The American promise is a confession. It is written in the parchment and blood of its birth, a declaration that all men are created equal, signed by men who owned other men.
This is not a footnote to the story; it is the stone in the gut of the story, the thing we keep stumbling over. We have been dancing around this corpse for two and a half centuries, and the smell is now too potent to ignore.
The revolutionary fire they speak of so fondly in schoolhouses was not meant for us.
The liberty they prized was the liberty to take, to expand, to build a nation on land that was not theirs with labor that was not free. And yet, they wrote down the words. They set the flame to the page, and the words escaped them.
“Unalienable Rights.” “Consent of the governed.” They became a gospel for those they had excluded.
My ancestors, hearing this gospel preached in the land of their bondage, took those words more seriously than the authors ever dared to. They believed the words belonged to them, too.
This is the great American tragedy and its only hope: that the lie, written down, contains the truth that will finally shatter it.
Now, in this fraught hour, we are told to venerate the founders, these flawed giants. But their flaw was not a personal failing; it was a national blueprint.
The system they built, fearing the tyranny of a mob, has been conquered by a tyranny of money.
The factions Madison warned against are no longer mere political clubs; they are ecosystems of influence, where the consent of the governed is manufactured like any other product, packaged and sold back to us in thirty-second spots.
Corporate billionaires at some point decided to buy off both sides in the partisan struggle, hedging their bets by converting politics into a spectator sport with the credibility of a pro wrestling match.
We are not citizens; we are an audience. We do not consent; we consume.
And what of the governed?
We stand in the long shadow of that original contradiction. The policing of our bodies, the strangling of our neighborhoods, the relentless machinery of the carceral state—this is not a perversion of the system.
It is the system working exactly as it was designed, protecting the property of the powerful and managing the lives of the dispossessed.
When a Black body is thrown to the ground under the knee of the state, it is the same principle that held a Black body in chains on a Virginia plantation: that some men are created to be ruled, and their pursuit of happiness is a threat to public order.
For 9 minutes and 29 seconds, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee and the weight of his body against George Floyd’s neck on May 25, 2020, but Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic U.S. Senator Cory Booker accepted the September endorsement of the New Jersey Fraternal Order of Police (NJFOP) for their re-election bids.
We are all on one side, as long as you stay on your side. It helps to know your place.
The new plantation is not a columned mansion. It is a labyrinth of minimum wage jobs, of subprime loans, of gigs that offer the freedom to choose your own hours and the slavery of never knowing if you can pay the rent.
The masters wear suits and hold shareholder meetings. They speak the language of liberty while building higher walls. The chains are financial, psychological, but they are no less real.
The replaced slaves with sharecroppers and substituted for them the modern gig worker.
And both political establishments, bought and paid for by the same corporate masters, offer only the theater of disagreement—a furious debate over who gets to hold the whip, while never questioning the necessity of the whip itself.
The revolutionary ideal is not a relic.
It is a ghost that haunts this house. It is the persistent, terrifying, and beautiful demand for a reckoning. The promise was written. It cannot be unwritten.
We have seen the promise, and we have seen the price paid to keep it from us.
We must now do what those founders lacked the courage to do: make the lie true. For all of us. We must consent to be governed only by a truth that acknowledges every one of us, finally, as created equal.
Nothing less will save this country. And it is very late in the day.