Conservatives and liberals enunciate it with fervor, and it elicits images of an American flag waving, the vaunted bald eagle and the Statute of liberty: it is the politically used phrase “American values.” Conditioned, as black people tend to be, many feel as whites do about so-called American values without really understanding American history – without analyzing implications of those values.

This republic, further named a democracy by wealthy Anglo-Saxon men called its founders, was not intended to be shared by other groups of people including those humans found here when Europeans arrived. Those nations of people called red men and women were subsequently all but eliminated by utter, systematic extermination, including wars. Democracy was invented as a sharing between white people alone.

“American values,” therefore, is the embodiment of white nationalism. How do you square God, Christianity, the Trans-Atlantic African Slave Trade and American values? You don’t. It is through pseudo-scientific and medical nonsense that white supremacy became a psycho-philosophical justification obsession and white nationalism its political, social and economic monster.

A recent front page New York Times article spoke volumes about American values. In 1838, Catholic Georgetown University’s slave holding Jesuit priests sold 272 of their black slaves to planters in Louisiana. They tore families apart all the way down to taking babies from pleading mothers. Georgetown University owned hundreds of African slaves who worked the university’s many Maryland plantations. (See the New York Times Sunday, April 17, 2016 front page, above the fold.)

If scholarly, Christian, Catholic, Jesuit priests could not only condone the Trans Atlantic African Slave Trade, but, themselves participate in the trade as owners, traders and workers of slaves to acquire wealth under no condemnation, what say you about American values? American history not readily taught in schools shows that Georgetown University was not alone in acquiring great wealth through slavery. So did Harvard, Columbia and many other universities in America.

Jesuits, through sheer madness, actually tortured many slaves to change behavior, especially their belief systems since African slaves were from many tribes, nations, languages and traditions, including religions. Everywhere in America, African slaves were forced into Christianity. Jesuits made good Catholics of every slave. American values say one must be a Christian. For some, Jews are exceptions.

American values? What say James Madison (1751 – 1836), a Democratic-Republican and America’s fourth president (1809 – 1817) in the Federalist Papers Number 54 to wit: “Let the case of the slaves be considered, as it is in truth a peculiar one. Let the compromising expedient of the Constitution be mutually adopted which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants; which regards the slave as divested of two fifths of the man.”

So that American value worked out by Madison at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 as a deal with America’s southern plantocracy was coined the “Three-Fifths Compromise,” making black people part property and part human being. That lynchpin got the Constitution of the United States of America ratified.

“American values” is code for maintaining white control of everything American. It is code for segregating, discriminating, growing militias and Posse Comitatus, (body of men summoned by sheriffs to enforce laws). It is code for resource gouging and extermination experiments like Flint, Michigan’s so-called water crisis, which remains unresolved. “Law and Order” means put black people in jails and prisons throughout the land. “Welfare Queens” are supposed to be black women when in reality more poor white women are on welfare, but white America sweeps poor whites of Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia and other areas under the rug. American values also means to hell with the environment, fracking delivers needed fossil fuels irrespective of air quality and aquifer issues.

“American values,” as a social construct is difficult to evaluate yet relatively easy to see, at face value, depending on perspective. As a black man, and from my sometime periscopic view of America, I also see so called “American values” as a dangerous white nationalist code, a calling together of the troops. Look out and get organized black people, America has turned severely to the right.