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. The Constitution protected speech, press and peaceful assembly. ([constitution.congress.gov](https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/?utm_source=openai)) The federal judiciary was established as a separate branch, with safeguards intended to protect its independence. ([uscourts.gov](https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/court-role-and-structure?utm_source=openai)) The Senate’s Church Committee had investigated abuses of power by the intelligence agencies and issued recommendations for oversight. ([senate.gov](https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/church-committee.htm?blm_aid=6187251100&utm_source=openai)) Investigative reporting helped force Watergate into public view before hearings, court rulings and the tapes led towards a president’s resignation. ([senate.gov](https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/watergate.htm?utm_source=openai)) The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 acknowledged the injustice of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, apologized and provided redress to eligible survivors. ([archives.gov](https://www.archives.gov/research/aapi/ww2/courts?utm_source=openai)) 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 it, but complicated it 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 building

The revision did not happen in a single moment. It accumulated across a series of events, each explicable in isolation, 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 a remarkable reluctance to speak as plainly 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—built a genuine institution for documenting African American history and its place in the American story. ([nmaahc.si.edu](https://nmaahc.si.edu/about/about-museum?utm_source=openai)) I left unable to treat the history it documents as sealed off from the present. The museum is genuine. The documentation is genuine. The gap between acknowledgment and adjustment is the thing worth examining.

Acknowledgment and correction

I was watching in 2011. I was watching in 2015. I watched in 2020 as the country seemed to convulse in a way that suggested it was finally going to bring the adjustment into alignment with the acknowledgment. I watched institutional statements, corporate commitments and public reckonings appear, many of them genuinely felt. I also watched acknowledgment move faster than adjustment. I could not see structural change at the scale the acknowledgment itself implied was necessary.

Acknowledgment has objects: a museum, a commission report, an apology, a statement. It can be visited, quoted, filed, taught and unveiled. Correction is less displayable. It changes rules, incentives, budgets and arrangements of power. Acknowledgment can therefore carry the emotional and reputational value of reform without requiring its full institutional and economic cost.

The observation is not that the country is irredeemably dishonest—that is too simple. It is that America has developed a sophisticated capacity for acknowledgment that does not automatically produce correction, and that acknowledgment can sometimes serve as a substitute for correction rather than a pathway to it.

This is the specific underhanded quality. It is not necessarily cynical. It is structurally convenient.

What this is not

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.

Nor is it the claim that America is uniquely flawed. What struck me as distinctive was the sophistication of its acknowledgment infrastructure—the museums, commissions, official apologies and acts of redress—which can create the impression that the gap has been closed more fully than it has.

I arrived believing what that 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.

Distance as method

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 September 2026. 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.

The Cherokee Stop

On the road to California there was a stop that used the word Cherokee and announced itself with signs long before you reached it. The signs increased in frequency and scale over several miles, each 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 what feels like forty miles without at least seeing what it is.

What it was: a commercial enterprise selling objects.

I did not establish who owned the place or whether its name described any tribal affiliation. What I saw was the familiar roadside vocabulary of Native American material culture: beadwork, feathered items, pottery in traditional-looking forms, and prints drawn from the aesthetic that American popular culture has built around Indigenous identity.

The staff were present and professional. The transactions were ordinary retail transactions. I found no ceremony and little history being explained: no clear account of who had made a particular object, what community it came from, what it meant there, or how its maker lived now. What reached the customer was culture as category—an object, a label, a price—arranged for highway travellers with a short stop and a credit card.

I had been many times to the Maasai Market and the City Market stalls in central Nairobi. I knew the grammar of a curio operation: the objects, the pricing, the repeated negotiation between cultural identity and commercial logic. I had also learned not to use commerce itself as the test. A sold object was not automatically a false one. Money changing hands did not, by itself, empty an object of meaning.

What troubled me about the roadside stop was therefore not the commerce. It was how little of the world behind the commerce was available to me. There was almost nothing to learn about makers, use, provenance, history or present-tense community life. The culture was available as object but not as story.

