REVISIONING AMERICAN HISTORY

I’ve always wondered why the United States is so divided from Latin America.

In An African American and Latinx History of the United States (REVISIONING HISTORY) by Dr. Paul Ortiz, he writes about the history of the United States and its involvement in the division and degradation of BIPOC since the American Revolution in the 1760s. It has been illuminating to read about how international emancipation has brought together African Americans and Latin Americans’ histories. Both histories sought and desired to be free from colonial regimes that financially benefited from their bodies and labor.

Dr. Ortiz begins the book with Haiti’s freedom struggles and how their independence from France was a significant inspiration for the freedom fighters in the United States. To be brief, in this post, in America, it has been colonial imperialism versus the freedom fighters. (I will expand on what Dr. Ortiz and I mean by freedom fighters in other posts.)

Monetary and financial prosperity versus human rights and liberties have been the constant tug of war between how the United States defines wealth.

When I write the word human, I use it in a way that encompasses all humanoid mammals, unlike our founding fathers. To them, BIPOC were not human; they were close but beneath. When they used the word “every man,” they did not mean every man; they meant every white semi to wealthy white man.

In the past 200 years, we as a collective nation of diverse humans in the United States have started questioning their language and intention regarding what our “founding fathers” meant by “land of the free.” According to Dr. Ortiz, questioning really started taking place in the 1750s, and went through another strong wave of critique in the 1850s, and recently another strong wave some of us have lived through in the 1950s. I do not want to wait 30 more years to be uncomfortable enough to seek change and improvement in the way humans and societies in the United States intersect. We need to start now.