With the recent events in Charlottesville and the rise of neo-Nazism in America, many have (thankfully) decided to take a look at the history of our country—especially because the rally centered around the undeserved monument of Robert E. Lee. People have spread more news about it, especially with the hashtag #ThisIsNotUs.

The problem is that it is.

As many times as people of color have said it, it still seems to elude the understanding of the USA’s populace, so it bears repeating: our country was built on the graves of Indigenous people and on the backs of slaves. It is a sin that our country will forever need to repent for because what nation is equal if it crushes and oppresses the very people who created it? What nation is free if we have prisons that keep the disenfranchised in chains? White supremacy is built into the foundation of the United States of America, from the fact that our money bears the faces of racists to our desecration of Native lands with those very same slave owners. It exists in insidious ways we don’t even think about or criticize. Take for example our history books.

It is often said that the winners of wars are the ones who write the stories and the same goes for us. The idea that every war we have entered in our nation being justified and morally upstanding is simply false. Notably, the narrative we have surrounding our involvement in World War II. The image of the great American soldier freeing the Jewish and Romani people in concentration camps is pervasive in our accounts of history—but before we entered the war (late, I may add), 80% of our nation was fervently against going to war. Anti-Semitism within our country was unfortunately present in spades.

Take for example, the famous image of Captain America punching Hitler, a comic book cover released by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, two Jewish men who defined comics in that time. As such, both were anti-isolationist and firmly believed that they had a moral obligation to show that America needed to enter the war—needed to protect Jewish and Romani lives. After the publication of that issue, Joe Simon recalled, “We were inundated with a torrent of raging hate mail and vicious, obscene telephone calls. The theme was “death to the Jews.”

This happened one year before the United States entered World War II.

Further back than that, American biologists had worked on eugenics—a pseudoscience that states that there are those who are fit to continue breeding and those who should be sterilized or killed so as to further the population. Sound familiar? Charles Davenport, the founder of the Eugenics Record Office often stated that the ancestrally unfit were “bacteria”, “mongrels”, “subhuman” and “defective.” Hitler said much the same in Mein Kampf: “The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind.” As stated by Edwin Black in his 2004 publication of Hitler’s debt to America, “Most of all, American raceologists were proud to have inspired the strictly eugenic state the Nazis were constructing.” And unsurprisingly, groups like the Ku Klux Klan would continue and still continue to utilize this faulty science to justify their hate crimes.

These are only two examples of how the United States, even in World War II, implicated themselves in the rise of Nazism. It is no surprise that the fear-mongering, racism, and hatred of anyone perceived as “other” contributes to the neo-Nazi movement we see today, spearheaded by political figures and seemingly innocuous next-door neighbors alike.

We cannot continue to believe that neo-Nazis are some outlier group—we need to understand that they are people we have considered “normal.” They are the result of us brushing aside racist comments and threats to others as jokes or uncomfortable comments because we valued social placidity more than we valued what is right. We all must take a stand and crush white supremacy wherever we see it, lest we struggle again with fascism and Nazis.

This was us, but it shouldn’t be anymore.

---

Edwin Black’s 2004 publication in the Guardian entitled “Hitler’s debt to America” can be found here.

Brian Cronin’s “The History of Captain America Punching Hitler” can be found here.

---

Direct help to Charlottesville can be provided through donations to the links below.

Southern Poverty Law Center

Solidarity Cville Anti-Racist Legal Fund

#A12 General Fund

The Charlottesville Chapter of the NAACP’s PayPal

UVA’s Donation Page for their Black Student Alliance