“Heroes” is the beginning of my country anthem, but i don’t agree

My country have a beautiful anthem, at least I always heard that and I believed too. It starts like this “heroes of the sea, noble people, strong and imortal nation”, sound strong and brave doesn’t it?

My country is one of the european countries that claim they “discovered” the world and America. My country ruled in several African countries, and you know what that means. Slavery, slavery, that word resonated in my head, I will never fully comprehend that, I can “thank god” I was born white, in XX century and in Europe, sometimes it hit’s me so hard, I am ashamed of being white, I am ashamed of being near a black person because all the suffer “my people” did tho their people, is so inhumane I can fully understand why.

I never really thought about that, I thought they were lucky they speak Portuguese and could come here and have a “better” life, I was just like “them”, poor ignorant me.

I imagine people living their lives in their homes and countries and suddenly their are invaded for some barbarians who broke in their homes, killed their children, rape their wives and kept their man to slavery and sold them like if they own them, i am feeling disgusted while i wrote this words, I believe they didn’t understand why too. Fist because they speak another language, their language, their heritage was stole too when we made them to stop speaking their language and started to speak ours so we could understand, and second because, it was so barbarian they didn’t deserve that.

In my country the “discoveries” are celebrated and the “heroes” who discover as well. We even had a huge celebrating year for the 500 years of that, can you imagine? In my country live a lot of black people, some came from the countries we invade, some are the family of people we enslave, can you imagine how they feel when we, white people celebrate the people that made all that? imagine Germans celebrating Hitler’s birthday, or his conquers, his death? how crazy that be?

The more I think about it the more absurd it becomes, Our people were brave (or crazy, i can’t really tell) to get in a boat without knowing were they were going and if they would return, but they were no heroes when they get to another’s people country and didn’t respect it or them.

People of my country say black people have to let it go because it was so long ago, but how if we never admit it it was wrong? I understand. the point was never to punish white people forever because what our people did 500 years ago, the point is just admit it was wrong, so, so wrong, and not say : “but french, and spanish people did worse” (and for the record, they didn’t, it was the same, this is not a game, whoever had more slaves was the worse, wasn’t the number of people that count (their lives count, yes). What matters is that they speak a language they weren’t suppose to talk, they use names to their kids that weren’t supposed to use. I can’t imagine some country came here and did that to us, and 500 years latter, in my country we celebrate those guys and called them heroes, that would be insane, I now my people, we would never forget, we would never forgive, we would never call them heroes for sure. so why we expect black people do that?

So after this thoughts I can’t thing about my anthem the same way, all the pride i had in them, is gone, i feel deeply sorry for what they did, they could just go there and be amicable. Imagine the history of the world if they had done that.