Americans And Their Things

Saturday, July 25, 2026

The Underhanded Country

In 2011 I arrived in a country I believed to be, in its bones, honest about itself.

This was a reasonable belief assembled from available evidence. America had a free press, an independent judiciary, constitutional protections for speech and assembly, a tradition of institutional self-examination that produced, among other things, the report that exposed its own intelligence agencies’ abuses, the journalism that brought down a president, the legislation that acknowledged its treatment of Japanese Americans during World War Two as a wrong requiring redress. These were not performances. They were real instances of a country looking at itself and finding cause for correction.

I had come from a context where institutional self-examination was rarer and more dangerous. The comparison was not unfavourable to America.

Over fifteen years I have revised this belief — not abandoned, but complicated in ways that make the original version look like the view from outside a building before you have lived in it for a decade.

The revision did not happen in a single moment. It accumulated across a series of events, each explicable in isolation, but which assembled into a pattern visible only across the full span. The pattern is this: America is capable of extraordinary public honesty about its past and extraordinary public dishonesty about its present. The distance between these two capacities, and the uses to which that distance is put, is what I mean by underhanded.

The country that built the National Museum of African American History and Culture — which I visited in August 2023 — also built and maintains systems whose current effects are continuous with the history the museum documents. The museum is genuine. The documentation is genuine. The gap between the acknowledgment and the adjustment is the thing worth examining.

I was watching in 2011. I was watching in 2015. I was watching in 2020, when the country convulsed in a way that suggested it was finally going to do the work of bringing the adjustment into alignment with the acknowledgment. I watched the convulsion produce a set of institutional statements, corporate commitments, and public reckonings that were, in their moment, genuinely felt. I watched most of them not produce structural change at the scale the acknowledgment implied was necessary. The observation is not that the country is irredeemably dishonest — that is too simple. The observation is that America has developed a sophisticated capacity for acknowledgment that does not automatically produce correction, and that the acknowledgment sometimes serves as a substitute for the correction rather than a pathway to it. This is the specific underhanded quality. It is not cynical. It is structurally convenient.

I want to be precise about what this is not. It is not anti-Americanism, a category I find lazy and imprecise. I have lived here for fifteen years and hold this country with genuine complexity — gratitude and critique existing in the same breath, which is how adults hold complicated things.

It is not the observation that America is uniquely flawed. What is distinctive about America’s version is the sophistication of the acknowledgment infrastructure — the museums, the commissions, the apologies — which creates the impression that the gap has been closed more fully than it has.

I arrived believing what the acknowledgment infrastructure describes. I now also see the gap. Both the belief and the gap are real. The country is large enough to contain both, and has been for a long time.

I am writing this down because the outsider position sometimes sees the gap more clearly than the inside does. Not always. Sometimes the outsider simply misunderstands. But sometimes the distance is the method, and what the distance shows is worth saying.

These notes were made between June 2011 and the present.
I started writing them down in 2026.
The gap is not an absence — it is the difference between experiencing something
and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.

Friday, July 17, 2026

The Cherokee Stop

On the road to California there is a stop that announces itself with signs long before you reach it. The signs increase in frequency and scale over several miles, each one adding information — curios, Native American crafts, the word authentic appearing more times than the word authentic can sustain without losing its meaning.

I pulled off because the signs had been building for so long that the stop had become a narrative inevitability. You cannot drive past something that has been advertising itself for forty miles without at least seeing what it is.

What it was: a commercial enterprise selling objects.

The objects were the vocabulary of Native American material culture — beadwork, feathered items, pottery in traditional forms, prints of images associated with the aesthetic that American popular culture has built around Indigenous identity. The people selling them were present and professional. The transactions were ordinary retail transactions. There was no ceremony. No history being explained or offered. The culture had been extracted from its context and repackaged as a product available at a price point accessible to highway travellers with forty-five minutes and a credit card.

I had been to the Maasai Market in Nairobi many times. The City Market stalls in Nairobi’s centre. I knew what a curio operation looked like — the objects, the pricing structure, the particular negotiation between cultural authenticity and commercial logic. A Maasai artisan selling beadwork to a tourist is doing something economically rational and culturally real simultaneously. The object is genuine even if the transaction is commercial.

What troubled me about the Cherokee stop was not the commerce. It was the absence of everything behind the commerce. There was nothing to learn here. No invitation to understand who made these things and why, what they meant in their original context, how the community that produced them was doing now. The culture was available as object but not as story.

