On Taking "Your" Country Back

Tim Wise via Balloon Juice

I know, you think you’ve taken “your country back” with this election — and of course you have always thought it was yours for the taking, cuz that’s what we white folks are bred to believe, that it’s ours, and how dare anyone else say otherwise — but you are wrong. 

 You have won a small battle in a larger war the meaning of which you do not remotely understand. 

 ‘Cuz there is nothing even slightly original about you. 

There have always been those who wanted to take the country back. 

There were those who, in past years, wanted to take the country back to a time of enslavement and indentured servitude.

 But they lost. 

 There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when children could be made to work in mines and factories, when workers had no legal rights to speak of, when the skies in every major city were heavy with industrial soot that would gather on sidewalks and windowsills like volcanic ash. 

 But they lost. 

 There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when women could not vote, or attend any but a few colleges, or get loans in their own names, or start their own businesses. 

 But they lost. 

 There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when blacks “had no rights that the white man was bound to respect,” – this being the official opinion of the Supreme Court before those awful days of judicial activism, now decried by the likes of you – and when people of color could legally be kept from voting solely because of race, or holding certain jobs, or living in certain neighborhoods, or run out of other towns altogether when the sun would go down, or be strung up from trees. 

 But they lost. 

 And you will lose.

I am, by any reasonable measure, an upper middle class, middle aged white male and all I can say to this is "Amen". oh, by the way, Tim Wise is not an angry black man. He is indeed angry (or was when he wrote that piece) but he is as pasty white as my Canadian butt.