People who think that phrase is racist are confused and are falling for the same fictions that are tearing the country apart.

America is not a racist country any more than America is an arsonist country, or a child-abuser country, or a wife-beater country, or a serial-killer country. America isn’t defined by any of those things, though all of those things are present, to a small degree, in America.

America is defined by something else, something that is noble and good and, to our collective shame, no longer taught in our schools. America is defined by the idea that all of us matter. To make that idea real, to make it the legally protected reality in America, took two centuries and cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. But it’s reality now: all Americans matter. All lives matter.

How is it that so many now believe that any significant portion of America doesn’t believe that all lives matter? Why do so many hold to the fiction that America suffers from institutional racism, that black Americans are “systematically targeted for destruction,” as the hateful bigots of the Black Lives Matter organization put it?

They believe it because they’re ignorant. We stopped teaching an honest history of America decades ago, replacing any attempt at historical accuracy with angry and distorted revisionist claptrap that reimagines America as an evil empire, that denies two centuries of hard but successful progress toward equality and shared prosperity, and that pollutes our children’s minds with a myth of endless oppression and suffering.

America entrusted her children to a class of professional educators, and then failed to notice or intercede when those educators and their bloated administrative bureaucracies, through their own ignorance and foolishness, betrayed that trust.

And so we have the fools of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, angry ignorant hate-filled people who don’t understand the country they’re burning down, nor the roles they could play as responsible citizens if only they’d set aside their resentment and reject the myth of victimization with which they’ve been indoctrinated.

All lives matter. If you think that’s racist we should talk, because you understand neither what racism is nor what America is, and the things you believe are holding people back and tearing people down. And it doesn’t have to be that way.