Two months later I stood in the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center in Connecticut, a tribally owned and operated institution at Mashantucket. Its films, archival and archaeological collections, interactive exhibits, recreated Pequot village and galleries about reservation life and the contemporary Nation placed objects inside a sustained historical account. The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation received federal recognition through legislation enacted on October 18, 1983.

The effect was not completeness—no museum can promise that—but continuity. Objects, land, history, government and living people remained in the same sentence. I spent three hours there. At the roadside stop I spent twenty minutes and bought nothing.

The distinction between the two experiences was not authenticity in the simple sense. The Pequot Museum also has a store. Some of the roadside objects may have been Native-made; the presentation did not give me enough information to know.

The distinction was the depth of the invitation. The museum invited me into the complexity of a community’s history and present existence. The roadside stop invited me to buy a thing and continue driving. One asked for attention. The other asked only for the transaction.

These two encounters suggested two recurring ways of presenting Indigenous material culture. In one, the objects remain while the people recede. In the other, people and objects are kept together, each making the other more difficult to simplify. You can often tell which encounter you have entered within five minutes of arrival.

These observations date from June 2011 onward. I began 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.

The Hierarchy Nobody Names

The assignment

In my early years in Northern Virginia, I worked at an Office Depot. I had a Ghanaian colleague. For the period he was there, we were, as far as I knew, the only African immigrants on staff.

A supervisor assigned us tasks that did not seem to be assigned to other employees, Black or white or otherwise. Nothing was said openly about race or origin. They were simply the tasks nobody else appeared to receive.

On August 23, 2011, the supervisor sent me by bus and Metro to help with a closeout at another store. I had no car. The round trip took the entire morning. That afternoon, the magnitude 5.8 earthquake centered near Mineral, Virginia, struck while I was standing between aisles in an unfamiliar store, alone and not knowing what was happening. ([usgs.gov](https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/science/m58-august-23-2011-mineral-virginia?utm_source=openai))

He had not sent the stockroom staff. In the pattern I remember, he made the Ghanaian man and the Kenyan man the movable ones. On a day when the city moved, that distinction became impossible for me to miss.

I do not tell this story as a grievance. Grievance asks for a target, and the target here is diffuse. I observed the allocation of work. What I inferred from it was a social logic: in that store, our foreignness seemed to make our time and inconvenience unusually available.

The supervisor may or may not have understood the pattern I saw. A hierarchy does not require everyone inside it to name it. Sometimes it appears only in the distribution of errands, distance, waiting and undesirable labor.

The theory

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

It does not have a clear top and bottom. It is more accurately a set of overlapping misrecognitions, each community holding an image of the other assembled from insufficient information and cultural distance. This note follows only one direction through it.

From a subset of African Americans toward African immigrants, I heard a version that went like this: 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.

Then came the specific version I encountered in Virginia: “Obama brought you.” The African president, as he was imagined in this account, had imported African immigrants as a political project. This was stated to me directly more than once, with varying degrees of hostility.

As a literal account of African immigration to the United States, it was false. Federal immigration records document African migration long before Barack Obama’s presidency, including throughout the preceding decade. ([ohss.dhs.gov](https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-12/Yearbook_Immigration_Statistics_2008.pdf?utm_source=openai))

But the error is not the end of its meaning. Inside the theory was a historically intelligible grievance: African immigrants occupy positions in America made possible, in part, by struggles they did not fight here. The legal and social gains of the civil-rights movement changed American public life, while the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed the national-origins formula and allowed more immigrants from Africa and elsewhere to enter. ([loc.gov](https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/african/a-social-revolution/?utm_source=openai))

The African immigrant community has not always acknowledged that inheritance adequately. I have sat with this perception. It requires sitting with.

The Obama theory converted that historical relationship into a presidential plot. The specific theory was wrong. The grievance beneath it was not therefore meaningless. Historical distrust can be intelligible without making every explanation produced by that distrust accurate. These things coexist.

