The Security Apparatus Loves Genocide

It's so inspiring to see that the parking lot of the former Spenger's Fish Grotto in my West Berkeley neighborhood will finally be returned to the indigenous Ohlone community.  As a child, I had to suffer in a thoroughly bigoted environment in which the material benefits of genocide were celebrated.  For example, my mother endlessly complained that she had been forced to contribute to society by supposedly "homesteading."  In reality, my grandfather, unlike my mother, worked hard, contributed to society, and was astute at business and knew that rich farmland in the Columbia Basin with access to water for irrigation was a good investment that bore little resemblance to sod farmers trying to homestead on the barren plains.  Of course, if my mother had even the most rudimentary knowledge of US history she would have realized how profoundly offensive her statements really were, given that the actual Homestead Act represented the massive redistribution of millions of acres of land that had been systematically dispossessed from indigenous peoples in campaigns of state-sponsored removal, extermination, and genocide.  

And my mother had the gall to complain that the real tragedy was that she wasn't given enough time to spend with her white supremacist youth group that systematically denigrated people of African and American ancestry as cursed!