White Americans Fail to Address Their Family Histories

[Dan]

61. I do not believe that any of my comments laid blame.

I spoke to history and if that acknowledgement of history offends - then there is little I can say.

Your great-grandparents and grandparents sound like and may have been very good people. People that we classify as the salt of the earth - and bless them, we need more of them.

But imagine your ancestors with their small farm or business - and someone decides one day that they have too much, and through legal and illegal means take possession of their assets. Decide that somewhere or somehow what they did was illegal, the legal case being judged and adjudicated by the people in power that decided that they had too much. That your ancestors had no remedy by law, custom, culture or tradition because the powers that be had decided on their ‘rightness’ and their ‘wrongness’.

Now, imagine if everything that your ancestors wanted for their descendants was taken away and left their children with nothing except broken dreams. Imagine them being told that they were failures for failing to provide for their offsprings. Imagine them telling their children to rise above via education and discovering that Jim Crow only provided the bare minimum of an education - and even if they were able to overcome that, being too smart or uppity could get them lynched. And now, discovering that the perpetrators of this ‘evil under the cover of rightness’ were the people that made the laws, administered the laws, and enforced the laws. And, even when the rightness of their cause was known by all, it was more important to be silent or accommodate the system than doing the right thing.

You may not agree, but maybe you can understand - why some of todays problems were created with actions of the past.

And, the situation was even worse for the Native Americans…