Settler-nation foundations create an unreckoned-with collective shadow that surfaces only in spasms

Evidence

In nations whose economies were built on the back of enslaved Black people’s labor, and whose very existences are owed to the stealing of lands from Indigenous peoples through campaigns of horrific violence, torture, famine, and forced relocation, the past is our collective, unshakable, omnipresent shadow. Only in spasms of reckonings like the one that followed George Floyd’s murder does the dominant culture manage to look with anything more than furtive glances at these foundational crimes—or at the present-day realities of continued racial segregation in our neighborhoods, schools, health-care, and justice systems. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 833