A Letter to the Last Americans in the United States

From a lonely believer in foolish dreams

Dear Last Americans in the United States: I write this letter to you after much inner wrestling. It is grounded in a deep fear that I am writing to no one, that I won't receive a reply from you.  I am writing to a cohort generationally, nationally, and almost collectively that is “gone.” Hung it up. Purchased an expedited passport, and have made plans for “if things go bad,” but almost none of them are to stay. Speak up. Fight. Dig in. 

What if my hope since I was a teen was foolish? My hope is in you, of course. 

The people of this land, with our varied stories, roots, and bloody paths our ancestors took here, either as those who were trodden upon at one point or as one of those doing the treading. My hope isn’t in your morality. That would be silly. Or in your capacity to learn. That frankly isn't your forte either. 

My hope is in your recalcitrant nature, your ornery soul, your pockmarked piece of the American dream that scraped, ripped, screamed, and twisted itself into contortions to fit into.  I have often written to you about what lies ahead,  and I have often tried to spark your willingness to create the world we always wanted. Not because we are particularly noble, or better, or endowed by the Creator with any more than any generation before us.

 But because it needed to be done. We are capable of great things as a people, as a movement, and as a nation. This is either good news to you or terrifying, depending on perspective. 

I am a Black trans queer american who has spent almost a third of their life on the streets of the United States. I have spent all of my time since I was 11 years old traveling these 50 contentious states, her protectorates, and other various holdings from an era of imperialism, embarrassing to all post-Civil War. I have “shown up” at many of your so-called “revolutionary” political movements. At Occupy Philly for a year, every day, after work, like a lot of the cohort, I  sat and listened to you. I watched as you took the stage and the mic from Black Woman. Decades before that, every shady backwoods revolutionary who would be willing to show me how to shoot, group tactics, and community safety. Before that, it was hippies and bikers and burnouts teaching me their way of avoiding all contact with the state. Born in a neighborhood full of people raised by panthers, members of MOVE, and wolves, and brought to adulthood in one of the greatest Black cultural districts in America: West Philadelphia. The Wheels of Soul, our local motorcycle club by my family's house it still says Death to the KKK out front. Just like when I was a kid, and decades before I was born. I spent all of the 2020 uprisings probably doing a lot more than most of my average readers, that isn’t a judgment. But if you didn't find yourself wrapped in community and body armor after the second attempt on your life, or have to bury comrades, we probably had a different “blacklivesmatter” experience. Not saying you didn't put in the work. 

I am trying to tell you I have seen your pain, confusion, real grievances, and even some of your murders by the state. Both parties have been in office during this raging inferno of cultural fraying. But this letter isn’t about today, or yesterday, I am writing to you in hopes of tomorrow. 

What I am trying to say is I used to know you, and you knew me. We were tight. So full of possibility, even if it was sarcastic, ironic, or just intentionally crafted to be made to be just a bit kinder than the world our elders left us. 

I do not believe the notion of liberty is a human one. I believe the idea of liberty, self-determination, the autonomy of the body, and the pursuit of a life that we deem fit for happiness is in the very dirt of the “Americas,” even the United States. It is the makeup of the land we walk upon, the dust that swirls around our farms, the soil we plant no camping signs in, and stained with the blood of many, but of importance to me, stained with the blood of Black peoples who believed in the ephemeral yet real promises of this continent. Promises that predate colonists, congresses, or the outright theft of that land. 

I am currently writing about this battle for history itself  in my new book: Black Power and Black Magick (Forthcoming from our friends at  Llewellyn Worldwide, 26.) In this particular section, I am making the point from a historical materialist position, there was never a European, Colonist, or any free democracy in the Americas other than Indigenous nations, and Haiti until June 19th, 1865-

“The first democracies were indigenous American, composed of sovereign nations, and had 'constitutions' and binding documents. This is a pretty established historical “fact.” We will argue the veracity of historical facts later, but the truth is that the very idea of liberty was an anathema to the European intellectual mind. 

