American Lies: Part 3

The lie we’re examining today?

Racism is fixed in this country. It’s no more - we live in a post racial society.

TLDR: Our country is built on a system of exclusion and that is the baseline. The government and small subsegments of the population will always work to get back to that; however, the larger group of Americans could easily change things if we fought for it.

Welcome to American Lies, a series where I talk about the lies taught to white America to keep us separate from our Black and Indigenous brothers and sisters, while the upper echelon of wealthy elites make money off our backs, force us to work until we die, and maintain a sustained hatred of each other rather than working together to build a truly great America.

You may be saying, Amy, no sane person in 2026 thinks racism is gone, or fixed or whatever you think you’re saying.

I get it, but travel back in time with me. It’s November, 2008. I am 18 and it’s a chilly night in Washington DC, where I started college just a few months ago. I am in front of the White House, chanting, yes we can. I’ve smoked weed with other college kids, drank champagne with some grown ups, and Vietnam veterans gave me a puff of a cigar, the first and last puff I’ve ever had.

Naively, many white Americans, myself included, assumed that Barack Obama becoming president, in a sweeping historic win, meant we’d done it. 50 years after the Civil Rights Acts passed, a young, inspiring Black man and his adorable family were moving into the White House. Racism, gone.

Poooof. Post racial society, occupied by the United States of America. Kachow.

What a fucking joke. I am sure some folks thought the same too after the 1960s. I am sure some people assumed we’d made it once the Civil War ended.

The last eighteen years have been backlash, or recalibrating to our equilibrium since Barack Obama was elected. Not dissimilar to the reaction to Reconstruction, or after the Civil Rights movement. Our inability to remove systemic racism is why we are where we are today. We operate under the same structures as before the Civil War. In 2026.

If you’ve ever imbibed historical content, you’ll hear that the Confederates weren’t punished enough. But punishment, while much fucking needed, wouldn’t have solved this.

After the Civil War, the 13th Amendment was passed. Stating slavery was abolished, with the exception of those charged with a crime. Work as punishment was a prevalent idea then and now. Many of us understand that the exception to the abolition of slavery, was so that people who were already imprisoned with a “work sentence” could be held there. But I can’t help to think it was an exemption to bring the southern states homes.

Legally, the system stayed exactly the same, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were more like bandaids.

What cropped up in slavery’s stead? The convict leasing system, the Black codes which turned into Jim Crow laws when the 14th amendment made the Black Codes illegal, enforced not just by lawmen of the state, but extrajudicial violence. First in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, followed shortly after with the Red Shirts, the Knights of the White Camelia, the White League, and more.

Black Americans were promised 40 acres and a mule, yet the Freedmen’s Bureau only lasted two years. But the plantation owners were given compensation for their loss of property. What the fuck do you mean? Loss of property. These families were ripped apart. Torn to shreds. Born and bred for enslavement over generations. The women and children were raped, constantly. Their bodies broken, the spirits harmed, their identities ripped away from them.

And the plantation owners were compensated for their loss of property.

I was listening to an amazing podcast called In Bed With the Right, sources are always linked at the bottom by the way. And in the Elizabeth Cady Stanton episode a story from Lucy Stone’s time at the Freedmen’s Bureau comes up. She’s teaching a man how to read and write, he is formerly enslaved and he is in his 80s. Stone asks, why? You’re in your twilight of life, why learn now. And he says that his son was sold away from him decades ago. If his son puts an advertisement out looking for him, he needs to be able to read and write back. This is one story, of MILLIONS. Millions.

And the plantation owners were compensated for their loss of property.

The Reconstruction Era, probably led many reformers and believers to think that the United States was on its way to a much more equitable society for all races, classes, creeds, and religions. But of course it wasn’t. Despite 2,000 Black men being elected to offices all over the United States, the reactions were swift. Two Black Senators were sent to Washington DC, from Mississippi.

The Ku Klux Klan, as one historian put it, failed because it couldn’t change the outcome of elections. Plus Ulysses S Grant, General of the Union Army, and then President shut them the fuck down with the Enforcement Acts.

But the reason reconstruction fails - beyond northern white racism or apathy, beyond not punishing Confederates, is because we never changed the systems in place. We still live under the pre-Civil War structure for the most part.

Oh, but Amy we’ve come so far – can’t you see it??

I can see the strides we’ve made, but I ask you, if in 2026, it’s so easy to repeal the strides we’ve made, have we even actually changed?

For over 160 years, we have been putting bandaids on femoral artery bullet wounds. Which as Americans, we all know what those look like and bandaids cannot do shit against it.

Let me walk you through it. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments are ratified, but are immediately undermined at the state level. The federal government turns a blind eye. The northerners who benefited from slavery (in capital or otherwise) are happy to see the Southern States get back on their feet.

