I would encourage every American to watch the Ken
Burns series, The West. It is available on Netflix and PBS.
What you learn from this extraordinary documentary
is that the White Man has, from the beginning of his presence here, done
everything in his power to prevent first, the Native American Indians, then the
Mexicans, then the Blacks, then the Asians, from ever being given the right to
be legally assimilated into the free function of American society.
The White Man is an immigrant. Unless you have Native
American blood in you, you did not come from this land. Your ancestors brought
you here from somewhere else.
Whites came to this country from Europe, Western
Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, and North Africa. This land did not belong to
them, they stumbled onto it and then they took it to be their own.
Many came here fleeing religious persecution,
poverty, disease, lack of economic opportunity, and the freedom to build a life
for themselves and their families.
They weren’t all sweet and gentle. Some were
pirates. Some were swindlers. Some were con men. Some were criminals. But the
majority who came here were good people ready to work hard and have a better
life.
Sound familiar? Yes. That is exactly what most of
the immigrants and migrants and refugees coming to America today are doing.
They are good people. They don’t want a handout, they don’t want your job, they
simply want the chance to build a better life for themselves and their
children. They want opportunity. They want freedom. Many of them simply want a
safe place to live.
Whites do not own America. Can we get that
straight? Can we at least admit this land was not ours? The native American
Indians were here first. The land was theirs and we took it from them. In many
instances we stole it. We robbed their stock. We killed off the buffalo. We
destroyed their ability to survive. And we murdered thousands of them in order
to do it.
That’s the history of the immigrant White man. He
never did originate here.
And today, he’s still taking from others. He’s
still expecting to own everything. He’s still oppressing anyone who tries to
come here from somewhere else for the very same reasons his ancestors came
here. To find freedom. To escape poverty, violence, illness, and death.
The real myth about the White Man is that he isn’t
even white. Every white person on earth is a mixture of races going back to
Eden.
The notion, which many people hold—many Republican
politicians, many Evangelical Christians—that Mexican immigrants, Latino
migrants, and foreign refugees who come to this country; the idea they are not welcome,
disregards and mocks everything decent about our nation and its values.
And it ignorantly and arrogantly forgets, the White
Man is and always has been an immigrant here, too. Just like the immigrants and
migrants and refugees today, our ancestors came here for the very same reasons.
Tolerance and compassion are not just nice choices we
can make. They are necessary to our humanity. We cannot survive as human beings
without them. Without them, we become
users, beasts, and monsters.
Thomas Paine, one of the early white leaders in
America wrote: “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
You can’t find a better definition for the heart of
this nation than that. Isn’t it time we lived up to it?
© 2019 Timothy Moody
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