America Doesn’t Have a Trump Problem, America Has an America Problem
Chris Rock once told a joke in his old stand-up special from 2004, Never Scared, about the trained tiger that attacked Vegas performers Siegfried and Roy during a performance back in 2003. Rock said, “Everybody was talking about ‘the tiger went crazy’. That tiger ain’t go crazy, that tiger went TIGER!”
When I saw the footage of the right-wing mob storming the Capitol building in D.C. on Wednesday, I thought this was another case of the “tiger going tiger”.
During the frenzy, President-elect Joe Biden made a public statement, saying that the actions of those individuals didn’t reflect the “true America”. Biden is a man more than twice my age, and even I knew that he wasn’t telling the truth in that moment.
Perhaps Biden should reflect on how the United States was founded. Better yet, think of who founded it. Think about those original 13 colonies. Who were the colonizers who created the colonies? Who did they take the land from? How did they take it? How did they maintain power on land that they took? How was the wealth of a settler-colonist nation established to begin with?
We can’t separate this country and it’s principles from white supremacist rage & violence because they are some of it’s foundational concepts. A country that has historically used…
