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America Was Founded on Oppression, Not Freedom
And remains addicted to oppression.
America Started wrong even before gaining independence
One of the many reasons America is still struggling with race issues is while we may no longer have chattel slaves, this country has not freed itself from that old slave owner mentality of using other humans for personal gain. One example is America has yet to confront the theft of the identity of African Americans. They were stolen from their lands and used by slave masters to enrich themselves and establish a social caste system based on race and wealth. Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this mentality remains strong among many patriarchal cultures, politicians, church leaders, business owners, corporate executives, and others desperately seeking or seeing themselves to be in the upper caste.
Another result of slavery was African Americans lost their real names and their real heritage. They were forced out of necessity to adopt new names and unnatural identities as someone’s property. As a result, they created their own unique identity and cultures, many of which became vehicles for the civil rights struggle. James H. Cone touched on this need for an identity as a basis for protest in his book, “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” In this book that should be required reading in all schools in…