The sorting

The store and the theory meet at the question of belonging. One asks who has inherited America through struggle. The other asks whose body and time may be treated as flexible, movable and unusually usable.

This is the hierarchy nobody names. It is not the formal hierarchy of citizen, resident and visa holder. It is an older and less legible sorting system, assembled from American racial habits and expressed through ordinary decisions: who is presumed to understand the rules, who is granted the dignity of refusal, who is sent across the city by bus because somebody has decided that his morning is available.

One store cannot establish a universal social law. One supervisor cannot explain every workplace. What I can document is the assignment, the repeated remarks and the pattern I believed I saw. What I infer is that African immigrants, in some American environments, can fall into a category that reads as usable in ways other categories do not.

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

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.

The Articulation Surprise

There is a moment I have learned to recognize in white-collar American environments. I call 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 a supporting argument, in complete sentences and using the technical vocabulary of the domain. You have been making points this way your entire professional life. It is simply how you were educated to speak in such rooms.

The room shifts. Not negatively. Not with hostility. Something closer to recalibration: the small change in expression that looks, to me, like people updating an assumption.

My reading of the prior assumption is simple: I was not expected to speak this way.

The first room

I first recognized it in the Xerox reseller company where I worked after a workforce development programme placed me there in late 2014. The environment was professional sales—B2B, mid-Atlantic, managed print services. There were client calls, presentations and the particular culture of a company that needed 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 began to suspect that certain people in certain rooms were carrying a prior about what I would produce in a meeting.

In my experience, the articulation surprise is usually followed by warmth. The room becomes more engaged and collaborative. More of the conversation is directed toward you. What follows is not continued dismissal but a kind of enthusiasm that, once you have seen it enough times, seems to reveal something about what preceded it.

The warmth that comes after the articulation surprise feels like the warmth of lowered expectations being exceeded. It is genuine. It may also be structurally produced by an assumption that should not have been made. If the surprise is real, some expectation preceded it.

The most interesting variant comes from people who understand themselves to be entirely without racial assumptions. These are not bad people. My interpretation is that they have absorbed, without awareness, a cultural prior about what certain voices are likely to say in certain rooms. If I am reading it correctly, the prior is not conscious. It operates below the level of intention.

This is what makes it worth naming rather than simply resenting. I do not read it as malice. I read it as ambient expectation, accumulated from a thousand sources and operating automatically. Naming it is not an accusation. It is a description. Descriptions are the beginning of the work.

Across multiple professional environments, repetition turned the articulation surprise into data rather than injury. I notice it the way a scientist notices a result—not with offence, but with the interest of seeing something confirm a hypothesis about how a system operates.

The next room

In any one environment, I have found that the surprise diminishes as people replace assumption with experience. The difficulty is entry. A new room can contain the prior again. You arrive, and it is waiting.

After years of watching this happen, I have made a kind of peace with it. 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.

These notes draw on observations made between June 2011 and the present. The articulation surprise itself became clear to me in late 2014. I started writing the notes 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.

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.

---

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.

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 an American 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 whether the number on the shelf tag was a mistake. It was not a mistake. That was just what cereal cost now.

The estrangement had a measurable backdrop. A Government Accountability Office analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that food prices rose 32.4 percent between December 2019 and December 2024. Memory had not become unreliable. The price environment had moved. ([files.gao.gov](https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-25-107451/index.html?utm_source=openai))

What interests me, however, is not another complaint about inflation. It is what the grocery store, as an institution, tells you while you shop—and whether you know how to read it.

The Shelf

A year away from American consumer infrastructure clarifies things that proximity obscures. In Nairobi, as I experienced it, household limits announced themselves quickly. You bought what you could afford. The distance between price and consequence was short.

