The thing is, not all Americans have to unlearn the myth.
You grow up aware of the lie of "with freedom and justice for all" and you grow up knowing America likes to lie about what it is and isn't as a nation.
I'll say - likes to pretend about what it is and isn't - if it makes people feel better, but the end result is the same for those of us who grew up knowing that there wasn't freedom for all and justice could be bought, and not just with money - the color of your skin could buy it too.
That your gender changed how you were seen and treated.
That your sexuality changed it as well.
When you know from an early age that the America you see and experience isn't the America others see and experience, you feel like an outsider - and not just because you're treated that way either. It can play with your head and you wonder what's wrong with you. It's hard to trust a system that allows for so much harm.
My favorite parts.
“It is different in the United States,” I once said, not entirely realising what I was saying until the words came out. I had never been called upon to explain this. “We are told it is the greatest country on earth. The thing is, we will never reconsider that narrative the way you are doing just now, because to us, that isn’t propaganda, that is truth. And to us, that isn’t nationalism, it’s patriotism. And the thing is, we will never question any of it because at the same time, all we are being told is how free-thinking we are, that we are free. So we don’t know there is anything wrong in believing our country is the greatest on earth. The whole thing sort of convinces you that a collective consciousness in the world came to that very conclusion.”
“Wow,” a friend once replied. “How strange. That is a very quiet kind of fascism, isn’t it?”
It was a quiet kind of fascism that would mean I would always see Turkey as beneath the country I came from, and also that would mean I believed my uniquely benevolent country to have uniquely benevolent intentions towards the peoples of the world.
I truly hope more people read this article.
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