Two months later I stood in the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut — a research centre and museum built by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation on their sovereign land. The difference was total. The Pequot Museum is a serious institution: oral history recordings, archaeological evidence, reconstructed village environments, the complete account of a community that the United States government declared legally extinct in 1910 and that continued to exist anyway, in defiance of the declaration, until they won federal recognition in 1983 and built the museum to say: we are still here, and here is everything we kept. I spent three hours there. At the Cherokee stop I spent twenty minutes and bought nothing.

The distinction between the two experiences is not about authenticity in the simple sense. Both involved Native American cultural expression in commercial contexts. The Pequot museum has a gift shop. The Cherokee stop had real objects made by real people.

The distinction is about depth of invitation. The Pequot Museum invites you into the full complexity of a community’s history and present existence. The Cherokee stop invites you to buy a thing and continue driving. One asks something of you. The other asks only for the transaction.

America has two modes for presenting its Indigenous history. One mode keeps the objects and removes the people. The other keeps the people and the objects together and refuses to let you separate them. You can tell which mode you are in within five minutes of arrival.

Thursday, July 9, 2026

The Hierarchy Nobody Names

There is a hierarchy operating in the space between African immigrants and African Americans and almost nobody speaks about it directly. The people inside it navigate it daily. The people outside it rarely know it exists.

The hierarchy does not have a clear top and bottom. It is more accurately a set of overlapping misrecognitions, mutual and sincere, each community holding an image of the other assembled from insufficient information and cultural distance.

Version one, from a subset of African Americans toward African immigrants: you did not go through what we went through. Your presence here is different in kind from ours. You arrived with a choice we were not given. And furthermore — this specific version arrived in my early years in Virginia — Obama brought you. The African president imported African immigrants as a political project. This was stated to me directly more than once, with varying degrees of hostility.

The Obama theory deserves a paragraph because it contains something real inside its inaccuracy. The real thing is the perception that African immigrants occupy a position in America made possible, in part, by African Americans — that the legal and social gains of the civil rights movement created a country that African immigrants could enter and benefit from, and that the African immigrant community has not always acknowledged this adequately. There is tmy wife in this perception. I have sat with it. It requires sitting with.

The Obama importation theory is the inaccurate version of this tmy wife, converted into conspiracy by the specific dynamics of a community that has been lied to by its government so many times that the lie became the default interpretive frame. The distrust is earned. The specific theory is wrong. These things coexist.

I worked at an Office Depot in Northern Virginia in my early years here. The store is now closed. I worked with a Ghanaian colleague — the two of us were, for the period he was there, the only African immigrants in the store. A supervisor assigned us tasks that did not get assigned to other employees, Black or white or otherwise. The tasks were not violent or explicitly discriminatory in the legal sense. They were simply the tasks nobody else was given. On the day of the 2011 Virginia earthquake — August 23, the largest in DMV history — this supervisor sent me by bus and metro to assist with a closeout at another store. I had no car. The round trip took the entire morning. The earthquake hit while I was between aisles in an unfamiliar store, alone, not knowing what was happening. He had not sent the stockroom staff. He had sent the Ghanaian man and the Kenyan man, on a day when the city moved.

I am not telling this story as a grievance. Grievance requires a target, and the target here is diffuse — it is not one supervisor but a social logic that the supervisor was operating inside without necessarily understanding it. The logic sorts people by perceived disposability. African immigrants, in certain American environments, fall into a category that reads as usable in ways that other categories do not.

This is the hierarchy nobody names. It is not the hierarchy of arrival — the legal distinctions between citizen and resident and visa holder. It is an older and less legible hierarchy, assembled from centuries of American racial logic, which places people in categories of belonging on a scale that does not announce itself and does not require anyone’s conscious participation to operate.

I have navigated it for fifteen years. I have watched it operate on others. I no longer find it surprising. I find it worth documenting.

Wednesday, July 1, 2026

The Articulation Surprise

There is a moment that happens to immigrants in white-collar American environments that nobody has named. I am going to name it: the articulation surprise.

It works like this. You are in a meeting — a presentation, a client call, a formal professional conversation. You make a point. Clearly, with supporting argument, in complete sentences, using the technical vocabulary of the domain. You have been making points this way your entire life. It is simply how you were educated to speak in professional contexts.

The room shifts. Not negatively. Not with hostility. Something closer to recalibration — the specific micro-expression of people updating a prior assumption.

The prior assumption was that you would not speak this way.

