This view of us [America] versus the outside world is mostly about foreign policy; it is spectacularly narrow and crushingly white. This view is predicated on the fairy tale, made possible by the shared and agreed-upon reality in which we are not subject to the same laws as the rest of the world, whether those laws are scientific or international. It bleeds into how we think about politics at home. The enduring belief — especially among white Americans, because ’it’ certainly never happens to us — is that ’it’ can’t happen here. But it does, and it can, and it has. Fundamental rights are crushed all the time, exposing ideas like the rule of law in America as anything but a system that provides equal justice. People starve and suffer. We are ignorant and indifferent to it, deluded by a culture of selfishness and isolation, characteristics we mistake for independence and strength.