They found American intellectuals incredibly frustrating to debate. By intellectuals, I am using the definition of Weber and Grengrow used to reframe our thinking around the enlightenment era products of constitutional republics and so-called ‘Madisonian democracy’ from “Dawn Of Everything,” which I think is useful. They make the case that what we call the European Age of Enlightenment was a response to the indigenous American critique of the colonists and to those who visited their vaunted Europe and were frankly disgusted with the way the French and much of Europe treated their people. Their land. 

“What we’re going to suggest is that American intellectuals – we are using the term ‘American’ as it was used at the time, to refer to indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere; and ‘intellectual’ to refer to anyone in the habit of arguing about abstract ideas – played a role in this conceptual revolution. Strangely, this should be considered a particularly radical idea, but among mainstream intellectual historians today it is almost a heresy”. (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 35)

While some of you may say what of the Continental Congress of the 13 colonies turned into the United States! Certainly, that was the first “non-native” democracy, by almost 20 years, in the Americas. But for a democracy to be a democracy, I think that its forms, society, and government would have to reflect its founding documents.

In 1791, at the start of the Haitian Revolution, not all men were created equal in the United States. Nor the rest of us in humanity. Not according to the United States. This equality, to the Founders of the United States, the great obsession of the enlightenment era, progress, and equality, certainly didn’t apply to the people native to this land, nor the living cargo they brought to this land to build it. But back to freedom, we know this isn’t an idea birthed by colonists, mostly because they told us so-

“That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these exchanges: both sides agreed this was the case. What they differed on was whether or not individual liberty was desirable. This is one area in which early missionary or travelers’ accounts of the Americas pose a genuine conceptual challenge to most readers today. Most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’ observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of ourselves; unlike indigenous Americans, who represent an essentially alien, perhaps even unknowable Other. But, in many ways, the authors of these texts were nothing like us. When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores, or popular sovereignty – or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology – indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones. These differing views on individual liberty are especially striking. Nowadays, it’s almost impossible for anyone living in a liberal democracy to say they are against freedom, at least in the abstract (in practice, of course, our ideas are usually much more nuanced). This is one of the lasting legacies of the Enlightenment and of the American and French Revolutions. Personal freedom, we tend to believe, is inherently good (even if some of us also feel that a society based on total individual liberty – one which took it so far as to eliminate police, prisons, or any sort of apparatus of coercion – would instantly collapse into violent chaos). Seventeenth-century Jesuits most certainly did not share this assumption. They tended to view individual liberty as animalistic. In 1642, the Jesuit missionary Le Jeune wrote of the Montagnais-Naskapi: They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages. (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 40-41)”-(Duncan, Black Power and Black Magick, forthcoming Llewelyn Worldwide’26)

I say all this to say that liberty, freedom, autonomy, constitution, representative government through oration, and the consent of the governed to be governed are not white nor products of the United States. These ephemeral promises that feel so much further out of reach are still worth fighting, living, and dying for. 

They aren’t dirty words. But they sure feel that way lately. 

I believe we learn about liberty by getting closer to the land. By watching its patterns, seasonal cycles, and fauna. Hearing it scream that it has been severed from the indigenous, tended by the terrified, and still not listened to. 

I believe that the notion of a nation, a people, a place where all kinds find shade, comfort, meaning, or a profound sense that experiencing and feeling without assigning theological, political, or social meaning is the point. A place of sanctuary, where people of good conscience can do whatever their pleasure or their desires, that place can exist for everyone. 

It may not happen in the United States. This dream is likely to outlive the United States itself. But it is in the very stones of America. 

Dear Last American in the United States, I watch you wander the airports, downtown, and the halls of work, looking and searching. It isn’t the death of the United States you should fear, but the hard work democracy and liberty may require of us after. 

Written in love and liberation

rev/awo  lenny duncan ( they/them)