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Yayne Abeba (https://substack.com/@yayneabeba) posted this poignant message via Substack July 6, 2025.

Why is America like this?

You want to understand why America is like this? Why Trump happened, why the rot keeps spreading, why cruelty isn't a bug, but the feature? It's not a mystery. It's the oldest story we've never told honestly. And until we face it, we will keep collapsing into darker versions of ourselves. This country was not founded on freedom. It was founded on stolen land, cleared by slaughter, and built by stolen people, broken by force. That is the foundational transaction. Everything else is decoration. We did not recon with the genocide of Native peoples. We mythologized it. We made Westerns about it. We named football teams after the dead. We paved over bones and called it destiny. We did not reckon with slavery. We declared it over, and then immediately wrote new laws to replace chains with prison bars. We never paid for the centuries of free labor, for the children sold, for the torture, for the theft of time and breath and lineage. We made a new America, but left the engine intact. The Confederacy lost the war but won the memory. We let them rewrite history in marble. The monuments didn't go up in 1865. They went up in the 1950's. Not as remembrance, but as warning. We never cleansed the institutions. The racists became sheriffs. The sheriffs became senators. And the logic of white supremacy adapted, changing shape, changing code, but never losing it's grip. That's why America elect racists. Not in spite of our history, but because of it. When the mask slips and the candidate says the quite part out loud, it doesn't alienate the country. It clarifies it. Trump didn't invent any of this. He just said it without shame. And for millions, that was the fantasy: a man who would take every buried cruelty and wear it like a crown. This is why they're banning books. Why they're rewriting curricula. Why the very mention of "racism" or "history" now sets off alarms. Because they know what we'd find if we looked too closely: A country terrified of its own reflection. Reparations aren't radical. They're overdue. Truth telling isn't divisive. It's the only way out. And if we don't learn from Germany, if we don't enshrine what happened, criminalize its symbols, and build laws that make it unrepeatable, then we are telling the future exactly what we're willing to tolerate again. America doesn't confront its breaking points. It buries them. Calls it pride. Wraps it in anthem and flag. But buried things don't disappear, they grow back meaner. And we are running out of time to break the cycle.

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