The chess game called U.S. Politics. Let us break it down because everything here is strategy. The strategy is cruelly simple: use the pawns as foot soldiers. Pawns are expendable; they move into the line of fire so the bishops, the rooks, and the queen can be protected while the King remains distant, untouched, impervious. That is the rudimentary picture. But let’s look deeper.
Against the backdrop of this country, I frame a hard truth: the people who first claimed these shores as their own the white expatriots did not arrive as saints. In my telling, they were buccaneers by trade: men who knew plunder, war, and taking. They murdered the first peoples of this land, drove the survivors into camps and reservations, and built their new “civilization” on the bones of those they displaced.
The pawns the territories, the lands, the laborers, the enslaved became the scaffolding of a nation that excused its own violence as destiny. That same blueprint carried forward into the trafficking of human bodies. Slavery became the great enterprise of manufactured superiority. From that labor and that cruelty, a White American legacy was born one that later generations would polish, legislate, and defend as the backbone of their greatness.
As waves of Europeans came Italians, Jews, Germans, Irish, Slovenians, Danes the chessboard expanded. Each group learned quickly how to play: to coalesce, to legislate, to segregate, to disenfranchise. They built their castles and cathedrals while the pawns, mostly Black and Brown, were told to stand still, to be grateful, to protect the game they would never win.
