Washington Post Celebrates the 4th of July by – surprise! — hating on the country

Villanova Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest faculty, Elizabeth Kolsky, 2nd row, right

Op-ed authored by a Elizabeth Kolsky, Phd. from Columbia, now teaching at Villanova*.

It is Time to Reconsider the Global Legacy of July 4, 1776

… The first is the central paradox in U.S. history: The nation’s democracy was founded as a slave society. The second is that after cutting political ties with Great Britain, Americans doubled down on the British Empire’s project of colonial domination. The American Revolution inspired freedom movements in other parts the world. But it also contributed to the worldwide spread of white supremacy. In the century after independence, the United States went from being a province of Britain’s empire to building its own empire “from sea to shining sea” and then overseas in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam.

When President Thomas Jefferson set the country on a path of westward expansion, he imagined an “empire of liberty” that would spread freedom across the continent and protect the nation from the “dangerous extension” of British power. But the growth of slavery and the “removal” of native peoples on the mainland were achieved by force, not consent.

Across the Atlantic, Britain responded to the loss of the 13 colonies by developing a “second,” much larger empire in Asia, Australia and Africa. Both the American and the British Empires post-1776 were structured by racial hierarchy, violence and a systemic devaluation of black and indigenous lives.

Consider, for example, the case of India. In the decades after U.S. independence, the British East India Co. conquered most of the subcontinent. British colonizers embedded racism in the law, political economy, geography and culture of British India from the late 18th century.[…]

Britain’s settler colonies in Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Africa caused the violent dispossession of indigenous peoples and frequently justified the idea of black extermination. In 1825, for instance, a white settler in Australia publicly proposed: “The best thing that could be done would be to shoot all the Blacks … the women and children should especially be shot as the most certain method of getting rid of the race.”

Despite self-aggrandizing claims to the contrary, Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1833 did not stop racism. In fact, colonial expansion intensified colonial racism. Genocidal violence was a foundational pillar of the British Empire, not an accidental or unintentional outcome.

As a consequence of colonial policies, as many as 30 million Indians died of starvation during three major famines that ravaged the subcontinent in the last quarter of the 19th century.After America declared independence from Britain, both countries maintained powerful traditions of racism and violence that were distinct and interconnected.

Oh, those rotten rebels: by throwing off the yoke of human bondage in 1776 they forced England to show up in India in 1608, the Spanish to conquer and destroy the peace-loving Aztecs and their friends in the 1500s and unlashed the Dutch, Portuguese, Germans, French, Japanese and Chinese on the rest of the world. American racism: is there anything it can’t do?

*annual cost tuition, food and board, $72,882.00