Nobody Has Ever Said “This Group is Not Equal” and Been Right
Want to wind up on the wrong side of history? Declare that a group of people are not your equals.
We all agree that slavery was bad, right? We all agree that white people are not better than any other race or ethnicity, right? Everyone is equally deserving of human rights, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, LGBTQIA+ status, or any other identifying factor, right?
It boggles me that anyone these days can declare that some broad group of people — black folks, LGBTQIA+ folx, women, any kind of religious minority, whatever — are not equal and not deserving of equal rights. Have these people never studied any kind of history?
Never in the history of the world has someone declared a group of people as less deserving of human rights and wound up on the right side of history. Never. Whether it was the slave trade, the Chinese Exclusion Act, or pretty much anything done to anyone of Jewish descent in most of history, the perpetrators have never, never been on the right side of things at the end.
Americans have spent the past several hundred years systematically removing rights from anyone who isn’t a straight white male, and when any progress is made, somebody tries to disenfranchise them anyway…
