There is something that happens to Americans who actually reckon with the history.
Not the ones who perform reckoning, who say "we need to do better" and mean better social media representation and more diverse superhero franchises, but the ones who actually sit with what was done in their name, in specific places, to specific people, over generations.
Something breaks open.
And what they discover on the other side of that breaking is not self-hatred, despite what the defenders of innocence always predict.
What they discover is the ability to see.
To see that the world is full of people who have been surviving American power for decades, who are not waiting for American permission to be legitimate, who have developed extraordinary intellectual and moral and political traditions that no textbook they were given acknowledged as real.
To see that the countries described as "failed states" and "unstable regions" did not fail on their own.
They were destabilized by specific actions taken by specific actors who are named in documents that exist in archives.
To see that the "international community" that keeps appearing in news reports to validate or condemn countries is mostly the United States and its allies, and that the countries left outside that community are not left out because they failed a moral test but because they failed a loyalty test.
To see all of this is not to hate America.
It is to see clearly.
And seeing clearly is the most threatening thing you can do to any system that depends on the population not seeing clearly.
The ones who get there know something they cannot un-know.
The empire needs them to not get there.
It has built an entire culture to prevent it.
Burn it
Turn it
Have them fucking learn it
Make them pay for their crimes
Adjourn it
Never buy their racist lies
Unearth it
Help our brother sisters stay
Theyโve earned it.
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