The Foundation

What America was actually built on

Photo by Polly Sadler on Unsplash

I didn’t grow up believing in America.

I grew up believing in human rights for all humans, in places that did not care about human rights. Places like Bangladesh. Then Haiti. Places the powerful ruined, abandoned, and would rather forget exist.

Flashback to 1971. I was adopted by a Mennonite and Amish couple who believed in God, in community, and in plainness. They didn’t believe in the myth of American exceptionalism because they didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t part of the vocabulary. The world was the world, and you served God in it, and that was enough. America wasn’t the greatest country on earth in my house, because my mom was from the northern neighbor — Canada — which is where I was born, and where they adopted me.

Growing up everywhere and nowhere changes your perspective.

When we moved to the United States, I was old enough to notice things. The pledge of allegiance in classrooms. The flags on every porch. The way people talked about this country like it was ordained — like God had reached down and touched this particular piece of dirt and declared it righteous. I’d come from places where children picked through garbage to eat. The confidence here was staggering, and so was the cruelty of my teenage peers.

I got beat up after junior high for being too quick to answer a teacher’s questions. I vowed that would never happen again. I joined the wrestling team. Found friends. Found niches where I fit in. Then someone put a KKK flyer in my school locker. No niggers. Having recently lived in a majority Black country, I was confused. I had never had any reason to look down on someone because of their skin color. I didn’t understand it then. I understand it now.

When I graduated high school, I moved back north and tried to join the Canadian Army. I wanted to be a UN peacekeeper. How naive I was. Canada rejected me, so I moved back south to Florida and signed up to be a Marine.

I became a combat correspondent. When Operation Uphold Democracy launched in September 1994 — the US-led intervention to remove General Raoul Cédras, who’d overthrown Haiti’s first democratically elected president in a coup — I volunteered to go. I knew the place. I knew the language. I was told no, that I was needed at my current duty station.

Nearly 25,000 other US military personnel deployed. Carter, Nunn, and Colin Powell negotiated a last-minute deal while the invasion force was already airborne, turning a combat operation into a peacekeeping mission. Aristide returned to Haiti in October 1994.

The ugly footnote: at least one key leader of the death squads targeting Aristide’s supporters was on the CIA payroll. And the price of Aristide’s return was submission — the US forced him to accept IMF structural adjustment policies that opened Haiti’s markets and gutted its economy further. I watched this happen to a country I loved. Watching how the machine actually works changes a person.

Years later, working in civilian IT, I watched the planes hit the towers. Some time passed. Then I watched a video of a man being held down and having his head cut off. I joined the Army National Guard. America was about equal rights for everyone (at least in my head).

I deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. I earned my place here in the most literal way this country recognizes — I bled for it. And somewhere in all of that, I started reading the history they don’t teach in the classrooms where kids put their hands on their hearts every morning.

Here it is, stripped clean:

The United States of America was founded by men who owned other human beings.

Not as a sidebar. Not as a contradiction they were working through. As the economic foundation of everything they built. The wealth that funded the Revolution, the economy that sustained the colonies, the labor that built the infrastructure, the bodies that generated the capital — all of it was rooted in the systematic, legal, hereditary enslavement of African people.

The Declaration of Independence was written by a man who owned over six hundred human beings in his lifetime. He enslaved the woman who bore his children. He wrote “all men are created equal” and then went home to a plantation powered by people he refused to free, even at his death. That is not a footnote. That is the thesis.

The Constitution — the document we treat like scripture — counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. Not because the slaveholders thought they were three-fifths human. Because counting them that way gave slave states more power in Congress. It was a math problem designed to preserve the institution. The Founders didn’t stumble into this. They negotiated it. They wrote it into the architecture.

Twelve of the first eighteen presidents owned slaves. The White House was built with slave labor. Wall Street was named for a wall built by enslaved Africans. The entire financial system of early America — banking, insurance, shipping, cotton, tobacco, rice — ran on stolen labor from stolen people.

This is not ancient history. This is the foundation. The thing everything else is built on. You need to understand how the machine works, why it needs to be dismantled, and what we build in its place.

I grew up in Haiti. If you know anything about Haiti, you know it’s the only country in the Western Hemisphere where enslaved people successfully revolted and created their own nation. They won their freedom in 1804. And the Western world punished them for it for the next two centuries. France demanded reparations — not from France to Haiti for enslaving its people, but from Haiti to France for the loss of its “property.” Haiti didn’t finish paying that debt until 1947. The United States didn’t recognize Haitian independence until 1862, and only then because the Civil War made it politically useful.

I didn’t learn this in an American classroom. I learned it because I lived there. I walked on that ground. And then I volunteered to go back in uniform, to help restore a democracy that the United States had helped destroy, under conditions designed to ensure it would never truly recover.

When you grow up in the places where empire does its worst work, you don’t have the luxury of mythology. You see the gears. You see what the machine actually runs on. And when you come to America and people tell you this is the greatest country on earth, you nod politely and you think about the gears.

I’m not writing this to relitigate the past. I’m writing this because the past isn’t past.

The wealth gap between Black and white Americans is not an accident. It’s a direct, traceable, measurable consequence of two hundred and fifty years of unpaid labor followed by a hundred years of legal apartheid followed by sixty years of systematic economic exclusion. You cannot enslave a population for a quarter of a millennium, free them with nothing, block them from every avenue of wealth-building for another century, and then point at the gap and call it a mystery.

The incarceration rate is not an accident. The policing patterns are not an accident. The housing segregation is not an accident. The educational disparities are not an accident. None of it is an accident. All of it is architecture. The blueprints were drawn in 1619, and they’ve been revised, not replaced, ever since.

Every conversation about American politics that doesn’t start here is dishonest. Every analysis of inequality that skips this foundation is incomplete. Every patriotic narrative that treats slavery as a chapter instead of the entire book is a lie.

I chose this country. I fought for it. I watched friends die for it. I am not writing from hatred. I’m writing from the specific kind of love that refuses to accept the lie because the truth is uncomfortable.

The empire is dying. It’s dying for a lot of reasons, and we’ll get into all of them in this publication. But if you want to understand why the structure is failing, you have to understand what the structure was built on. You have to look at the foundation.

The foundation was people. Enslaved, brutalized, dehumanized people. Bought and sold and bred and worked to death and erased from the story of their own country.

That’s where we start.

Everything else follows from here.