Dear White People.

Let’s Not Mince Words.

Let’s face it.

Many white people are out of touch with their own historical reality, or live in a state of perpetual cognitive dissonance about it.

So many try to deflect and diffuse the facts about what was done in their name, then fall back on the “all races have done wrong” speech.

Yes, every people has done wrong. But I believe the scale and organization of European colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade have few parallels. They were built on a racial hierarchy, designed to enrich Europeans, and enforced by law and violence for centuries.

I won’t accept a watered-down version of events meant to put anyone’s conscience at ease.

I don’t care about Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, or any other ancient figure who gets offered up as an excuse for what Europeans did to people across this planet. Stop making those excuses, because they don’t excuse. It’s an insult to the intelligence of people who can now read without being punished for it.

King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, from 1885 to 1908, is estimated to have cost around 10 million Congolese their lives, all so he could enrich himself through rubber and ivory.

In 1884 and 1885, at the Berlin Conference, European powers sat down and carved up Africa among themselves, with no African leaders at the table, to claim its land and resources.

The transatlantic slave trade enslaved over 12 million Africans, and the wealth it generated helped make generations of European and American families rich. Forced labor and human trafficking still exist today, and the economic gaps that slavery and its aftermath created are still with us.

The systems that began with the slave trade produced enormous wealth, and a great deal of it remains concentrated in white hands. That is the legacy of those systems.

No, I will never accept the excuses handed out so freely by those who feel some kind of way when the facts are put in their proper context. Denial doesn’t make the reckoning go away, and it doesn’t erase the debt that history owes. And no, I don’t believe every empire in history has operated the way European colonial powers did toward the rest of the melanated world.

European empires set themselves apart through their brutality, their ruthlessness, and the systems they built to keep it going. How dare anyone downplay that reality.

They forced themselves on the entire planet, taking what they wanted and calling it civilization, with the acquisition of the Earth’s resources as their focus. The belief that some people deserve everything, and are entitled to take whatever they please, is exactly what white supremacy taught.

Millions of people were murdered, millions displaced, millions impoverished. All kinds of crimes were committed against humanity for the sake of white supremacy, white superiority, and white hegemony, all false notions and false assertions.

It’s high time we all faced the facts and stopped looking away.

The mirror of history is directly in front of us.

All you need to do is open your eyes and take a long look.