I first encountered it in the Xerox reseller company where I worked after the workforce development programme placed me there in late 2014. The environment was professional sales — B2B, mid-Atlantic, managed print services. Client calls, presentations, the particular culture of a company that needs its people to be legible and credible to business buyers. I was the Kenyan with the IT background and the military discipline and the accent, and within the first weeks I understood that certain people in certain rooms were carrying a prior about what I would produce in a meeting.

The articulation surprise is almost always followed by warmth. People are, in the main, pleased to update. They become more engaged, more collaborative, more likely to direct the conversation toward you. The surprise is not followed by continued dismissal. It is followed by a kind of enthusiasm that, once you have seen it enough times, reveals more about what preceded it than about the speaker’s intentions.

The warmth that comes after the articulation surprise is the warmth of lowered expectations being exceeded. It is genuine. It is also structurally the product of an assumption that should not have been made. You cannot celebrate the surprise and also deny that there was a prior expectation of less — the surprise requires the prior. The most interesting variant is when it comes from people who consider themselves entirely without racial assumptions. These are not bad people. They are people who have absorbed, without awareness, a cultural prior about what certain voices are likely to say in certain rooms. The prior is not conscious. It operates below the level of intention. This is what makes it worth naming rather than simply resenting: it is not malice. It is ambient expectation, accumulated from a thousand sources, operating automatically. Naming it is not an accusation. It is a description. Descriptions are the beginning of the work.

I have experienced the articulation surprise across fifteen years and multiple professional environments. It has become data rather than injury. I notice it the way a scientist notices a result — not with offense, but with the interest of something confirming a hypothesis about how a system operates.

The surprise diminishes over time in any particular environment, as people build a new prior based on actual experience. The problem is entry. Every new room contains the prior again. You arrive and the prior is waiting.

After fifteen years I have made a kind of peace with this. The peace is not resignation. It is the peace of understanding the mechanism clearly enough to navigate it without spending more energy on it than it deserves. It deserves a paragraph. It got one.

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

32 Hours

In early 2013, the hours at Walmart dropped.

January is the slow month in retail. The holiday season ends, the foot traffic falls, and the store responds predictably: it narrows the schedules of part-time employees without seniority. Thirty-two hours. Sometimes less. I was one of those employees. I was making $7.50 an hour and working thirty-two of them a week.

The arithmetic did not work. It had never quite worked — Northern Virginia is not a cheap place to survive at retail wages — but in the January contraction it worked less. I had come back from basic training and AIT the previous summer changed enough to see the room clearly, and what I saw clearly in January 2013 was the shape of the road I was on.

The shape was flat. Not descending — the people I worked with were not failing. They were anchored. There is a difference. But the road did not rise from where I was standing, and I had been standing on it long enough to understand that it would not rise on its own.

I had an IT degree from Kenya. It had not translated directly into American employment because the American hiring system runs on locally legible credentials and local experience, and I had neither in the domain where the degree was useful. The degree was real. The gap between the credential and the role was not a function of the credential’s quality. It was a function of the system’s preference for the familiar.

I had heard about a workforce development programme — a scholarship initiative run in conjunction with Northern Virginia Community College, specifically designed to bridge the gap between immigrant qualifications and American employer expectations. I had been sitting with this information for some months. In January 2013, working thirty-two hours at $7.50, I started taking it seriously.

The American class crossing exists and is not a myth. I want to say this clearly because it is sometimes denied by people who have been hurt by how often it fails, and sometimes oversimplified by people who want it to be a story about individual merit. It is neither. It is a system of platforms — some stable, some temporary, some that dissolve while you are standing on them. What the system requires is that you be in motion before each platform disappears, and that you have enough resources — time, energy, the schedule that allows for simultaneous crossing — to make the motion. Many people do not have those resources. In January 2013 I had them barely, and the barely was doing a lot of work.

I did not apply to the programme that January. The application would come later, when the timing aligned with the programme’s intake cycle. What January 2013 gave me was the decision — the internal shift from considering to committed. The thirty-two hours and the arithmetic that did not work had given me enough clarity about the road to decide I needed a different one.

Nobody wrote this down from where I was standing. The electronics section looked the same every shift. The badge reader clocked me in and out without comment. The decision was invisible to everyone but me.

That is usually how the decisions that matter are made.

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

What the American Grocery Store Tells You About Cost: Household Economics as Institutional Signal

I came back from a year in Nairobi and walked into a grocery store and did not recognize the prices.

