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OP-ED
How Can Anyone Claim This Has Never Been a Racist Country?
Chattel slavery, racial segregation, and discrimination disprove their assertions.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive," is the phrase that comes to mind after hearing some people repeatedly deny America's legacy of racism. Of course, an English poet, Sir Walter Scott, first used this phrase when writing about betrayal in romance, but it can easily be applied to color-blind denials. America is "not a racist country" and has "never been a racist country," Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who is currently running for president as a Republican, claimed in front of a Fox News audience. Of course, this is an egregious falsehood. The White men who founded this nation maintained a racial hierarchy cultivated in the colonies, keeping a firm grip on social, economic, and political power by subjugating Black people.
Even this country's "founding fathers" understood that America was a nation created for the benefit of White men. Thomas Jefferson, the third president, once argued that White people living in Virginia "would not be able to live peacefully with once enslaved people who are freed because they would always view them as inferior," according to historian David Waldstreicher…
