User Profile

The word "abyss" is perhaps the only Sumerian loan-word in the English language, and has changed its meaning somewhat during the thousands of years in which it has been current. Originally the Sumerian word abzu meant the waters under the earth.

— Looking for Dilmun by Geoffrey Bibby

History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order. So it was with Josiah Nott looking back to Ancient Egypt to justify slavery. And so it is with the American Revolution and the founding of a great republic, or the Greatest Generation who did not fight to defend merely the homeland but the entire world. If you believe that history, then you are primed to believe that the American state is a force for good, that it is the world's oldest democracy, and that those who hate America hate it for its freedoms. And if you believe that, then you can believe that these inexplicable haters of freedom are worthy of our drones. But a different history, one that finds its starting point in genocide and slavery, argues for a much darker present and the possibility that here too are haters of freedom, unworthy of the power they wield. A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths. That the country's major magazines, newspapers, publishing houses, and social media were suddenly lending space to stories that questioned the agreed-upon narrative meant that Americans, as a whole, might begin to question them too. And a new narrative—and a new set of possibilities—might then be born.

— The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates