Are Americans Historically and Presently ‘Good People?'

The online discussion was about genocide, specifically whether Israel was guilty of such in Gaza and if America was guilty in its killing of Native Americans. In the area that became the United States: Native Americans saw an approximately 96% loss of population, in good part to disease, but also due to warfare, massacres, and state‑sanctioned violence.

The person I was involved in the discussion with wanted to arbitrarily limit deaths to those occurring after 1776 and those committed by United States troops. He insisted I fail to consider:

State militias (who alone killed more Native Americans than US Troops)
Vigilante posses and settler mobs
Slave‑raiding gangs and kidnapping rings
Corporate militias (railroad guards, mining‑company security, rancher militias)
Local law enforcement (sheriffs, deputies, Texas Rangers)
Volunteer expeditionary groups (ad‑hoc “Indian hunting” parties)
Individual settlers
Coerced Native auxiliaries acting under U.S. direction or pressure
He ended our back and forth with this:

“You should also recognize that most Americans are and were good people.”

I allowed myself to retort:

“Good people don’t find reasons to discount murders so they don’t have to consider them. The millions are real; you simply chose to use a starting date after the deaths. Every part of what is now America is because people were killed to obtain it. What is not America (Mexico) when we could have expanded there is because it contained “too many Mexicans,” as John C. Calhoun put it on the Senate floor in his Mexico speech.

“I know further, sir, that we have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race — the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.” — John C. Calhoun

The territories that America owns and uses but won’t make states are for similar reasons of not wanting more people of color. But all that goes back to who Americans were.

If you want to distinguish everyday Americans today from its leaders, you can try to convince yourself, but this is a representative government elected by those people. We have applied tariffs on the rest of the world, including uninhabited islands. We treat our allies like shit (recently threatened to bomb the shit out of Oman and posted a map of a new American territory including portions of Oman and UAE, not even counting the “shithole countries” and our neighbors to the North and South.

Read through the comments on this page and see how many offer Second Amendment solutions to what they consider America’s problems. How many actually hate Democrats and paint them with the broadest of brushes, and how many give no consideration at all to Palestinian deaths?

How many objected to ending the USAID program and the resulting hundreds of thousands of deaths they don’t care about because they aren’t in their backyard? How many stand by as we implement an immigration policy targeting brown and Black people? Nations like Somalia and Haiti have their whole nations targeted for fraud or eating pets. Rick Scott has committed more fraud than all the Somalians in America, and he was later elected to Florida Governor and US Senator.

Good people wouldn’t protect the rapists in the unreleased Epstein Files and make their chief protector the Attorney General. I skipped earlier threats to take over Greenland, Panama, Cuba, Venezuela, and to make Canada the 51st State.

Everyday Americans have the luxury to consider themselves good people. My next door neighbor is MAGA, and he’s been a good neighbor. He and his wife are snowbirds, and I look out for their property when they’re gone. I generally think of him as a good person, but is he absolved of any responsibility for what America does in the world or within its shores after he put the politicians responsible in place?

How long after this post will it take for me to be invited to “go back” to Africa? It’s been a few days since I was last invited by one of your good people.”

In the spirit of fairness, Americans have shown themselves capable of short-term goodness. Millions of protesters have taken to the streets in support of causes. Here are ten of them:

Ten Causes Drawing 1,000,000+ Protesters in America

Civil Rights Movement (1963–1968)
Vietnam War opposition (late 1960s–early 1970s)
Women’s rights and reproductive rights (Women’s March, 2017)
Racial justice and police brutality (George Floyd protests, 2020)
LGBTQ+ rights (Marriage equality demonstrations, Pride mobilizations)
Immigration and refugee rights (2017–2018 anti‑ban and family separation protests)
Gun violence prevention (March for Our Lives, 2018)
Labor rights and wage justice (general strikes, union mobilizations)
Environmental and climate justice (Global Climate Strike U.S. participation)
Anti‑war protests (Iraq War demonstrations, 2003)

Americans have also given money to causes affecting both Americans alone and people across the globe. It would be fair to say that Americans are often not selfish. It would also be fair to say their concerns don’t always last. During the 2020 George Floyd protests, it looked for a minute like there might be systemic change, like the passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Instead, all we got is Juneteenth.

Something I left out of the discussion was that America built its fortunes on the cheap labor provided by enslavement. Even if I limited myself to after 1776, I’d find a Constitution that guaranteed the continued importation of enslaved people for twenty years. Thomas Jefferson mostly ended that practice on January 1, 1808, while advocating the practices of forced breeding and rape to increase the number of domestic-bred slaves. America’s slave population was increasing while other nations in the Caribbean, South America, and Central American countries were decreasing due to breeding practices we had the nerve to call Natural Increase.

He wrote to George Washington that he could achieve a 4% annual increase in earnings if his female slaves produced a child every two years. Those slaves were desperately needed to meet the nation’s labor needs. America was literally built on the backs of Black men, women, and children, and the beds of Black women.

“I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four percent. Per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their numbers.” — Thomas Jefferson

There’s a discussion to be had about how many, or what percentage, of America’s people are or were good. It seems the discussion about whether America the country is good has already been settled.

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This post was previously published on The Polis.

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