And America is now blood and tears instead of milk and honey

from Gil Scott-Heron – Comment #1 on Rap Genius

From the Book of Exodus, chapter 3, verse 8:

And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey: unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

GSH is not saying that America really used to be the land of milk and honey (the Biblical paradise) but has now become a land of blood and tears — he is presenting the viewpoint of contemporary youth movements, which in this period began to attack “conventional” American history for overstating America’s righteousness and understating its history of oppressing and dispossessing the poor and the non-white.

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