WHITE BIRTHRIGHT (MANIFEST DESTINY)

MANIFEST DESTINY

The racist ideology that white men have a God-ordained right to power and control over people and land. It was the ideology of Europeans who sought to colonize the West, native peoples be damned! Pretty much how the story of North America, specifically our part, played out, right? Because God gave us that birthright, or right by being born white, right? Just ask the passengers aboard the Mayflower.

When they got lost and landed north of their destination, they didn’t feel too welcomed by the non-whites who already lived in the area we would later name Cape Cod. So once they landed, they conspired to produce the Mayflower Compact in 1620. America just celebrated the 400th Anniversary of this event in 2020. Why is that significant? Well, it was Manifest Destiny in full effect. The white Europeans had arrived!

"The ideology of Manifest Destiny inspired a variety of measures designed to remove or destroy the native population. US President James K. Polk (1845-1849) is the leader most associated with Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny inflamed sectional tensions over slavery, which ultimately led to the Civil War,” says The Khan Academy.

Interesting how you can draw a straight line from our domination of Native Americans to the institution of African slavery using that ideology as a guide. And how that same ideology persists today in American democracy all these centuries later.

WHITE BIRTHRIGHT

I’ve written here about white privilege a number of times, but my most elaborate explanation can be found here, “Understanding White Privilege.”  But trying to explain this to uneducated white people is a lesson in futility! They get hung up on one word, privilege, and misunderstand that to mean family wealth or socio-economic status. I watched a video on the Troubled Waters YouTube channel the other day where the host, Reese Waters, talked to another black man about this problem. They agreed that the word “privilege” was the problem. We need a better word. I chose birthright.

I used it once already at the top of this post. It was the white man’s “God-given birthright” to take land that wasn’t theirs. Now, had they been of royal lineage, they would have had their own lands in Europe to claim as their BIRTHRIGHT. That’s how it works. Your birth into the right family, say the ruling class in Europe, would have given you this privilege. But the Puritans aboard the Mayflower TOOK this right as their own. It wasn’t really their privilege from birth. Yet, they believe GOD ordained it so. Again, Manifest Destiny wasn’t just the right of the wealthy, the ruling class. It was the birthright given to white Europeans BY THEIR DEITY! Thus, white birthright. 

And as the Khan Academy pointed out, this ideology, or way of seeing the world, still permeates our government, our society. I discuss this and make it very personal in my post titled “Systemic Racism.” It’s just as real as Manifest Destiny and white birthright.

So the next time you’re in conversation with ignorant white folks, choose your words more carefully. Words matter. Understanding matters.

If you’re a white person reading this and you still don’t get it. Imagine that your European ancestors had been rounded up, shackled to the hulls of a slave ship and transported half a world away, lying in their own feces, only to be auctioned like hogs in a foreign land. If you can imagine being free in your homeland one minute and a slave in unfamiliar territory with a whip across your back for making eye contact with your captor-owner the next, MAYBE these ideas will begin to crystallize.

Sins of the Father: American Hypocrisy

It was our Christian European forebears who first landed on America's shoreline, and the white colonists who followed, that cemented our fate. As the Old Testament says over and again, the sins of the father will be visited upon their children.

The Scripture noted above is followed by three more in Exodus and Numbers, each talking about future generations of family, down to the fourth. We may be well beyond that generation in America. I mean, I've traced my own ancestral roots back to my 6th great grandfather, a Revolutionary War hero from Maine. It's apparent, at least to me, that the sins of his British ancestors, some of them Quakers, are still being visited upon our ilk.

I've been watching the fictional drama on Paramount Network, Yellowstone, featuring producer/lead actor Kevin Costner, which deals not-so-delicately with the tenuous relationship between non-native and Native Americans near his fictional ranch in Montana. Each episode reminds me of the hypocrisy of Manifest Destiny, white privilege and American power. Today, the Biblical-rooted idiom, "sins of the father," kept repeating in my stereophonic brain. And this blog post began formulating therein.

No more succinct indictment of American hypocrisy has been made than this by the Brown Political Review last November:

If the United States wishes to punish human rights violations abroad, it must also come to terms with its own flawed record. To be clear, the United States’ claim to moral authority has never been strong. From the genocidal colonialism of indigenous peoples under the guise of Manifest Destiny to the forced internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans in World War II, the history of the United States is rife with severe human rights violations (Source: "The Man in the Mirror: Human rights and American hypocrisy," 8 Nov 2018, cached on Google).

The above article goes on to remind us that "the United States withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), joining Iran, Eritrea, and North Korea as the only countries refusing to participate in the council." That's sadly telling.

It's the proof positive, to me anyway, of the snowballing effect of Manifest Destiny. We see it in the current administration's stance on everything from women's rights to the rights of immigrants and foreigners and the LGBTQ+ community. The hypocrisy is that we forget history (doomed to repeat itself), our own heritage, our non-native origins.

A Foreign Policy article, The Heart and Hypocrisy of the American Empire (19 May 2019), describes
"American power" or Pax Americana as "overbearing, lustful, and mendacious." I call it sinful. It sickens and saddens me that this is both our heritage and our legacy.

In Rob Larson's article earlier this year, Capitalist Freedom is a Farce, he quotes American icon Frederick Douglass, who railed against unfettered capitalism, "Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other. . ." It led Larson to conclude, "capitalism limits both positive and negative freedom...the dynamics of capitalism generate unbelievable concentrations of private power," tending toward monopolies.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.   ~Lord Acton (1887)

That's one way to say it. We are, as a nation, enslaved to the Almighty Dollar. Let us not pretend that we operate under some divine right or that our allegiance to this nation is somehow ordained by Almighty God. That's not the bronze calf at who's altar we worship. Let's be clear about that. Capitalist America is greed-driven. It's power is not god-ordained in anyway, don't be fooled by the inscription upon our currency, "In God We Trust." It might as well read, "In This Almighty Dollar We Trust." Yet, that paper currency isn't worth the pulp it's printed upon.

Yes, our hypocrisy runs deep.

The sins of our father's father's father (well beyond four generations, now) is certainly visited upon us today. This shouldn't be a source of national pride or patriotism. For me, it is a source of great shame.
As the people said in response to Pontius Pilate (Matt. 25:27), "His blood be on us and on our children." We sacrificed human dignity and sanctity upon the cross of Manifest Destiny. It's blood is surely on our hands, America.