George Washington is portrayed as some great leader and a role model but this is largely mythological. The man was a slave owner and was nicknamed destroyer of towns by the Native Americans. That man pulled teeth out of the mouths of his slaves to make dentures for himself, and the stories we hear about him in grade school are entirely fabricated by biographers, and like the other racialized mythology of past leaders it is heavily contested and even seems colonial in nature. The United States has only ever been governed by horrible dictators and the people suffer under their political leaders since their effects have had lasting painful effects on all of the citizens. As someone who lived through the egregious human rights abuses of Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, and other zionist imperialist warlords, I would not want to see any of their faces on a currency I need to use in my daily life.
This conversation has an elephant in the room with Harriet Tubman scheduled to appear on United States money. This seems unlikely because not only was Harriet Tubman involved in a resistance organization and worked to free slaves from captivity, which would go against the state ideology of capitalism. The regime we have now is the same that is responsible for those atrocities, so putting Harriet Tubman on the money is the equivalent of Apartheid South Africa putting Nelson Mandela on the money hundreds of years after he lived. The regime is not going to put someone on the money who would have once been considered a radical by their regime and likely killed immediately if authorities caught wind of what they were doing. It’s true that minorities are allowed to be involved in politics in this country, but only if they are complete traitors to the well-being of their race and uphold capitalism above the wellbeing of their own people. This is why Cuban and Vietnamese gusanos are celebrated while local-born activists are met with disdain and violently oppressed, jailed or assassinated by police, let alone allowed to get involved in political systems. I am very hard pressed that a woman who fought against exploitation and slavery would ever be celebrated by the American regime by being put on the money, and I don’t believe the delays around her face being printed on money are truly issues of logistics.
So who should be on the money? Martin Luther King seems like a good option as well as Malcom X and Assata Shakur, but those have the same issue as Harriet Tubman that the regime will not glorify someone they are actively trying to kidnap from Cuba and kill, if they did not already order an assassination of them. Native American leaders such as Sitting Bull who we could look up to, also have the same issue that the government tried to kill them. There isn’t a good leader in this country that the government has not tried to kill or subdue in some way. They’re also killing the environment, which brings me to my conclusion.
When there is no political leader that does anything good for society, the next option is to simply put plants and animals on the money. This is not offensive and I do not have to look at some horrible slave owning fascists every time I pay for something. Imagine every time you look at your money, you see Hitler or Ron Desantis staring back at you. This is what we currently have whether we choose to accept the historical truth behind those individuals or not, and the flora and fauna are a much better choice. Bison, ferrets, bobcats, white tailed deer or other flora and fauna unique to North America would help promote environmentalism and take the politics and propaganda out of the currency.