I am blessed to be an American.

I also realize that this place has a horrific history.

Growing up here, I was afforded privileges that don't exist many other places around the world. I've been to countries where speaking your mind can get you thrown in prison. There are plenty of countries in the world that are torn apart by war—ravaged from the outside or often even within.

But I'm sick and tired of people pretending that America is the bastion of all that is right in the world. A quick look at the facts shows that we are complicit and sometimes commit atrocities like the nations we disdain.

Let's start with slavery. For centuries, we held people in bondage for no reason other than the color of their skin. We forcibly removed them from their home country and brought them to a land where they didn't want to be, forcing them to work without pay in often grueling and sometimes downright barbaric situations. Virtually all of our Founding Fathers, those men who believed "all men are created equal", owned slaves. Even for those who were willing to set their slaves free, most weren't willing to give up the economic security that OWNING PEOPLE gave them until they died (i.e., George Washington, an American hero).

Speaking of "all men," our country—along with the rest of the world—has had a regressive attitude towards women. Though they have played a much more significant role in American history than many realize, our country has shown a predilection towards treating women as if they are fragile objects rather than valuable members of society. We talk about leading the way in terms of progress, and yet we have yet to elect a female President—a barrier that had been broken 59 times around the world as of 2016. And in the past year, we have seen in clearer detail than ever that America has a very disturbing sexual assault problem that many still refuse to acknowledge.

Another thing that America has refused to acknowledge is the right of people who already live somewhere to continue living there—just ask Native Americans. Our entire country exists on the basis of lies, deception, and force against a group of people that were here first. Our claim to this land is essentially that we came here and said it was ours. When the people that lived here decided very justifiably to defend their land against invaders with whom they tried to make peace, we claimed "manifest destiny" and struck out with lethal force, practically eliminating groups of people and relegating others to small sections of the land. Even many of those who stood up for Native Americans did it on the condition that they assimilate to the culture we superimposed on this land that wasn't ours.

We can't forget, of course, that even after slavery, we had a horrific history of discrimination. Many don't realize that right after the Civil War, there was a period in which African-American males enjoyed rights that were in some ways close to equal, with some southern states even having state legislatures that were comprised of a majority of African-American lawmakers. But that progress was possible in large part because of military intervention; in time, many so-called "progressive" Americans grew tired of using military force to quell extremely violent (dozens, even hundreds of African-Americans killed at a time) uprisings in the South. And so it was that we allowed the disgusting system of Jim Crow to emerge and re-subjugate an entire group of people for absolutely no reason but the color of their skin.

Even in some of our heroic moments, we overestimate our country's legacy. Much as we like to believe that World War II was an example of America playing the hero—and our soldiers were extremely valiant —we didn't enter the war until Pearl Harbor forced us to, and we didn't enter with a focus on saving the Jews and other Holocaust victims. We entered with a focus on getting revenge against/protecting ourselves from Japan's expansion. Of course, that set off an incredibly unsettling display of xenophobia in our own land, where we uprooted Japanese citizens and interred them in what amounted to concentration camps.

And today, we have a huge range of issues that plague our country. We continue to see the stains of institutionalized and outright racism in the stories of unarmed black men gunned down by police (often simply just on suspicion, not even evidence, of having committed a crime) and the rise of white supremacy groups. We continue to see the rise of xenophobia in the post-9/11 era, with children literally being put in cages and separated from their families for their parents committing the misdemeanor crime of trying to escape to a country where they don't fear for their life (and it is worth noting that such separation is highly unusual for a misdemeanor crime). And we have gun violence on a scale that is incomparably higher than virtually all other nations in the world with economic conditions similar to those of the United States.

These are just broad looks at a few of the most prominent skeletons in America's closet. And all of this is not to say that we are a nation that is beyond redeeming. The ideals that our highly imperfect Founding Fathers espoused, that they worked towards, are some of the grandest that the world has ever seen. I am wholeheartedly in love with the ideals that America claims to stand for, the ideals that many soldiers have so bravely fought and died for—freedom of speech, of religion, of the press, and so on. I believe in what Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence, with a slight change: "that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Should we want to be excellent, we will strive towards those ideals, and we will welcome anyone willing to uphold them to join us in that striving. Until then—until we are willing to actually look at and respond to the skeletons in our closet, we will continue to live in ignorance of what we could be. America has not yet become exceptional, and too many people have died defending her ideals for us to pretend as if it has.

It's not about making America great again—it's about making America what we said it should be when we created it.