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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
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Rebecca Solnit

What is the United States of America now?

El Sereno, California Celebrates Independence Day And 100 Years On Route 66LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - JUNE 27: Participants hold American flags before the 67th annual El Sereno Independence Day Parade in the predominantly Latino community of El Sereno on June 27, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. This year's theme was
‘It is a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that produced nonviolent resistance’s most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr.’ Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. The United States of America is … so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it approaches its quarter-millennium mark. I say it as though the US was one thing, but it is a thousand things.

It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good as she stood up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past – and present and future. The US before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.

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