The Story of America is a Failed Group Project

America was never a group project. In fact, in practice, the country acted independently of those indigenous to Turtle Island and created laws to ensure that Africans and African Americans could not contribute. This democratic project remains restricted to a particular demographic: men racialized as white.

There have always been competing visions of inclusion, unity and reconciliation. The only shared focus has been for and against their actualization. 

Sure, it was the assignment, what was written on paper, but not quite if you’ve read the founding documents. The country’s constitution included protections for chattel slavery; this was done to secure the support of the Southern states. 

“The Revolution and the Founders’ Constitution chose unity over justice, but the Civil War and Reconstruction put justice ahead of unity,” Kermit Roosevelt III explained in The Nation that Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story. “The heroes and villains are different.”

For me, they switch places. This is the back and forth, the push and pull, the tug-o-war that this country has always been engaged in. 

The insurrection on January 6, 2021, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., has been compared to secessionism and proof of the enduring legacy of the slaveholding South, complete with Confederate flags waving.

While there have been amendments added as a corrective, millions of Americans continue to work from the original. This is coupled with the belief that they are the rightful owners of this land—rather than stewards or custodians.

“The USA convulses between its political extremes represented by white Christian nationalists and progressive identitarians,” N.T. Wright and Michael F. Bird pointed out in Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies. “It lacks consensus and belief in a greater good that once characterized its political class.” However, America’s “greater good” has always required a “necessary evil.” 

It’s the predictable two-sidedness to the same old story of domination, coupled with the strange desire to own human beings, which now includes their likeness and voice. Flesh and blood are not enough. Large tech companies control the digital infrastructure and are the new plantations as digital colonization repurposes land for water extraction in service to its AI masters. 

Karen Hao described it in Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s AI, writing, “Over the years, I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires. During the long era of European colonialism, empires seized and extracted resources that were not their own and exploited the labor of the people they subjugated to mine, cultivate, and refine those resources for the empires’ enrichment.”

She continued, “They projected racist, dehumanizing ideas of their own superiority and modernity to justify—and even entice the conquered into accepting—the invasion of sovereignty, the theft, and the subjugation. They justified their quest for power by the need to compete with other empires: In an arms race, all bets are off.”

Further, Hao argued, “All this ultimately served to entrench each empire’s power and to drive its expansion and progress. In the simplest terms, empires amassed extraordinary riches across space and time, through imposing a colonial world order, at great expense to everyone else.”

It’s all about conquest, possession, domination, extraction, violence, greed and supremacy. Frankly, I don’t want to work with people who think these are the only answers to human being and belonging, that this is what any project would require.

I failed to mention that I hate group projects. Because there is always a slacker, one who avoids responsibility while benefiting from the labor of the other group members. 

The slacker doesn’t contribute to discussions or attend planning meetings, but is sure to show up once the final project has come together. It is then and only then that the slacker asks, “Do you need me to do anything?” 

The slacker is not as invested and thus doesn’t have much to lose. The slacker simply shows up when the work is complete, to share in the credit and expects a good grade. The slacker will also be sure to look the part, blend in, and work to position themself front and center when it is time to make the presentation—as a kind of finishing touch. 

But the work of American democracy is far from done and I can’t help but notice how many Americans are slackers. They are waiting around for African Americans to do the work, to protest, to make demands, and to push back against the empire. 

But we’ve done all the work before. “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true,” Nikole Hannah-Jones stated emphatically in The New York Times Magazine article titled “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black People Made It One.” 

My ancestors marched for rights now rolled back and out of respect for their sacrificial work, I refuse to roll up my sleeves once more. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said rightly in Chicago in 1966: “I’m tired of marching, tired of marching for something that should have been mine at birth.” 

Besides, why continue with a project for which we will never get any credit? Do your own work. I’d rather it fail.