A Letter to America
“Now is not the time for us to shy away from challenging ourselves to make substantive change for the better. We have the opportunity to raise the bar in the faith-based world by forging a culture in which inclusivity, diversity and equality are paramount.”
The currently dismal social relations and political climate of our nation are a result of three problems. One: the Democrats forgot their populist roots. Two: some of us have forgotten that this nation was founded on the principle of the separation of church and state. Lastly and most importantly, White America has never actually dealt with the structural inequities created by enslaving one population and attempting to exterminate another, then later granting them both citizenship without any reparations or guarantees to equality of opportunity.
These three mistakes can be traced historically from our country’s colonial formative years to now. It is often said that this country was founded on compromise and that it is compromise that makes this country continuously grow, along with the age of the human spirit. However, compromise among an enclave of elite white men in 1776 was far easier than the challenge Americans face today.
The challenge we face today is also one of compromise, but in a much more diverse country where so many more voices are heard and everyone is struggling with forms of pride, confusion, and simply living. I believe by acknowledging the mistakes we have made as a country and moving toward social balance, we have the potential to make America great for everyone for the first time in history.
White America tried to kick the can on the paradoxical issue of slavery in a country that professed ideals of liberty for so long that it ended in a civil war. A war that took more American lives than any other thus far. Then our political structure failed to effectively solve the issue of massive wealth inequality borne from almost 250 years of unpaid labor from an entire population. Unpaid labor that built the universities we all sit in, like the Universities of Virginia and North Carolina. Unpaid labor that built the White House our presidents have lived in. Unpaid labor that built an agricultural economy that made White America’s rejection of England’s power and a declaration of freedom and independence possible.
Economic reparations for slavery are an issue that we never addressed and it has unleashed a slew and milieu of race relation issues for America today. For the African American community, it has called for them to act as a nation within a nation simply to survive and experience growth. Every legislative advancement to attempt to empower Black Americans has come from their endless theorizing, organizing, and resisting the racial wealth gap and social inequality. I understand, Bill from Indiana, that you did not personally enslave anyone. But you, like everyone else in America that is not Black, have to understand that we all benefit from the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans that lived here from 1620 to 1865 and reparations—a solution to close the racial wealth gap between White and Black Americans—is an absolute necessity to moving forward in our country.
Not to mention, all White Americans have actively benefited from the historically-constructed social privileges of being White. Those same privileges continued to oppress Black Americans throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth-centuries through convict-leasing systems and vagrancy laws; sharecropping; Jim Crow; unfair wages; disenfranchisement; unfair labor and bargaining power in unions in the North; and mass incarceration. Some of these issues continue today. In order to flourish as a nation, we must reimburse Black Americans for the unpaid labor their enslaved ancestors performed that LITERALLY built this country.
No matter what month it is, Black history is American history.
In addition, this country would never have been possible without the guerrilla warfare, forced removal, and attempted genocide of the native people. The United States of America promised native tribes welfare and equality in their own sovereign communities in exchange for the land that we ALL live on. The avoidance of issues of slavery and colonialism have alienated indigenous people from political conversations that they are very much a part of. Furthermore, our racially binary dimension of politics since our inception as a country has led all Americans to contribute to native political invisibility.
Native tribes have to be a vital part of race and colonial reconciliation conversations in this country. They need to be a part of conversations about climate change and the environment, as these are issues they have been advocating for long before Leonardo DiCaprio began flying his jet around with fuel emissions everywhere to talk about it. (I love you Leo, but I’m just sayin’.) The colonialist past of the United States can no longer be ignored. We must be acutely aware of it if we are to make political compromises that are grounded in both logic and empathy.
