Respectfully, I find your thinking problematic as well. If you check my profile and previous writings, I am not on board these schools of thoughts of overemphasis on race/gender/sexual orientation (often called "wokeness" or "identity politics"), so that's a longer and separate discussion.
My basic view is that you misunderstand the world at your own risk. If you want to rewrite the past to suggest that we colonized the US just to enslave people and displace Native Americans and that's our core identity, it will do a good job at empowering minorities, but it's not an accurate view of history. Do you know that the 1619 project was debunked? At the very least, it had to undergo a stricter peer review with much of the original text detracted:
First Google hit I got:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248
Sure, we can
In that light, I would argue that you minimize the importance of historical truth when it doesn't fit a convenient set of facts.
In a previous article for a different magazine (https://thezebra.org/2020/11/06/first-africans-in-virginia-alexandria-author-ric-murphy-writes-about-his-ancestors/), I wrote about a guy (a descendant) who researched the 30 original settlers to the Jamestown colony in 1619 and he dug through archives in Rome, London, Angola, and all over the world:
"That the Portuguese enslaved their captors, Murphy noted, was not an unusual form of cruelty. The practice was customary in European, African, and even Native American societies. The enslaved people would then be assimilated into society over multiple generations. Murphy noted that this was significantly different than the Antebellum South.
The Slimmest of Coincidences Saves the Colonies
The San Juan Bautista was the first ship to take prisoners and happened to take members of the royal class. This ship was bound for present-day Mexico when it was captured by British pirates. The pirates were hoping to get gold and loot. Instead, they found 360 slaves on board.
They took the 60 healthiest and split them between two ships. One vessel headed for the West Indies and the other to Jamestown Colony At Jamestown, 30 men were offloaded with the intention of being added to a class of indentured servants taken up by peasants.
Contrary to popular belief, these thirty men were not technically slaves since the law did not exist under the British crown. Regardless, a labor force was still available."
Where's your shock at the slave trading practices of the Portuguese and Angolans? I wonder if it’s because you've been taught that critical thinking means spotting signs of racism point blank.
I don't mind a separate discussion and will always be civil and respectful towards you, but it might be more useful if you read some of my other articles on the subject.
As for whether the ends justify the means, no one's suggesting that slavery or Native American displacement were things we're proud of because those things helped us achieve a government, because slaves or native american displacement were not the light bulbs that powered the founding fathers to draft such an advanced constitution. So yes, logically we can separate the two.