That is not a metaphor. I stood in the cereal aisle holding a box I had bought dozens of times before and genuinely could not tell if the number on the shelf tag was a mistake. It was not a mistake. That was just what cereal cost now.

What follows is not a complaint about inflation. Complaints about inflation are everywhere, and they are almost always the wrong unit of analysis. What interests me is what the grocery store, as an institution, is telling you while you shop — and whether you know how to read it.

The Institutional Claim

The American grocery store is a signal architecture. Its prices, its brand tiers, its private label expansion, its store geography — none of these are neutral logistics. They are a running account of where institutional stress has been absorbed, who absorbed it, and who is being asked to absorb it next. If you know how to read the store, you can read the economy. And right now, the store is saying something very specific about the relationship between household cost and institutional health.

The Evidence Architecture

A year away from American consumer infrastructure clarifies things that proximity obscures. In Nairobi, household economics are legible in a different register — costs are visible, margins are thin, the distance between price and survival is short and openly acknowledged. You buy what you can afford. The category architecture of the American store, by contrast, is designed to make that distance invisible. There are seventeen versions of the same yogurt. There is a budget tier, a mid tier, a premium tier, and a store brand positioned just below the budget tier as a kind of price floor with a dignity problem. This is not abundance. This is segmentation. And segmentation is what institutions do when they need to extract value from multiple income bands simultaneously without any single band feeling directly targeted.

When I left, private label — store brand — products were already expanding. When I returned, they had expanded dramatically. This is a data point. Private label growth is not a story about consumer preference. It is a story about consumer pressure. When household budgets compress, shoppers move down the brand architecture. Retailers know this, build for it, and margin it accordingly. The store brand is not cheaper because it is less profitable to the retailer. It is cheaper to you because the retailer has decided that capturing your trade-down is worth more than holding the national brand margin. The cost of that calculation is not borne by the retailer.

The specific category that stopped me in the aisle — cereal — is worth examining because it is a mature, low-innovation, commodity-adjacent category. There is no supply chain disruption story that fully accounts for what happened to cereal prices. There is a revenue management story. There is a shrinkflation story. There is a story about category captaincy and how national brands negotiate shelf placement in ways that keep price anchors high even when input costs moderate. These are structural stories, not shock stories. The shock already passed. What remained is the new floor.

Produce pricing told a different story and a harder one. The items with the most transparent supply chains — where you could, if you wanted to, trace the price from field to shelf — showed the widest divergence between what the supply chain economics suggested and what the shelf tag said. This is not a mystery. It is a margin capture story that relies on the consumer not doing the tracing.

The Mechanism

Here is the structural logic. American grocery retail operates on thin nominal margins at the store level and increasingly thick effective margins at the category and platform level. The distinction matters. When a retailer tells you its grocery margins are thin, that is true in one register and misleading in another. The thin margin is at the commodity layer. The thick margin is at the data layer, the loyalty layer, the shelf placement fee layer, and increasingly the retail media layer — the ads you now see on the screen of the self-checkout machine and inside the store app and embedded in the digital circular. You are not just the shopper. You are the inventory.

This means the price you pay for a box of cereal is not primarily determined by what it costs to make the cereal and get it to the shelf. It is determined by a negotiation between a national brand with significant marketing leverage and a retailer with significant placement leverage, conducted against a backdrop of consumer price sensitivity data that both parties have in exhaustive detail. The consumer is in this negotiation only as a modeled variable — a price elasticity coefficient, a basket size metric, a loyalty tier. The consumer does not have a seat at the table. The consumer is the table.

Inflation, in this model, is not primarily a story about rising costs flowing through to prices. It is a story about which actors in the supply chain had the leverage to pass costs forward, which had the leverage to expand margins under cover of the cost story, and which had no leverage at all and simply paid. Households had no leverage. Households paid.

Who Bears the Cost

The accountability architecture here is worth stating directly, because it is usually stated sideways if at all.

The households that bore the most cost were the ones with the least substitution flexibility. If you are buying the cheapest version of a thing because that is the version your budget allows, there is no cheaper tier to move to when prices rise. The private label floor is not actually a floor. Below it is not shopping. Below it is not eating that thing, or not eating, or eating something that costs less and does less for you nutritionally, which is its own cost that does not appear on a shelf tag but does appear eventually in healthcare expenditure and cognitive load and the compounding pressure of poverty.

The households with moderate income did what the store designed them to do: they traded down. They moved from national brand to store brand, felt the slight indignity of it, and mostly absorbed the psychological cost without incident. This is a successful institutional outcome from the retailer's perspective. The trade-down kept the basket. The margin held or improved. The consumer felt like they had made a smart choice. The consumer did make a smart choice, given the options they were given.

