this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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The US was founded on a genocide that didn't fully stop until the late 20th century. That much is true. We're not an apartheid state because we don't have a population of Native Americans who aren't allowed to leave their designated areas. We do have areas called "Indian Reservations" where Native Americans have limited sovereignty (somewhat comparable to that of a US state), but the people who live there are free to leave and many of them do.
We might very well be an apartheid state if the native population hadn't been genocided to the point that nobody sees them as a threat, so I'm not claiming any kind of historical moral superiority. And the US government still treats Native American groups badly in a lot of ways, but they're at least not treated badly enough to inspire them to form terrorist groups, and it's not because Native American cultures are inherently pacifistic—native attacks on white settlers were quite common in the 1700s and 1800s.
The lesson I take from it is that even people with the worst historical grievances are willing to set them aside if they're given the same opportunities as everyone else.