The Republican Party has wholly unconcerned itself with racial inequality since 1896. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has traded gestures of symbolic social equality—like voluntary, one-way integration programs, publicly-funded colleges, the welfare state, and the liberation of women’s reproductive rights—for class-blindness. None of these socially progressive stances change the fact that the Democratic Party has not addressed the economic structural problems that have plagued this nation since before its inception. The Democratic Party has looked toward these gestures and symbolic forms of political imagery to replace progressive and radical policy making that calls for an examination of the role of socioeconomics in both segregation and low-income Whites.
Democratic politicians are wondering how they could’ve lost to Trump. Well the liberal, white-collar, knowledge professional base of suburban White America has created an ideology that peddles social progressivism and ideals of equality, yet has not taken the radical actions necessary to fix the racial wealth gap White America created through slavery. What’s more, they’ve turned their backs on their populist base of the White common man—blue-collar workers—to accomplish both their image of liberal progressivism and avoid issues around the questions of class and labor, like unionizing, price controls for rural farmers, and reparations for Black Americans.
It was not, my friends, simply ‘a crock of liberal shit’ or an ‘out of touch interpretation,’ when Howard Zinn said in The People’s History of the United States that they conquered and divided us, the populous. Because the elite political structures of America have slowly done just that since at least the 1865 emancipation of formerly enslaved Africans. After the populist party of the 1890’s threatened to converge poor White and Black farmers to demand labor and class reforms, Northeastern Republican elites expanded industry even more, into the Roaring Twenties, to ensure they held economic power and direction. Then the Great Depression brought an opportunity for economic redresses in our national political ideology.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt built on the ideas of 1890's populism and turn-of-the-century progressivism and invented and implemented New Deal liberalism, anchoring it as an ideology in our politics. FDR appealed to blue-collar workers, minorities, women, southern segregationists and white-collar professionals who all benefited from his New Deal policies and job creation, albeit to different extents. Roosevelt was not perfect, but he had a key element that Democrats since 1964 have been missing: an appeal to blue-collar workers and a clear stance on big business, labor and wages. Since 1964 and increasingly since Watergate, Democrats have become more and more like Republicans in their economic policies. The class and labor movement that peaked in power in 1937 has yet to make a real comeback among the Democratic presidents we’ve had since then. If it were not for the Great Depression and FDR, we could well have remained in the political power dynamics of the Gilded Age. But that’s another essay for another day.
Modern conservatism was born out of the response to the New Deal. Businessmen forged alliances with primarily evangelical-fundamentalist church leaders and libertarian, or laissez faire, ideologues; those alliances would come to be the foundation of the Republican Party. The ideology of modern conservatism fully formed in the white suburbia of Orange County, California from 1960-1963 and culminated in Barry Goldwater’s loss for the executive office in 1964. The conservative loss and failure to fully end liberalism by 1964, in combination with the rise and radicalism of labor, the black power movement, women’s lib and the New Left, made them determined to gain office.
In 1980, they elected Ronald Reagan. With Reagan in office, the conservative economic policies were fossilized, just as the welfare state was under the period of New Deal liberalism (1932-64). And religious cultural politics, began by Eisenhower when he added religious connotations to our money and national pledge in the 1950’s, became an accepted discourse of political issues. Conservatives began to challenge the separation of church and state and used their religious base (primarily White evangelicals) as a reliable one, who only truly votes on one issue: abortion. White liberals continued to put a band-aid where a whole surgery was needed. Hence, in 2016, evangelicals, blue-collar Whites, middle and upper class proponents of laissez-faire libertarianism all came together to form the silent majority once again, as they had with Reagan in 1980, to recapture the executive office.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has turned its back on poor White America. It has failed to solve the systemic issues of race and class, yet continued to preach social equality without radical solutions to radical problems until an Independent from Vermont changed some of the discourse in the past election. Not to mention, amongst all of this, they decided to run a candidate in 2016 who was perceived as not only controversial for several reasons, but also the quintessential establishment candidate. The very kind of candidate those who voted for Trump did not want. I believe if we can reflect upon this history, our own ideologies and privileges in society, and adapt a spirit of compromise, empathy, and understanding, then perhaps we can do the Roaring Twenties right this time.