The households with high income did not change their behavior materially. This is also a successful institutional outcome. Premium tiers held or expanded. The signal value of premium consumption — the communication of not having to worry — increased as the rest of the store became more visibly stressed. The store became, among other things, a theater of class position, which it has always been, but more so.

Who gained: retailers, through improved private label margins and data infrastructure. National brands with high loyalty elasticity, who held price and volume better than the category averages. Private equity-backed brands in premium categories, who used the inflationary moment to establish new price anchors that did not come back down when input costs moderated.

Who lost: households in the bottom two income quintiles, with no substitution flexibility. Small and mid-size regional brands without the marketing leverage to hold shelf placement or price. And, in a diffuse way that is hard to assign to any one transaction, the general legibility of price as a signal — the sense that price means something about value rather than about leverage.

The Doctrine Point

Here is the transferable principle. When an institution is under stress, it does not distribute that stress evenly. It distributes it according to leverage. The actors with the most leverage pass the stress forward to the actors with less. This continues until the stress reaches someone with no leverage left to pass it to. That person absorbs it. This is not a malfunction. This is the system working as designed.

The grocery store makes this visible in a way that is unusually legible, if you are looking. The price tag is not a fact about the world. It is a record of a power negotiation that happened before you arrived, conducted by parties who knew more about your behavior than you know about theirs, optimized for their capture of your expenditure, and expressed as a number that feels like neutral information.

Coming back from a place where the economics are harsher but more honest did not make me angry at the American grocery store, exactly. It made me interested in what it was saying. And what it is saying, if you stand in the cereal aisle and read it carefully, is this: the cost is real, the cause is structural, the distribution of burden was not accidental, and the people who set the prices already knew which households would pay and could not do otherwise.

That is not a neutral fact about supply and demand. That is an institutional choice, expressed at scale, priced into a box of cereal, and waiting for you on the shelf every week.

Monday, June 15, 2026

California's Lie

California told me it was different and I almost believed it.

I arrived in Los Angeles in late April 2022, at the end of the first long leg of the road trip. I had driven from Virginia through Tennessee, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. I had seen the Grand Canyon and stood at the rim and understood for the first time why Americans develop the specific reverence for that particular hole in the ground. I had driven through Las Vegas, which is another kind of hole — a hole in the argument that desire needs to justify itself.

Los Angeles presented itself as the place where the rest of America’s rules did not apply. The diversity was visible and genuine — not the diversity of adjacent clusters maintaining their geometry at close range, but something that looked, from the outside, like actual integration. The Griffith Observatory at dusk with the city below it. The Grammy Museum with its argument that American music is the product of every culture ever imported and put to work. Streets where the signage ran in four languages.

I stayed three days. The lie revealed itself gradually.

California’s diversity is real. I want to be clear about this before I describe the lie, because the lie is not about the diversity. The diversity exists. Los Angeles contains more versions of human origin than almost any city on earth.

The lie is the implication that the presence of diversity constitutes the resolution of its tensions. That the Mexican restaurant next to the Korean restaurant next to the Ethiopian restaurant means that the people inside them have worked something out. California presents its diversity as an achievement when it is more accurately a condition — a thing that happened because of geography and economics and history, not because California solved a problem that the rest of America has not.

Every immigrant has encountered the California argument, which is usually delivered by Californians and goes: it is different here. The subtext is: the rest of America has a problem that we have moved past. What the argument cannot survive is the inquiry into housing, into the distribution of wealth, into which communities live along which fault lines. California has the most beautiful face of any American state and some of the sharpest structural inequities. The beauty is partly funded by the inequity. The diversity is partly the product of a labour history that California has not fully reckoned with. I loved Los Angeles. I did not love it uncritically.

I stood at the Griffith Observatory and looked at the city. Eleven million people in the greater metropolitan area. The second-largest city in the richest country in the history of organised human settlement. Below me were the homes of people who had come from everywhere on earth and built lives in the specific California light, which is real and unlike any other light I have encountered.

I drove back east through the Mojave and Nevada and Kansas and Indiana and arrived home in Virginia having covered roughly five thousand miles. I came back with a more complicated map than I left with. California was on it, larger and more nuanced than I had expected, neither the utopia it advertises nor the hypocrite its critics describe.

Just a place. Extraordinary and flawed, like all the rest. The lie was the exceptional claim. The reality was more interesting.