The American grocery store speaks in a more elaborate register. There seem to be seventeen versions of the same yogurt. There is a budget tier, a middle tier, a premium tier and a store brand positioned near the bottom with what can only be described as a dignity problem.

The store calls this choice. From the aisle, it also looks like an income map.

The tiers allow several households to encounter the same category without encountering the same product. One shopper buys the familiar national brand. Another waits for the digital coupon. Another moves to the store brand. Another buys the premium version whose principal message is that its buyer need not perform these calculations.

This is abundance, certainly. It is also segmentation: a way of keeping households with different budgets inside the same store and, if possible, inside the same category.

The Store Brand

When I left, private-label products were already prominent. When I returned, they seemed to occupy more of the store. Industry sales data support the direction of that impression, though not the melodrama: between 2019 and 2024, store brands’ share rose from 19.1 to 20.7 percent of dollar sales and from 21.6 to 23.2 percent of unit sales. ([plma.com](https://www.plma.com/article/data-points-private-label-share-growth?utm_source=openai))

It would be too simple to call this only a story of consumer pressure. Store brands also grow because shoppers like them, because their quality has improved and because retailers develop them deliberately. But their economic function is hard to miss. They give the store somewhere to receive a shopper who is trading down.

That architecture is explicit rather than secret. Kroger, for example, describes its private-label portfolio as three tiers: premium, mainstream and value. It also reports that those products represented more than $32 billion of its fiscal 2024 sales. ([sec.gov](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/56873/000155837025004267/kr-20250201x10k.htm?utm_source=openai))

The store brand, then, is not merely the sad little box chosen after the national brand becomes unaffordable. It is a strategic asset. It can preserve the basket, retain the customer and turn an act of household retrenchment into an ordinary merchandising event.

The consumer still makes a sensible choice. The institution has simply prepared the choices in advance.

The Cereal Box

Cereal stopped me because it is so familiar. The cardboard box, the bright lettering, the quantity printed near the bottom: these are objects designed to be recognized without much thought. When the price becomes strange, the whole object becomes newly visible.

But the shelf tag cannot, by itself, tell me why the number changed. Food prices are shaped by production costs, labor, transport, energy, weather, disease, trade, competition, promotions and corporate pricing decisions. Government investigators have repeatedly cautioned that the contribution of any one factor can be difficult to isolate. ([gao.gov](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105846?utm_source=openai))

Shrinkflation is part of the cereal story, but it is not the whole story. GAO found that product downsizing made only a small contribution to inflation overall between 2019 and 2024, although its estimated effect was larger for breakfast cereal, contributing 1.6 percentage points to that category’s price increase. ([files.gao.gov](https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-25-107451/index.html?utm_source=openai))

That distinction matters. A smaller box is evidence of a particular pricing tactic. A surprising shelf tag is not proof of a single cause, much less proof of a conspiracy. What it does record is an outcome: after costs, contracts, promotions, competition and pricing strategy have finished their work, this is the number presented to the household.

The Second Store

The visible store sells groceries. Inside it now sits another store that sells access to the shopper.

Loyalty accounts record purchases. Apps deliver individualized promotions. Search results and digital circulars contain paid placement. Screens at checkout sell attention. Shelf assortments can be adjusted using transaction data. The grocery business is therefore not exhausted by the difference between the wholesale and retail price of a tomato or a box of cereal.

Major chains describe this second business plainly. Kroger says the traffic and data produced by its retail operation support high-margin businesses including analytics and third-party media. Albertsons says it uses customer and transaction data to target promotions and optimize shelf space, while its media business uses the company’s digital platforms and proprietary data. ([sec.gov](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/56873/000110465926037723/kr-20260131x10k.htm?utm_source=openai))

You are still the shopper. You are also part of the audience, the dataset and the sales proposition offered to suppliers.

This does not mean that production costs no longer matter or that every price is engineered from a secret psychological profile. It means that the modern grocery store has more ways to earn from a shopping trip than the shelf margin alone. The shelf tag belongs to that larger system.

