The United States of Amnesia

The United States of Amnesia

“America is a nation that remembers its victories and forgets its violences. Its memory is selective, curated, and politically maintained … a museum of half-truths.”

The forgetting is not accidental.
It is engineered.

America must forget in order to function.
Forget slavery.
Forget genocide.
Forget intervention, invasion, extraction, and exploitation.
Forget the bodies that made its buildings and the spirits that haunt its soil.

To remember fully would collapse the illusion of innocence that the country depends on.

America is not the land of the free.
It is the land of the conveniently forgetful.

This forgetting becomes cultural:
People forget their origins.
Families forget their roots.
Black children are told to forget their magic.
Immigrants are pressured to forget their names.

The United States of Amnesia is both a place and a condition
A psychological strategy of power.
Because a nation that cannot remember cannot repair.
And a nation that refuses to repair cannot evolve.

The Atlantic slave trade never took place in one trip meaning how African slaves were transported to the Americas: Africans were the first from another “continent” to arrive to Turtle Island (Present Day America) before the Portuguese and Europeans even understood the concept of crossing waters to explore new lands. Europeans wanted resources (spices, textiles, grain, various fruits and vegetables) native to the later westernized countries today; like the Muslims. So the Europeans began trading with North African nations for resources but due to greed and imaginary power, the Europeans wanted to expand. So because Columbus (Portuguese Man) discovered the Caribbean islands aka The West Indies; that was the first stop for Africans to be shipped and enslaved. Once America was officially discovered by the Portuguese, is then when the slaves were transported from the Caribbean to the Americas. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Path went from the West Coast of Africa to the Caribbean Islands where seasoning and breeding took place; then the next migration push was to the Meso and Southern parts of America by the Portuguese and Spanish (hence the reason many Afro- Latinos exist in Spanish speaking areas). And lastly, as the exploration North from the Meso and Southern American territory began; present day America is “discovered”. But what was discovered was that Turtle Island was already inhabited by natives, natives that resembled the Africans that they ( Portuguese, Spanish, French, & English) had bought, sold, raped, and traded from “Africa”. These natives are the Soulaan people, in today’s terms we would say the Melanated “Afro” Native Americans or the Foundational Black Americans those who were later classified as negro, colored, African-American, or … Black.

And now as we enter the 2026, we are facing a crisis of who is Black and who is Afro- Nationality. But that is a topic of conversation for another time.

-Madame GiGi