The beloved lies about America

White supremacists love their narratives of America. They spoon feed it to their children and force feed it to people of color. When Francis Scott Key penned the lyrics for “The Star-Spangled Banner” in1814, stating that America was the “land of the free and home of the brave,” he crafted a stirring image of goodness and virtue. Who wouldn’t love and admire such a homeland? But these high-minded sentiments were written by a racist and proponent of chattel slavery for Black Americans. Most disturbingly, the third verse of this song that would become America’s national anthem, proposed a particularly horrible fate for the once enslaved African Americans who were then fighting for the British in the War of 1812. “No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror or flight, or the gloom of the graves.” These words were a clear call to slaughter people of color who dared to challenge the authority of white Americans. America was never the land of the free. Just ask the descendants of the multitudes of the enslaved who had every manner of inhumane abuses handed to them. Or just ask the families of innocent and unarmed Black and brown men and women who have been gunned down in great numbers across America by police in recent years. This is the factual history that is woven into our culture, and this is the reality with which we live every day. But now, there is a movement afoot by white supremacists to gaslight not only Americans of color, but the entire world that these injustices do not exist, and never did exist. One particularly blatant example was the political maneuver by Virginia’s Republican Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin when he claimed that he would ban Toni Morrison’s book “Beloved” from Virginia’s public schools. This attack by Youngkin on a book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was written by the 1993 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was clearly intended to be a loud dog whistle to the white supremacists whose votes he was courting. Youngkin’s campaign dug up a […]

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