And so, having set out on a long journey, I have, like Kierkegaard's Christian, arrived where I began. Or so it may seem. In truth, nothing about my understanding of my country is the same, nor can it ever be again. Gone forever is the illusion that America was founded as a haven for those seeking freedom, and has remained since a city upon a hill, shining like a beacon and holding out the hope that in this exceptional land, the founding dream will slowly be realized.

In place of this fantasy is the realization that North America, like Australia, South Africa, India, and many other lands, has for the past four centuries been a White Settler state, where the Racial Contract, in Charles Mills's evocative phrase, is imposed on the backs of those whose skins are not classified as “white.” America is and has since the seventeenth century been a land of Bondage and Freedom—Bondage for the many, and then for those not White, Freedom for the few, and then for those who are White.

This realization is not an expression of cynicism or pessimism, as some might imagine, for to be cynical, one must suppose that an ideal is being honored only in the breach, and to be pessimistic, one must have lost hope that an ideal will be actualized. But the Ideal of Freedom has never been the story of America. From the first, White settlers sought to exploit the land and its resources by means of bound labor. Very quickly, they imposed on this effort a racial coding that continues, in one form or another, to the present day. The population of our prisons testifies to this; so do the profiling practices of our police, the decisions of our Supreme Court, the statistical picture of the distribution of wealth and income, and our popular culture.

Incurable optimist that I am, I prefer to see this refashioning of the American story as a first step toward the crafting of a truly liberatory project.