Opinion by Eugene Robinson: Welcome to American History Month — often called Black History Month. The former can’t be understood without the latter. It is a MAGA article of faith that the nation’s story must be told without causing White people discomfort.
, when the first enslaved Africans were bartered to the Jamestown colonists; or at 1620, when the Mayflower landed in what is now Massachusetts. Remember that there were thriving civilizations here for thousands of years before any Europeans arrived, and that those Native American populations were dispossessed and decimated over centuries in a process that can only be described as genocide.
Remember that Spanish settlers were here before the English, and that they founded St. Augustine, Fla., the oldest continuously inhabited European-established city in the country, in 1565. Remember, when MAGA demagogues rail about a Latino “invasion” across the border with Mexico, that the entire southwestern third of the continental United States was once part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain.
, when a “compromise” to end a dispute over an allegedly “stolen” election resulted in the withdrawal of Union troops from the states of the former Confederacy — which allowed the antebellum White elite to reassert its dominion over African Americans. The resultingthe widespread theft of labor and wealth from Black Americans. Practices such as
redlining, racist discrimination and the deliberate undervaluation of Black-owned property extended the thievery to Northern cities as well. Through it all, somehow, Black Americans remained patriotic Americans. I had a great-uncle who fought with the American Expeditionary Forces in France in World War I, serving in an ambulance unit that tended the wounded on the Western Front. My father and all three of his brothers served in the military during World War II.
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