The Enforcement Acts of 1870-1871 ripped the Klan apart, but put no structure in place to stop the Red Shirts from overturning an election in Wilmington NC, the only coup ever perpetrated on US soil. Nor did it stop the Colfax Massacre from happening in 1873, in Louisiana. There were no structures to stop lynchings. The anti-lynching law was passed in 2022. Twenty fucking twenty two. And it’s a law, it can be repealed. Anti-lynching must be put into our Constitution.

What comes next? States systematically undermining the rule of law. Refusing to allow Black men to vote demanding segregation and the highest law in the fucking land just 31 year after the end of the Civil War says “Seperate but Equal” no problem here. The transition to Jim Crow laws is what we know modern fascism is based on.

Plessy vs. Ferguson is 1896. Thirty years. Thirty years after the Civil War ends. Thirty years is all it took to systemically segregate people based on race, legally, and societally. Because we didn’t fucking change the structure of our country.

A big labor movement is created, but the big lie (episode one), persists. Jay Gould, a famous robber baron, states that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. Many laborers and unions are segregated. The Industrial Workers of the World emerged, heralding anti-racist beliefs, fighting side by side with Black Americans, Immigrants, Women, and any other worker. Its destruction was systemic and by design. Back to the baseline of racism, segregation. And it was done by the government with the Espionage Act of 1917. Systemically draining the IWW’s financial power while trying over 100 of its top brass. Culminating with the Palmer Raids, which was not only Hoover’s origin story, but also a mop up job.

Now, in the backdrop of these incidents, the federal government is transforming. Federal income tax has been created, the administrative state is growing, and it will explode with the Great Depression and the New Deal. We didn’t have any version of the military that we see today. By the Palmer Raids we are between the World Wars.

Famously, after World War I, the United States hit its nadir of racial violence. With the Red Summer of 1919, both red for blood of Black Americans spilled at the hands of white Americans in thirty some cities, but also because it was amidst a red scare. Greenwood, the burning of Black Wall Street is next, in 1921. And Rosewood in Florida in 1923.

Categorically, the press in every incident is used as a tool to lie. To incite violence, to further separate the people of the United States.

The Great Depression adds to the regulatory arm of the United States federal government. Every regulation created, SAVES LIVES. That’s the point. There is a reason why a nation of over 330 million people needs the FDA, the SEC, the Fed, the National Labor Relations Board, and later, the EPA, OSHA, and so much more.

Between WWII and the 60s, I need you to understand that segregation was manufactured by the government. By the FUCKING GOVERNMENT in places that didn’t have it with Housing and Urban Development programs. The Color of Law explains this in a way that will make any person with a soul vomit.

Throughout the 60s and 70s more rights were awarded to groups of people. Including, the Civil Rights Acts, the Fair Housing Act, the Voting Rights Act. Roe V Wade becomes the law of the land (or so they say), the fight for LGBTQ+ rights begins, the American Indian Movement, the Anti-War Movement, the Black Panthers, and so so so many more.

Fred Hampton’s murder by the state is another such moment where leadership brought together Black, white, Puerto Rican, Indigenous, and many more Americans, and he was killed for it – by the Chicago Police Department in cahoots with the FBI is yet another example of what happens to leaders by the people in power who benefit from us being divided.

The reaction, not unlike the end of Reconstruction, is fucking swift. The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973, just two years after the Powell Memo was written and one year after it was leaked. The Moral Majority was founded in 1977. Less than a decade after the last Civil Rights Act was passed.

Today in 2026, the President and his administration are gutting the regulatory programs. His Supreme Court - and yes it is his, overturned Roe v Wade. The Save Act while being pushed to the side continuously comes up to threaten voter rights and create the largest voter disenfranchisement since Jim Crow. Fucking USDA is selling our farming and food data to Palantir. There is a hostile movement to repeal the 19th Amendment.

I cannot tell you what I expected to discover when I decided to relearn US history. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, but we cannot fix the country we live in without diving into the foundational lies. And when we white folks pretend like the racism isn’t constantly baked into our society, isn’t structurally found at every turn, we’re doing a disservice to every person in this country.

Ourselves included. Because the exclusion built into our system is both racist and classist, both racist and misogynistic.

We can’t outrun the racism baked into our country’s founding, and we haven’t even really tried. We’ve put bandaid over bandaid over bandaid, but the country was born out of genocide, our government has never apologized nor given, US, THE PEOPLE, an opportunity to vote on how to rectify relations with the indigenous people on Turtle Island. We have not investigated every broken treaty.

The structures were based in minority rule, exclusion. There is no way to bandaid that. Our constitution is over 200 years old, and we’ve spent the last 160 trying to fix it, and some of us naively believed we had. We haven’t and cannot we need something new.

Because we were designed in exclusion, racism is where our government leads us. Division on purpose so we forget our power (because it’s written into every structure we have).

You can find more of me on Youtube (where long form drops every week), at The Foolish Optimist, or on Instagram. Read along with my sources.