What I'm going to say is not directed toward immigrants to the United States nor its naturalized citizens. While we do not have a good metaphor (e.g., melting pot, fruit salad) for who we are, we are all part of the history, the present, and the future of this country. /1

But I am going to address my comments to the current occupant of that famous house in DC built by slaves, freed Blacks, and noncitizen immigrants: @realDonaldTrump.

I heard your speech tonight, given on unceded Sioux land on Independence Day eve. And I was appalled. /2

You pretend to know American history and thus understand America. You do not. Tonight it sounded as if you were reading some preschool version of the stories of the four presidents towering above you, complicated men who did both good and evil. Maybe the truth would shock you. /3

But by the time your grandfather Frederick arrived from Germany in 1885, our Revolutionary War, our continental colonialist expansion, and our Civil War were history. The three presidents -- Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln -- who oversaw those times were long dead. /4

Teddy Roosevelt continued to lead that colonialist expansion by riding roughshod over Cubans. His officers, who had learned to fight in campaigns against Indigenous people or during the Civil War, led men wanting to embody the "cowboy tradition" by capturing Spanish territory. /5

Such men were considered heroes then. Now we recognize them for what they were: colonialist opportunists who wanted only to be seen "as the true inheritors of the cowboy tradition of white, aggressive, armed, nationalist manhood" (as historian Sarah Lyons Watts puts it). /6

This was the same "tradition" you tapped tonight, while you stood on land stolen from its sovereign people by gold prospectors backed by the U.S. Army, violating the Treaty of Fort Laramie -- talking of Wild Bill Cody and such as if such men too were heroes. /7

You can tell these stories with what borders on glee because while your grandfather may have been in what we now call the "service industry" during the Klondike Gold Rush, your family was never part of that white masculinist oppressive history you seem to worship. /8

My family, though, was part of that history. We were the colonists who exterminated the Indigenous people, the slave owners who bought and sold people as if they were property, and the homesteaders who gladly settled on land cleared by military conquest. /9

Many in my family were Quakers and abolitionists, but they also fought (without seeming contraction w/ their pacifist faith) in nearly every war: American Indian Wars, Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Civil War (on both sides), World War I, World War II. /10

Some moments in that complicated family history have been proud ones, such as arguing against slavery (as far back as 1688), fighting against fascism (including protesting when Japanese citizens were rounded up during WW2), and supporting civil rights in the 1960s. /11

But that history you were touting tonight? You can talk about it as if it were somehow glorious because it is not YOUR history. It is, however, mine. And there was precious little in anything you mentioned about which I can be genuinely proud. /12

There are certainly no monuments to that history that are worthy of lasting in perpetuity — and absolutely none that matter more than living human beings. And people are dying, @realDonaldTrump, by the tens of thousands. While all you can talk about are statues and monuments. /13

What's strange to me is that you care so little about here and now. Your own grandfather died in 1918 in the only global pandemic to rival this one. I realize you never knew him, but still. I guess your sense of family history and mine are very, very different indeed. /14 [END]