Racism Is At The Core of American Culture

It’s been there since the colonists killed indigenous people instead of figuring out how to live with them.

Our cities are burning again. People say they’re tired. People say enough is enough. People say white officers killing Black people shouldn’t still be happening. But of course it’s happening and it’s going to happen for a long time yet because racism is at the heart of American culture and it takes any culture hundreds of years to fundamentally change.

By the time the U.S. declared its sovereignty in 1776, the American population believed that slaughtering all the indigenous people was a fine idea and slavery was good. Disregard for human life was entrenched in our culture from the start, and we’ve never dislodged it.

Scholars such as Keri Leigh Merritt have written about the Deep South in the nineteenth century and described how the secessionist slaveholders of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina created the confederacy because they wanted an oligarchy where wealth and power was held tightly by only certain white people.

And what do you know? The secessionist dream of a racist country where rich whites hold all the power has been realized. Every year of its existence (and 150 years before its existence) the…