Stop saying 'this isn't who we are'

What we're seeing now is who we've always been.

By Shalise Manza Young

Stop saying “this isn’t who we are” as you consume images of pathetic masked men stealing people off the street for the crime of appearing to be illegal and read headlines about the ongoing war in Gaza that we’re funding and watch TikTok reels about a legally dead Black woman kept alive despite her family’s wishes so a fetus with a tiny chance of survival could be ripped from her decaying body.

What we’re seeing now is what this country has always been.

A country that was born in violence and is sustained by violence.

The first ship carrying Africans trafficked from their villages arrived on these shores in 1619, the beginning of centuries of systemic brutality. In England, the law dictated that a child’s status was inherited through his paternal line; here they changed that, so every child born of an enslaved woman, no matter the father’s race, was also enslaved. People were bought and sold, no different from cattle or farm tools.

Puritans claiming to flee their own persecution in 17th-century England in turn frequently persecuted the Natives who had lived on these lands for centuries, tribes that taught them how to farm the fertile acres they would eventually steal. Diseases the settlers brought and massacres they carried out decimated the Native population.

Stop saying “this isn’t who we are.” What we’re seeing now is what this country has always been.

Modern-day policing got its start as slave patrols in the antebellum South, one of the myriad methods employed to keep the enslaved in line and hunt fugitives who were desperately trying to escape their bondage.

In the mid-1800s, the fight for and against slavery in Congress sometimes led to physical violence. Most famously, in 1856, South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks caned Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner until he was unconscious; Sumner was an outspoken abolitionist, and Brooks was not.

As the thirst for power and wealth can never be sated, the canings and fistfights in Congress eventually became the Civil War. So dependent on free labor, wealthy Southerners who had amassed their fortunes on the backs of their human property first seceded then raised arms as traitors. Over 600,000 people died before the Confederates officially surrendered.

Stop saying “this isn’t who we are.” What we’re seeing now is what this country has always been.

For 12 brief, shining years after the Civil War—known as Reconstruction—the country actually approached the high-minded ideals that it enshrined in its founding documents. Three amendments were passed: outlawing slavery*, granting birthright citizenship, and giving formerly enslaved men the right to vote. Black men were elected to local, state, and federal offices.

(* – The 13th Amendment just allows slavery by another name: Incarceration. It’s become profitable for state and private prisons alike. Inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary raise cattle that end up as McDonald’s hamburgers or packs of beef at Walmart, working in oppressive heat for pennies a day, if they get paid at all. Which is why today American Black men have a 1 in 3 chance of being behind bars at some point in their lives, while white men have a 1 in 17 chance.)

As the formerly enslaved in the South tried to build lives as free folk, white people grew angrier and angrier. Vigilante groups were formed all over, their goal to intimidate and harm Black people generally minding their own business.

And then came the Jim Crow laws, so diabolical and effective that Nazis came to America to study them before the Holocaust. Poll taxes were instituted to disenfranchise Black voters. Blacks were barred from many jobs. Public hangings, often of Black men falsely accused of showing any kind of interest in a white woman, were treated like picnics in the park.

Stop saying “this isn’t who we are.” What we’re seeing now is what this country has always been.

Thirty-three white suffragists endured a night of jailhouse beatings in 1917, arrested for picketing outside of the White House to support their cause of gaining a woman's right to vote.

Oscarville, Georgia, a majority-Black town that saw several incidents of racial terror in the early 1900s, was flooded over in the 1950s to create Lake Lanier.

The Tulsa Race Massacre, the complete destruction of arguably the most financially successful Black neighborhood in the country, led to 300 people getting killed.

On Bloody Sunday in Selma, hundreds marching for voting rights were met with billy clubs, vicious dogs, and fire hoses.

President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Fred Hampton were murdered for trying to push the civil rights movement forward.

Raids on gay bars terrorized members of the LGBTQ community and led to the Stonewall riots. Ronald Reagan turned a blind eye to the AIDS crisis, and a generation of gay men was gone.

Stop saying “this isn’t who we are.” What we’re seeing now is what this country has always been.

Innumerable Black people killed extrajudicially by police, for actions ranging from holding a cell phone to “waving his arms” walking home from work to sleeping in her own bed to possibly passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store.

A young man opens fire in an elementary school in an upscale Connecticut suburb, and lawmakers enriched by the gun lobby do nothing. A young man opens fire in an elementary school in a small majority-Hispanic city, and police stand around waiting for the shooting to stop.

Unending stochastic terrorism, from the far-right and encouraged by the current president, is directed toward the tiny population of trans girls and women, one of our most vulnerable populations even before the hate campaign took off.

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump pardoned 1,500 insurrectionists that broke into the Capitol—some armed, some defecating in supposedly hallowed halls, some chanting for Vice President Mike Pence’s death—in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election Trump lost. Parents with no criminal record are being kidnapped in front of their children, families have no way to contact them, and now the Supreme Court has given the administration the green light to send criminal migrants off to some of the most violent countries in the world without due process.

Stop saying, “this isn’t who we are.” What we’re seeing now is what this country has always been:

A country that was born in violence and is sustained by violence.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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