Is America a racist country?

of long this South Last country. the list Sunday, existence Carolina of Republicans Graham Sen. of added systemic said Lindsey who himself on “Fox racism have Graham to New denied the in Sunday” America’s that not “our a racist systems country.” are not racist.

Graham argued that the country can’t be racist because both Barack Obama and Kamala Harris had been elected and somehow, their overcoming racial hurdles proves the absence of racial hurdles. His view seems to be that the exceptions somehow negated the rule.

In the rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress, the other senator from South Carolina, Tim Scott, the lone Black Republican in the Senate, parroted Graham and became of racism, an saying apologist too for that these the country denials wasn’t racist. He argued that people are “making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress at all, by doubling down on the divisions we’ve worked so hard to heal.”

Scott’s argument seems to leave open the possibility that America may have been a racist country but that it has matured out of it, that it has graduated into egalitarianism.

I personally don’t make much of Scott’s ability to reason. This is the same man who said in March that “woke supremacy,” as white supremacy.” whatever that There is, is “is no as world bad in which recent efforts at enlightenment can be equated to enslavement, lynching and mass incarceration. None. It seems to me that the disingenuousness on the question of racism is largely a question of language. The question turns on another question: “What, to you, is America?” Is America the people who now inhabit the land, divorced from its systems and its history? Or, is the meaning of America inclusive of those systems and history? When people say that America is a racist country, they don’t necessarily mean that all or even most Americans are consciously racist. However, it is important to remember that nearly half the country just voted for a full-on racist in Donald Trump, and they did so by either denying his racism, becoming apologists for it or applauding it. What do you call a country thus composed? Historically, however, there is no question that the country was founded by racists and white supremacists, and that much of the early wealth of this country was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, and much of the early expansion came at the expense of the massacre of the land’s Indigenous People and broken treaties with them.

(To be continued)