I was cooking up a post about writing and what I’m working on and why, but I’m gonna save that for Friday, I think. Because something else came up that felt a bit more urgent for me to share. In part because it’s a way of looking at something I see a lot and have never thought about in this way.
The other day, I came across one of those “white grievance” TikTok/reel videos. You know that ones. Some white person, usually wearing either some outright Trump merch or something that’s “red state” coded, sitting in their car, recording a video about how they don’t want to have to apologize for being white or feel bad about being white or apologize for things they didn’t do, that happened decades or centuries ago. We have all seen these videos or read these kind of comments for, well, most of our lives, if we’re being honest. It’s a pretty powerful appeal to emotion and a thing that gets a lot of folks bogged down in trying to explain. It’s a big part of the “you can’t explain to someone how to care about other people” line. But a different response welled up in me when I saw this video.
No one is asking you to apologize. In fact, I feel pretty comfortable that no one wants an apology from you. I don’t care if you don’t want to feel bad, I don’t care if you do. I know, for sure, that I do not care about you or your feelings. If you want to sit there and say I don’t want to feel guilty for something I didn’t do, go right ahead. It’s a free country and I can not stop you. And I don’t care to. I don’t need an apology from you (though I will have a question for you a little later).
What I need is an apology from the U.S. government. That’s who owes me and mine an apology, reparations, healing, change. It’s the government who decides my relatives were worth 3/5 of a white person. It’s the government that not only allowed the enslavement of human beings to happen, but supported it and encouraged it to flourish. It’s the government that enforced fugitive slave laws. It’s the government who compromised with slave owners to force states to accept slavery in order to join the union, in order to keep the “balance” that allowed slavery to continue. It’s the government who filled their coffers with taxes, fees and revenue built on the backs of human beings. It’s the government that conducted a genocide against Native Americans and indigenous people around the world. It’s the government who dismantled Reconstruction. It’s the federal and state governments that built Jim Crow. It’s the government that allowed the KKK to become a de facto law enforcement arm and secret police of the South. It’s the government that rolled back the gains made after the Civil Rights Movements. It’s the government that built and maintains the carceral state, finding new and more horrifying ways to lock up Black and brown bodies. It’s the government that is currently sending masked armed thugs into our cities to lock up anyone they deem insufficiently American.
Those are all things that the U.S. government did to its own citizens. And before you start, anyone born in the United States was a citizen from birth. They simply had their citizenship withheld from them until the 14th Amendment was passed. They were citizen. They were human beings. They were Americans. And their own government tortured, abused, murdered and exploited them. That’s who owes us. Our own government.
Over the last ten years, I’ve decided not to fight for people’s hearts and minds, not in the way we’re used to fighting for them. No reasonable person with anything approaching a functioning brain should need to be told that slavery was wrong, always wrong and always cruel. The evidence is plentiful. If you refuse to see that, then you don’t want to. I don’t want to spend my one, wild and precious life trying to convince you of something you don’t want to see.
All I really need from these people right now is to get out of the way. Fine, you did nothing wrong. Or if you did, it was on a personal level. Whatever. But the government did do many, many things wrong and it owes its citizens to make that wrong right. If you want to complain about a sliver of a minority population getting two spots out of ten under the assumption that you were going to get one of those spots, take your complaint to the person doing the choosing. And let them explain to you that they have to make it right. Let the government make it right.
But I do have a question for you. Are you proud of American history? Are you proud of our victory in WWII? Does your heart swell with pride when you hear the national anthem, see the colors flying and hear the Blue Angels fly over the Super Bowl? Do you walk around telling people that America is the greatest country in the world, the leader of the free world, a bright shining city on a hill?
If you do, then…what did YOU do to make that happen? You didn’t fight in WWII. You’re (probably) not a Blue Angel pilot. You (again, probably) don’t make warships. You have, in all likelihood, at best contributed a few years of taxes to the system. You don’t make flags. You didn’t win the War of Independence. Maybe you cosplay as a Union soldier on the weekends. But you did nothing to make America great in the first place.
So…how do you get to be proud of things you didn’t do, but not responsible for things you didn’t do? How can you be proud of American achievement, but innocent of American failures? How do you get to pick and choose what parts of history you own?
I didn’t think of this question. I saw it on another video between two Brits and one of them, a white man, was going on about how he wasn’t responsible for slavery and the other, a man of color, asked him if he was proud of British resistance to the Blitz. And as a the white guy opened his mouth to say “yes,” you could see that he saw the trap.
You don’t get to do both. That I won’t stand for. If you want to wave your Confederate flag, you don’t get to say that the Civil War is in the past. You’re the one keeping it in the present. You don’t get to talk about the great tradition of Southern gentlemen and then say “I never owned any slaves.” I’m sorry, you don’t.
And I wish more people would make that argument. Not because I think it will change the hearts and minds of bigots, but because it will change the hearts and minds of people listening. People who think “well, yeah, we can’t blame you for your grandfather’s sins.” A reasonable thought…except when that person is living in their grandfather’s house, spending their grandfather’s money, trading on their grandfather’s name. You want the legacy, you want the history, you get the history.
Black folks have understood this for so so long. The most patriotic, the most committed to the American experiment, the people with the deepest reservoirs of knowledge and respect for American history are people of color. Because we embrace all of it. We don’t look away from the stuff we don’t like. We know that it’s all the same story.
Save your apologies for someone who cares. I certainly don’t. But think, for just a second, about how history is a long, twisting, turning river that you’re on as well as I am. Trace it back and it goes to the same headwaters. You poison one, you poison all. You clean it for one, you clean it for all. What are you dumping in the waters?