The Negotiation Before the Aisle

The price of cereal is formed before I arrive. Producers negotiate with retailers. Retailers decide assortment, placement and promotion. Both sides study demand. The shopper participates by buying, refusing, substituting or leaving—but does not participate in the negotiations that created the available choices.

The shopper is not at the table. The shopper’s anticipated behavior is an input to the discussion.

The pandemic made the unequal leverage inside this system unusually visible. In a 2024 staff report, the Federal Trade Commission found that larger firms were often better able than smaller rivals to secure supplies during shortages. It also found that food-and-beverage retailers’ revenues relative to total costs remained above their pre-pandemic peak through the first three quarters of 2023. The FTC cautiously concluded that some firms appeared to have used rising costs as an opportunity to increase prices and profits. That finding does not establish that every price increase was excessive, but it does rule out the comforting idea that higher shelf prices merely copied higher costs in every case. ([ftc.gov](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/03/ftc-releases-report-grocery-supply-chain-disruptions?utm_source=openai))

Inflation is therefore not only the movement of costs through a pipe. It is also a test of who can pass a cost forward, who can protect a margin and who must alter a household budget.

The Household

The same shelf increase does not produce the same consequence in every home.

In 2024, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of 33 percent of their before-tax income on food. Households in the highest quintile spent 6.4 percent. These figures do not prove that lower-income households saw higher shelf tags. They show why an identical increase can impose a radically different burden. ([ers.usda.gov](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/58372?utm_source=openai))

A household with financial slack can preserve its preferences. A household without it must alter the basket. It can change brands, reduce quantities, abandon a category or remove something else from the budget.

If you already buy the least expensive acceptable version, the store contains fewer painless substitutions. Below the private-label floor is not another attractively designed tier. It is less of the item, a different item or no item.

This is not rhetorical poverty. USDA estimated that 13.7 percent of American households experienced food insecurity at some point in 2024, including 5.4 percent experiencing very low food security, in which eating patterns were disrupted or intake was reduced because resources were limited. ([ers.usda.gov](https://ers.usda.gov/publications/113622?utm_source=openai))

Moderate-income households often do what the store enables them to do: move from the national brand to the store brand, activate the coupon, buy the family size and congratulate themselves on being disciplined. They are being disciplined. They are also responding to an architecture built to retain their spending as their circumstances change.

There is no shame in this. The humor of the American grocery store is that it can turn austerity into a lifestyle decision. The package changes color, acquires the word value, and allows everyone involved to proceed without mentioning what happened.

The Institutional Signal

Institutional stress tends to move along gradients of leverage. Actors able to pass a burden onward usually try to do so; the burden becomes hardest to move when it reaches the household with the fewest alternatives.

This is a principle, not a claim that every firm wins or every household responds identically. Grocery retailers can be squeezed by suppliers. Small brands can be squeezed by retailers. Workers, farmers and distributors can absorb costs that never become visible on a shelf tag. The point is not that one actor controls the entire chain. The point is that the ability to refuse, substitute or renegotiate is unevenly distributed along it.

The grocery store makes that inequality unusually legible. The shelf tag is not a neutral fact about the world, but neither is it fiction. It is the residue of several negotiations—over costs, wages, supply, promotion, placement, data, margin and consumer tolerance—compressed into a number small enough to print beside a box.

Coming back from Nairobi did not make me angry at the American grocery store, exactly. It made me curious about what it was saying. What Nairobi had given me was not a superior economy but a different kind of legibility. Returning made the familiar machinery look strange enough to inspect.

Standing in the cereal aisle, I could not prove from one box who had gained, who had lost or which cost had moved first. I could see something more modest and more durable: the cost was real, its causes were plural, and its burden would depend heavily on how many alternatives a household still possessed.

That is what the store records every week. Not simply supply and demand, but the household meeting an institution that has already studied its likely behavior, arranged a ladder of substitutions and placed the final number on the shelf.

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.

---

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.