South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes—believes with all its heart—that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are. “I’m suppos

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The theory that “labor” is not a word for human beings whose flourishing is the proper interest of the state, but rather a word for a cost that should be brought as close to zero as possible in order to accrue wealth for owners of capital, has been entrenched in red states and particularly the South for much longer than I have been alive. It’s conf... See more

After school, in the front seat of our Nova, you told me what white folk demanded of us was never fair, but following their rules was sometimes safer for all the black folk involved and all the black folk coming after us. You kept talking about how amazing it was that Mississippi had just elected its first progressive governor since William Winter.

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Clinton and Giuliani marched in a parade for Albizu, but did they know who he was? Very likely not. The epic battle between Muñoz Marín and Albizu in the fifties transformed Puerto Rican society, but it barely registered elsewhere. If mainlanders think about Puerto Rican history in that period at all, the image that comes to their mind is an entire

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