FULL ARTICLE AT MEDIUM:
“When I think about America, I think of the multi-millions of Indigenous peoples who were killed, who were raped, who had their children ripped from their arms or who died from diseases deliberately introduced. I think of the African peoples torn from their lands, their cultures, their professions and histories, drowning in the ocean, suffocating in a press of bodies, beaten bloody beneath a burning sun, being sold and treated worse than animals. These are my ancestors.

When I think about America, I think of the incoming immigrants, the settlers, the European peoples who were abused, misused, demeaned and struggling in their own homelands, who heard the promise of land and a better life and came. Away from structural oppression and violent conversion that created desperate, vicious souls willing to do anything for wealth and power. I think of the Europeans who incorporated and founded an institution that decided what type of life and which lives were worthy and good, and which others were not. They recreated the systems and structures of elitism, oppression and bigotry they had fled….”