The Reckoning by Mary L. Trump

Author:Mary L. Trump
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

PART III

American Exceptionalism

CHAPTER 5

Suffering in Silence

It is a truism that the winners write history, and at the heart of our American system of government are an unacknowledged paradox and a false paradigm. The paradox is the unresolvable tension between the concepts of liberty and equality laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the embrace of chattel slavery in the Constitution. The paradigm is the myth that there is, first, such a thing as “race,” and, second, that there is a fixed hierarchy with whites at the top and Blacks at the bottom.

Because of this paradox and false paradigm, the country has developed along two tracks that run parallel to each other but nevertheless continuously impact each other. One, based in historical fact, is the genocide of two groups of people—Native Americans and Africans—and the enslavement of the latter. The other is the myth of white supremacy, which is the story white America has told since the country’s inception and that continues to drive the racial divide. It is the denial of white supremacy and the vehement need to deny it, however, that have ensured that the traumas upon which this country was founded would never heal, that they would in fact worsen over time, compounded by the continuing neglect of our democratic ideals and the pressing need of the white majority to pretend the traumas never happened.

Born in the flight from persecution and toward promise, our country was actually built on the backs and with the blood of Native Americans and enslaved Africans. When the Civil War ended, white Americans had a chance to atone, at least in some measure, by ensuring true equality for all people—by returning stolen land and sovereignty to Native Americans and guaranteeing and protecting freedmen and freedwomen’s full rights as citizens.

The terrible irony is that white supremacy demanded that Blacks be excluded from society, despite their desire to be fully integrated, while Native Americans, who wanted nothing more than the return of their land and their sovereignty, were forced to assimilate, no matter what the cost to them.

We can only imagine, but never know, the trauma caused not only by the physical pain, but by the pain of isolation and despair and, once forced into the hostile world of the slave trader and the plantation, by the loss of dignity.

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