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Manifest Destiny was the Idea that White Americans were Divinely Ordained to Settle the Continent of North America.
The Vestiges continue in the time of COVID and Protests
Like many of us, I have been sleeping uneasily since the death of George Floyd.
Last night, I dreamed of Manifest Destiny. She was a goddess, clothed in a white, Roman tunic, flying West across the American Plains.
I googled images this morning, and, lo, there she was in an 1872 painting by John Gast entitled “American Progress”! Dreams!
Manifest Destiny was the idea that white Americans were divinely ordained to settle the continent of North America.
Not in the painting but in Manifest Destiny’s wake, 11 million dead indigenous tribes people lay, most of them slaughtered by white men, while others succumbed to white men’s disease.
When Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung visited Taos, New Mexico in the American West in 1925, he asked the Hopi Elder, Mountain Lake, why he considered white people, “mad”.
“They think with their heads,” he replied.
