues, R&B, Rock N Roll, Jazz, Honky Tonk, Gospel, Ragtime and Hip Hop, individual success in sports, from Jesse Owens to Jackie Robinson to Muhummad Ali to Kareem Abdul-Jabar. Success in entertainment and business. Excellence in service going from Crispus Attucks, to the Black soldiers in the Union Army, to the Buffalo Soldiers to the Tuskegee Airmen. Creating their own companies and corporations from Black Wall Street to Jet, Ebony and Essence magazine to BET, the success of Oprah, the movie studio built entirely by Tyler Perry and directors such as Spike Lee. Heroes and Astronauts such as Dr. Mae Jemison, or Robert McNair who died on the Challenger, and Michael P. Anderson who died in the Columbia explosion. Black women are the most educated single ethnic group in America. We are Leaders in academia, thought and morality such as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, W.E.B. Debois, Booker T. Washington, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Hampton, Cornell West, Michael Eric Dyson and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
If you simply piled the successes of African-Americans in this nation together across the wide dimensions of American life and culture, I do believe we would easily match and potentially exceed just about any other single ethnic group. We remain the leaders in fashion and style, we are in the forefront of much of what it means to be American, because we didn’t just transplant our original African culture here — at least not entirely.
We built it new, almost entirely from scratch.
We had our original culture, language, religion and identity stolen from us. It was against the law to teach us to read, while it was also illegal for us to use our native languages. We’ve had to rebuild everything back up from almost nothing. Bit by bit, brick by brick. Usually against direct opposition to our very existence and while we endured another ongoing century and a half of intimidation, harassment, exclusion, torture, red-lining, being herded into pollution-filled job deserts, false imprisonment, continued forced labor, murder and terrorism.
Slavery never ended, it only changed into the Black Codes, Sharecropping, Chain Gangs, Debt Peonage and Convict Leasing — which was where people (falsely) arrested for petty crimes such as “loitering” or “vagrancy” by the agents of the state were sold and worked to death for the benefit of plantations and corporations. That form of Slavery continued openly and regularly right until the 1940s.
Nixon kept this going with his “law and order” initiatives and his “War On Drugs.” Reagan kept it going with his attack on “Welfare Queens.” The Pigford Farming lawsuit involved the US Department of Agriculture wrongly denying loans to black farmers from.1981 until 1996. Racist Housing lawsuits against major banks have happened in the 2010s. The DOJ just settled a Racist Housing Appraisal lawsuit just this year.
Places like the Smithsonian teach that Slavery was bad, because it *WAS* fucking Bad. 1.5 million died during the middle passage. 12.5 million slaves were transported here from 1651 to 1808, 380k of which came to North America. When it was technically "ended" with the passage of the 13th Amendment there were 4 million enslaved persons still alive in the US. Over the course of 200 years before then, 10s of millions were born, lived and were worked to death under the yoke of cultural, language and family annihilation, torture, murder and rape of Chattel Slavery. That's worse than the Jewish Holocaust and the Cambodian Killing Fields combined.
And regardless of all this whining we hear about “DEI” we still have high rates of racial discrimination in business, housing, loans and college admissions. We still see Karen’s calling the cops on African-Americans for daring to bird watch, bar-b-que or simply walk down the “wrong side” of the sidewalk. They’re trying to implement even more voter suppression of black and brown voters using gerrymandering in Texas Right. F-Ing. Now.
And yet, we’ve accomplished what we have, in spite of all that. There’s still a huge racial wealth gap. There’s still a racial education and experience gap. We still have a ways to go, but we’ve done a lot.
But this Isn’t really about just what happened to Black slaves and their descendants.
America practiced racist forced sterilization of Eastern Europeans.
America implemented “Operation Wetback” to deport millions of Mexicans into the middle of the desert, where many of them died from dehydration.
America placed Japanese American CITIZENS — actual U.S. Citizens — into Internment camps after stealing their homes and businesses away from them.
America implemented the Chinese Exclusion Act, which began decades of racist immigration policies.
But here’s the kicker. What America has done to all of them pales compared to what they've done to Indigenous Native Americans who were living here before them. For them, It's been even worse than all of that.
Genocide. Mass Murder. Biological Warfare using Smallpox. Broken Treaty after broken treaty. Forced Relocation with the Trail of Tears. Kidnapping Native children and placing them in “Re-educational Boarding Schools” where thousands of them died of abuse, neglect and communicable disease.
Still today, the mysterious disappearances and deaths of native females is astronomical. Estimates are that about 18 million Indigenous Native Americans were killed within North America, and 55-60 million were killed if you also include Central and South America.
That’s worse than the 25 million massacred by Stalin.
African Americans are stopped, searched, arrested, assaulted and killed by police 2.5 Times more often than Whites, even though they use and sell the exact same amount of drugs and are less likely to have guns. Meanwhile, Native Americans are stopped and killed by police 5 Times more often.
And these fuckers like Trump can’t even admit that any of that shit has been wrong.
They can’t come to grips with it. They can’t deal with it. They want to ignore it, wipe it away, pretend it didn’t happen and that it isn’t still happening. That it doesn’t matter to anyone.
What we have all accomplished has to be understood as an even greater accomplishment in the wake of what we’ve endured and survived. How far we’ve come and what we've accomplished despite all that has been stacked against us, shows that America is an even greater nation than many have stated.
“Why can’t you just get over it?”
Because what was done to us, was done here. We weren’t persecuted and driven out of Europe by their bigotry and intolerance. White people were. They threw out the Irish. They threw out the Polish. They threw out the Swedes. They threw out the Catholics who they didn’t think were Catholic enough. They threw out the Quakers, Puritans, Lutherans and Methodists. And that was after they had an Inquisition over religious purity. It’s easy to forget and “get over it” because it didn’t happen to you here. All that was over there, back then.
And after they were tossed out, they then chose to repeat the mistreatment they received from England, France and the Netherlands on all the rest of us. What was done to us before was done IN AMERICA, and there’s still a chance it could happen again. A lot of it never stopped happening.
Because America has never attempted to make it right. We haven’t even tried to fix any of what has been broken. We didn’t give back anything that was taken. We didn’t even try to repair *ANY* of the damage that has been done to any of the minority individuals in this country — usually by the U.S. Government — for centuries.
CENTURIES.
They say in response to the German Holocaust, “Never Forget.” But what do they say to us? “It wasn’t that bad.”
Fucking really?
Trump wants the Washington Commanders to go back to being called the “RedSkins” — which is a term that describes providing the scalp of a murdered Native American to the crown in England in order to prove they had been killed in order to collect a Bounty for them.
He thinks that shit is funny. He thinks that's what “Made America Great.”
Fuck dat Puto.
Here’s a direct response to Trump’s Slavery post.
Here’s a discussion of this subject from Abby Phillip on CNN.
Taking up Supremacy yet again.
