Here is what is totally mind boggling to me. How many White people have decided instead of discussing the actual impacts of the laws, public policies and social customs intended to strip Black and Brown people of our lives, lands and labors, many which were still in place less than 50 years ago and as intended had a profound and continuing impact on our lives, there is a veritable cottage industry of White people gatekeeping the boundaries of acceptable US history. We only get to talk about exactly what we lost through this over three centuries of written and informal structures and strictures designed to limit Black and Brown mobility if it doesn't make White people feel uncomfortable. The body really does keep score. Our Black and Brown bodies keep score with the historic trauma that has reverberated through our lives.
Are most Whites addressing any of the things about which we are talking Nope! You are literally centering the conversation on your own invented argument. Complete red herrings. Something I've never heard or said as a Black person and I'm almost 60.
The “narrative that there are Black people who believe White supremacy is: “the sole defining definition of the history of the US.” Your description only exists in the fevered imagination of White people.
That being said, too many Whites are in denial about the integral impact of the laws, policies and customs that their families voted for and supported not in the distant past but currently. Because the laws didn't have the impact on them they want to downplay the impact of what they had on us. So they mistake rude things that a Black person said to them or distrust that a Black person might have of them individually as racism rather than address why it is I have to dress up to go to the ER when I'm injured so that I'm not immediately assumed a drug addict. The number of things I have to go through as a Black woman that none of my White women friends have EVER Experienced. My experience is that my White friends and family would prefer to be kept ignorant of my embodied experience. It's easier to imagine me as somehow being so deficient and pathetic that I exaggerate my lived experiences from the impacts of the laws, polices and customs rather than confront the fact that myriad laws, public policies and social customs operated entirely as intended.
The US based documentation was founded as a race caste society that instituted many interconnecting laws, public policies and social customs that harmed Black and Brown people. The Constitutions that named us 3/5ths a person and called Indigenous people “savages.” States banned miscegenation. Redlining. Sundown towns. Think deeply about why 33 states outlawed marrying across race? What WAS the purpose of the one-drop rule? What was the purpose or redlining in a neighborhood. Why did the FHA give loans only in neighborhoods that were 98% homogenous?
That these laws had impact and harmed Black people and still harm us today shouldn't be controversial. Even the most cursory examination of them should be obvious that they would harm people. That those of us who have had our lives, histories and stories erased as part of the systemic process might have a lot more reason to consider our laws, public policies and social customs--as well as who is able to write and impose those laws--more integral to our success or failure than someone for whom the laws were designed to lift up and protect!