I’m sure many of you reading this are asking who is she and why does she think she’s entitled to speak to, and in a way for, all of America in this letter? I don’t. I’m simply putting out there what I think, as an historian who has lived the life I have. It has taken a quarter century of learning from both life and literature for me to be able to fully understand, form and express the thoughts I’ve shared with you in this letter. I’m just a White girl from Alabama, born to two Deaf parents, whose ancestors have been in this country since the eighteenth century. My mom’s family is of a blue-collar, lower-class background and my father’s is of a lower-middle to middle class background, with the first college graduates in his family being in his mother’s generation.
After constructing my pedigree in 2018, my family tree is a sea of Europeans, with a few indigenous ancestors that intermarried with my ancestors over the centuries. My father’s mother’s ancestors, and consequently some of mine, were Scott-ulsters, a group of radically violent White protestants, some of whom migrated to the colonies from 1773-1775 following their campaigns against the Irish under the British government in exchange for benefits and local autonomy. They initially migrated primarily to North Georgia and served as the foot soldiers for Jackson’s Indian Wars and later for Lincoln and Johnson’s after the Civil War when we expanded west. Buffalo soldiers, an African American regiment, also joined the effort to expand west through guerilla warfare against tribes. Former president Barack Obama is a Scott-ulster descendant through his mother’s side, as many presidents have been.
We have a shared history but we all live in different present realities that are often sharply separated by spatial lines of class, race, gender, ableism, and citizenship status. My father—despite experiencing ableism and audism derived from an ideology of Eugenics (Thank Alexander Graham Bell for that one, guys)—graduated high school at 20 years old. My father is one of the most intelligent people I know. He got his B.A. in archaeology and has been an avid atheist pretty much his entire life. Being the child of a white-collar knowledge professional who was Deaf, classism and ableism were the primary concerns of my home environment. My dad was often discriminated against, in some cases having to file discrimination suits, but generally he could not prove it and so he was one of the last to be hired and first to be fired, or laid off. My mom did not go to college until I was an adult and experienced the same challenges my father did. Often, though, she saw more success with gaining jobs without prejudice because she chose to work in Deaf communities, whereas my father's field was a hearing-dominated one.
Because of this, I grew up in the welfare system and in predominantly PoC (people of color) neighborhoods my entire life in cities in the South and on the East Coast. My first encounter with racism, which would not be the last, was when I was called a n-er lover in 6th grade because I had a black boyfriend in Mobile, Alabama. It is because of these experiences that I see the world as I do and that I believe in the things I believe.
I know that I did not make it to where I am today—a soon to be recipient of a Master’s in history and Law school applicant—simply because I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. If it were not for the U.S. welfare system, access to excellent education programs via application, social White privilege, and the strict and sturdy hand of my grandmother who was a high school drop-out and cleaned houses her entire life, I too probably would have fallen further in the cracks of structural inequities in just ONE generation. I went on to attend a historically black university, Xavier University of Louisiana, and I am currently a Junior historian who will receive her Master’s in history this fall from the University of South Alabama. My experience at Xavier was the foundation of transitioning my life experiences and observations to intellectual understanding. I chose Xavier because it felt right, I had friends going, and voluntary integration isn’t just one way, despite what those suburban White liberals in Boston with their METCO programs thought.
This is why I see the importance of radically reforming these structures to provide equality of opportunity for all and to embrace a mixed economy. This is why I have written this letter to America. My intellectual development and this letter have been, in a way, therapeutic for me, a girl who’s always felt quite lost without a tribe-ish. Perhaps a vision of a truly environmentally conscious, equal opportunity, technologically oriented country where we continue to grow in healthy ways to connect us all happening just in time for the Roaring Twenties 2.0 is naïve and overly optimistic. But the real question is: Are you at least listening yet?