So, I removed the info of the person who posted this because I respect them and don’t want them trolled.

However, this whitewashed notion of US history, and our failure to address it, is EXACTLY how we ended up with Trump... [THREAD]

The Declaration of Independence was effectively a Declaration of War against a British government with the annoying habit of displaying vestiges of recognition of Indian sovereignty. This highbrow document explicitly refers to us as “merciless Indian savages...”

... in order to justify ignoring the Proclamation Line that was holding back a mass invasion of the American interior. With the British out of the way, Americans were “free” (to steal the freedom of others). And some of them even wanted to do it with stolen people...

... which is how you end up with Gettysburg: the turning point of a war tldr’ed as “poor-ass White people dying by the hundreds of thousands to decide which group of rich-ass White people would be made even richer by invading the west.” It’s like COVID, but with prizes...

Lincoln turned White America loose on Indian land out west before the secession papers were even dry. He’s also famous for the single largest mass execution in US history, hanging three dozen Dakota for having the nerve to defend themselves from armed invasion...

American history is really a very terrible story. It’s the story of how rich folks who couldn’t make it in Europe invented Whiteness to keep a large class of culturally similar people just one step above an even larger class of culturally dissimilar people...

... in order to take everything (or, in the case of the various people that became White, next to everything) from all of them...

But what you see in the images of the OP is a flat denial of that history by omission (displaced by saccharine depictions of “founders’ virtue”), which is how White supremacy has typically expressed itself since the Civil Rights movement...

And what you’re seeing with Trump is actually the coin’s obverse: his “f*ck you” brand of White supremacy would be far more recognizable, perhaps even comforting, to America’s founders, nearly every one of them a slave owner...

America today is arguing over what made America “great,” and there’s a strong argument to be made that the Trumpists are far closer to the truth than (relative) progressives who, with straight faces, look to slaveholders and Indian killers for inspiration on civil discourse...

Because White Supremacy means excusing anything as long as it’s sufficiently White and Polite, while ignoring the better words of better “Americans” from Dekanawidah to James Baldwin for fear of being led by those for whom this nation was never intended...

Trump is not the tragic fall of a people otherwise on a high arc of destiny. He is the inevitable expression of the primal American character: moral cowardice moldering everlong beneath a veneer of pugilistic arrogance, suddenly exposed to the world and reeking to high heaven...

That character comes as a surprise to all but those who’ve dwelled for centuries beneath the awful weight of that veneer, enduring its violence alone, silently, invisibly, until cell phones rendered the Breonnas and the Tamirs suddenly, impolitely, constantly visible...

It turns out half the country has an easier time imagining a return to an America explicitly stratified by the violence of law for the elevation of Whites, than imaging an America where the Negro and Indian may exist without fear under protection of the law...

And it turns out the other half can scarcely imagine the latter under anything but the leadership of White ideals, morals, and principles (occasionally couriered by the colored in a perverse moral minstrelsy), even those put forward by designing and morally bankrupt men...

That is how, in 2020, you end up with America’s highest office, late of its first non-White occupant, contested by the Yin and Yang of White Male Dominance. For water always seeks its level, and this country, for all its righteous popinjaying, is the same as it ever was...

And will be forever until it summons the courage to be, fundamentally, something else, something better. /THREAD