Sometimes appearances can be deceiving. What we may see at first glance may not be the reality upon taking a deeper look. In other words, not everything that glitters is gold. It may be pyrite, AKA “Fools’ Gold.” America’s gold rush took place between 1799 and 1899 and had many would-be prospectors and miners seeking riches in various parts of the country. Most came up short and often fooled by the illusion of gold in the form of pyrite.

To the untrained eye, pyrite may lead the beholder to become excited, believing that they have found the real thing. They want to believe and may begin entertaining thoughts of how their newly found treasure can change their lives.

But the reality is that pyrite is more yellow in color and much less dense than the real thing.

The belief that America is a post-racial nation and void of institutionalized systemic racism/white supremacy is much like believing in Fools’ Gold. It can easily fool the untrained eye and convince those who want to believe the narrative.

But this narrative is lightweight and much more yellow in color than the truth. As long as the masses are kept ignorant of the truth, they can be easily convinced otherwise. Those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of institutionalized systemic racism/white supremacy must maintain an agenda of keeping the masses ignorant and therefore subject to being misled and accepting Fools’ Gold as their reality.

In so doing, you have to control the narrative by controlling the dissemination of information. You make learning to read by the enslaved illegal.You teach students what to think as opposed to how to think.You promote an inferior biased educational curriculum that makes heroes and patriots out of slave owners and Confederate traitors to America’s democracy. You devalue and demonize the history of POC and create scare tactics by presenting Black Studies under the guise of “CRT” and “Woke Culture” as an attack on the feelings of white children and promoting the victim card among Black students. You refer to predominately brown and Black populated countries as “sh*tholes.” You demonize brown and Black immigrants as threats to the American way of life. You ban books that teach truth and embrace those that don’t.

You teach the masses to view pyrite as pure gold. You teach them to overlook the yellow and its lack of density and make them think that this narrative has value and legitimacy, and you teach them to defend it at all costs.

You refuse to make them aware of the gross hypocrisies and inconsistencies which proliferate our history. You paint the fantasy of superhero “Founding Fathers” who can do no wrong. You celebrate a National Anthem that ignores a fourth stanza that threatens the lives of the enslaved seeking freedom and expect those who have been oppressed and denied human rights under that system, to stand with pride when it is played. As if such a response is proof of one’s true patriotism, not the insisting that America actually lives up to its promises.

You teach that the Constitution was virtually passed down to man by the hand of God Himself yet ignore that it was written for, and by, wealthy white male landowners only. All others had to fight and insist that they be included. But we leave that part out of the curriculum.
We ignore, justify, and rationalize America’s colonization, the genocide of millions of Native people, and the kidnapping of their children, and placing them into indoctrination camps to deny them their native tongues and culture, with the consequences of non-compliance being punishments that were inclusive of death.

We ignore the horrors of the Middle Passage and the millions of Africans who perished in the ocean along the way, packed like sardines in the holds of slave ships.

We ignore the unique components of America’s Chattel slavery complete with legalized rapes, pedophilia, torture and murder, and slave breeding farms (one of the largest owned by Founding Father and U.S. president Thomas Jefferson who also engaged in pedophilia, producing children with a 14-year-old child, at the age of 44).

We ignore the caveat to the 13th Amendment which allowed for the continuation of legalized slavery under the prison industrial system, while creating Black Codes which permitted the arrest of freed Blacks for virtually anything imaginable. We ignore the rescinding of the promised 40 acres and a mule to newly freed slaves, while many former “slave owners” were compensated for their loss of “human property” in the form of monetary reparations.

We ignore the reclaiming of land via many illegal means from African Americans. We ignore the legalization of segregation under Jim Crow and the consequences for those who failed to obey.

We ignore the plunder and destruction of our Black Wall Streets and the accompanying mass murders without any recompense. We ignore that Blacks had no rights that white folks were obligated to respect, in accordance with the Supreme Court Dread Scott decision, and the many tactics used to deny POC the right to vote which continue today.

We ignore redlining and the developed strategies of creating ghettos and denying loans to African Americans for home ownership and the extensive accompanying ripple effects. We ignore America’s history of using Black people as ginny pigs for medical experimentation without anesthesia.

We ignore America’s history of using African-American soldiers to fight wars on the front lines for America’s freedom and yet deny that very freedom to them and their families once they arrived home to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Yet we loved America while it hated us in return.

We ignore the history of policing, which has its origins in the southern slave patrols and northern militias, and that this deeply rooted racially based culture still exists today.
We want to ignore the more than 4,000 lynchings and executions of Black men, women, and children and the usage of their executions and tortures as entertainment for white families following Sunday church services.

Yeah, we ignore a lot of our American history. (And this is the shortlist.) But most of all, we ignore that this was largely approved by the Europeanized “Christian” evangelical, Southern Baptist, and Catholic churches.

“Study to show thyself approved…” (2 Tim. 2:15) and learn the difference between pure gold and “Fool’s Gold.”