Colonizer
I cringe when the color of my skin denotes this term, reminding me of hundreds of years of oppression that the speaker feels every living moment of their lives…
Waking up to the reality of my people’s prosperity grows ice water in my veins, crystallizing against my bones and muscles and skin. My privilege makes me an ample ally, but a false one, because I can go home and sleep at night in a peace many will never know…
They could come for all of you, and the odds would ever be in my favor of survival. Sure my less than hetero-norm-cis-rich-mentally healthy life would give me away, someday, but long after your inability to conform would give you away. I can pass, even if the tinny acidic bile gave me a harsh taste in my mouth, I would survive…
The tales of conquering warriors fighting for their place in this unforgiving world, gives me pride, inflates my chest and gives me strength. Persecuted faithful sailing into the unknown makes me feel like a survivor. Pioneer ignites my adventurous spirit. The best example of strength based intervention is The United States’ White Supremacist historical account, proving any story can be spun to inflate or deflate the human spirit, this one inflating a majority for generations creating waves of inspiration and entitlement so strong, we’ve lost the ability to fight for anything. Obedient to our masters as long as they say “you’re a good boy, and by the way, those people over there, they burn flags and scream ‘death to America!’ How about you go and kill them?” And like a faithful dog, we do. Our masters lining their pockets with gold, telling us the reason why we are poor is because the color of another person’s skin and the reason they are taking what is ours, and another person’s religion is threatening our rights. Nevermind those good congressional Christians take our rights away all the time and we call that oppression “God’s way”…
There will never be healing until responsibility is held. The soil you stand on, whether White House or trailer park, does not belong to you. African slaves built this nation, just as much as the white men who stole it from the Indigenous people that lived here thousands of years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue and enacted genocide for the love of gold, a curse we still have not shed, even now as it has turned green and represents 0s and 1s on our computer screens…
So here I give you, my responsibility, I would not have what I have if not for the stolen promises against the Indigenous people of the Americas, or the brutal blood sweat and tears of the Black men, women and children of Africa. From sea to shining sea on the missing limbs of the Chinese and Irish immigrants who dynamited the way from one coast to the other, and all commerce developed that multiplied into all we have today. I can’t even spin how we felt safer by locking up Japanese Americans, stealing their businesses and homes, so we could feel safer during the war, even though German and Italian Americans roamed free. The food I eat and that my ancestors ate, came and comes from the blood, sweat and tears of the Latinx people that built the southwest and all of California before gold made the white man interested in this magical place I call home…
How many sorries will make it right? I am unsure, but I hope you read “I am sorry” from me as many times as you need. I hope that you don’t need me to bleed. I hope that if you are ever in the majority, that you will treat me better than my people treated your ancestry. I hope that egalitarian becomes the call of the nation over the pipe dream bell curve mysticism of capitalism, and no further genocide is needed to even the scales before…
I am sorry, and we should never forget all those that came before us to build what we have here and the promise that with each civil unrest more of us will be truly free. My hope is that this can occur before the addiction of avarice destroys this place we all yearn to live in, to thrive and dream and innovate in.
No hands are clean from the blood that made us. Follow the money and privilege all the way back, and you will see that no one pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but instead willfully climbed on the backs of those deemed lesser, their boots grinding through the cloth on their bodies as each step up guided them to privilege and power. Those of us in privilege achieve this every single day when we ignore the homeless on our way to work, or on our way home for the dinner might get cold. We don’t notice that we are standing on the backs of others, despite our good intentions and bumper stickers. No one is free of exploitation as long as any person is exploited…
I am ashamed we haven’t come further. I am ashamed that when I see fascism in Nazi Germany I can fear and hate it, but when children pledge allegiance to the flag, I get misty eyed and patriotic. The fact we can’t be mindful of our indoctrination is idiotic. Doesn’t mean I don’t love my people, this place and its promise. Doesn’t mean I don’t value the men and women who give an oath to protect and sacrifice beyond their lives for us. It just means I see the price of colonization, the equation that does not equal on both sides. As long as any person is not free, none of us are free and none of us deserve freedom…
Amen
