Sarah TaberHello Americans on Mastodon, I know we don't feel like there's much to celebrate this July 4th. It's been a rough several years.
So I want to talk about how we're making history right now.
If you started paying attention to the US in 1960, this sure feels like the darkest timeline. But unfortunately, purges against Black & brown people are normal US behavior.
You know what's NOT normal US behavior?
This is the first time there's been a mass movement to STOP a purge in real time.
This is new and unusual. To get an idea of how weird this is, let's take a quick tour of some of the many times the US federal government has officially persecuted entire groups of people.
And what (if any) pushback there was at the time.
1929-1939: the US "repatriated" somewhere between 300K and 2M Mexican Americans. No due process. The federal government removed them from the US to "stop them from competing with Americans for jobs."
About half of the deported people were US citizens.
Few if any Anglo Americans seemed to have a problem with this.
Mexican Americans ran the court battles, protests, and educational campaigns against forced deportation on their own. While they were struggling to keep their families together day by day.
WW2: the US jails 120,000 people, who hadn't been charged of any crime, as a "precaution." 2/3 were US citizens. Many were farmers. White folks wanted their land, & got it.
The loss of so many skilled farmers dented the US food system & made it harder to fight the war.
Some white Americans did publicly oppose rounding up their Japanese neighbors. They were in the minority & overruled.
Resistance was limited to individual efforts to tone down the impact of incarceration- tending jailed neighbors' farms while they were away, sending supplies to the camps, etc.
Operation Wetback, 1954: a federal program to hunt down & deport undocumented immigrants from Mexico.
Somewhere between 1.1 and 1.5 million were rounded up & deported.
And yet again, many were documented migrants or US citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback#Operation_Wetback_(1954)
Public outrage over the many US citizens deported caused Operation Wetback to get its funding pulled. … After 3 months & over 1 million people deported.
This was the fastest a purge ever got rolled back. But it still took people a while to notice & stop it. At the supposed peak of US unity.
Slavery & Jim Crow: millions of Americans held in captive labor.
Enslaved & sharecropping farm workers knew things were bad! They did what they could to push back the whole time.
But that wasn't enough. Both slavery & Jim Crow finally ended when a critical mass of white Americans decided they should. Not even the majority of white Americans. Just a critical mass. And it took us ~250 and close to 100 years to get there, respectively.
The US & its preceding colonies were at war with tribes ~each year from 1610 - 1920s- 300 years.
There was more opposition from white folks than you'd think; but it wasn't broad-based, organized, or effective. We're still breaking treaties with tribes today.
Sometimes, replacing tribes with settlers wasn't enough. The federal gov't put in the work to keep the new guys down too.
When coal miners went on strike, they sent in the National Guard. To push people back into the mines at gunpoint.
My grandma left Harlan Co so she didn't get stuck in company store debt for life.
So it's frustrating to hear things like "This is the darkest timeline" and "late-stage capitalism."
Yes things suck & you gotta vent. But... do people think the US started in 1960?
We really forget our country, and capitalism, *started* with people on the auction block.
When you know what the US has been about this whole time, that really puts the current moment in perspective.
We've been up to some ugly, ugly stuff. And it usually gets either silence or applause.
2025 is a whole different animal. The response has been strong and immediate. We had *preemptive* mass mobilization.
By millions of people who *aren't* being targeted by raids, jailing, and deportation. (Yet. 🙃)
That's never happened in US history before. This is different.
That's why the right keeps sniveling about how they're under attack. Even while they're successfully pulling off another purge.
They're not used to getting yelled at when they blow taxpayer dollars on witch hunts, they're used to getting high-fives at the country club.
We still have a long way to go. And it's frustrating bc we have leaders who supposedly want to run our country better, and they plain don't have the levers to do much. I'm not making excuses.
I'm just pointing out how weird it is for the US to even *have* leaders who want to do better.
We have so much more going for us than any generation that's tried to stop these things before.
And yes, that's left us without much of a playbook on how to do this kind of change quickly.
These movements usually take decades or centuries to build up steam.
This time, we already had one in place when the problems started. That's weird & nobody knows what to do.
So if you're looking at the US & thinking "This isn't the country I know," you're 100% right. It's not.
We're actually fighting back in real time for once.
CavyherdThere's another factor at play here, also. Not only are we seeing a backlash in realtime but, possibly even more important, we're seeing into the perspectives of the target populations, also in realtime, in a way that hasn't been possible or available before.
The humanity of the marginalized groups is much more visible than previously. & that humanity is MUCH harder to gloss over with propaganda than it used to be.