America’s Endless Race Wars and Massacres
…The English settler colonies in North America were different ? unique. Masses of armed migrants came to steal, and stay, and keep stealing. Theirs was an enterprise of aggrandizement at the native’s expense, and unlimited expansion. Less than a century and a half after the massacre and near-erasure of the Pequots, in celebration of which the Governor of Massachusetts proclaimed the first day of Pilgrim Thanksgiving, the white colonists decided that they were a distinct people, no longer Europeans.
They were right. American colonial society was shaped by constant depredations against non-whites, close up and brutal. By 1776, one out of five non-Indian residents of the colonies were Black slaves, the control and dehumanization of which had become a daily collective duty of much of the white population. Across the Alleghenies lay unconquered Indian lands that, once cleansed, could usher into being a white empire that would dwarf Europe. The English King and his treaties with the Indians stood in the way; he had to go.
The ‘American’ mission was clear, manifest: to endlessly expand through the elimination of impediments posed by the External Other (‘savage’ Indians), while keeping white society safe and separate from the ‘debauchery’ of the valuable, Internal Other (Black slaves). This is the foundation on which the American iconography and celebration is based. Lacking any other, it is the template of white American identity and purported ‘civilization.’
blackcommentator.com