By Matt Stone
The United States was not founded on liberty and justice. It was founded on rape and genocide. It was born from the violent seizure of land and the violent seizure of bodies, and that original sin is not a historical artifact; it is the engine that still powers the nation today. To ignore it is to be complicit in its continuation.
Start with the architect of the lie himself, Thomas Jefferson. The man who wrote “all men are created equal” was a slave owner who raped the woman he owned, Sally Hemings.
He did not have an affair with her.
He owned her.
He owned her children.
He wrote soaring words about freedom while holding his own family in bondage. This is not a contradiction; it is the foundational hypocrisy of the American project. The nation’s creed was a proclamation of rights for white men, built on the labor and bodies of everyone else. Jefferson is the perfect symbol: a philosopher of freedom who was a practitioner of sexual slavery.
This dualism was the blueprint for westward expansion. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny was not a noble quest; it was a justification for theft and murder. It was the belief that God had ordained white men to steal land from its inhabitants, a belief that made genocide a holy act. The Trail of Tears was not a tragic relocation; it was a death march. The Sand Creek Massacre was not a battle; it was the slaughter of unarmed people. The California genocide, where state-sponsored militias hunted Native Americans for bounty, was not a frontier skirmish; it was an extermination campaign against people defending their own fucking land. This is not history; it is the foundation of the country’s land, wealth, and illusions.
And woven through this genocide was rape. Rape was not a byproduct of conquest; it was a tool of it. It was a weapon of war used to terrorize, to humiliate, and to erase Indigenous lines. It was how the land was claimed not just by force, but by blood. The creation of the mixed-race “mestizo” population in Latin America and the “half-breed” slur in America are testaments to a history of sexual violence that was as systematic as the land grabs themselves. The bodies of Native women were the first battleground in the war for America, and they remain a battleground today, with rates of sexual violence that are a direct legacy of this founding brutality.
This foundation of violence did not end when the frontier was closed. It was simply repurposed. The system of slavery that Jefferson benefited from was an economy built on the perpetual rape of Black women. Their bodies were not their own; they were property, to be bred and sold at will. The lynching of Black men was often accompanied by the public violation of Black women, a ritual designed to terrorize an entire community into submission. The violence was not just physical; it was psychological, a constant reminder that Black bodies were not sovereign.
After slavery was officially abolished, the violence continued in new forms. Jim Crow was not just a system of segregation; it was a system of racial terror enforced by rape. The fear of sexual violence against Black women was a tool used to keep them in their place, and the false accusation of rape against Black men was a tool used to justify murder. The state turned a blind eye, or actively participated, because the foundation of the nation required a permanent underclass that could be controlled by the threat of violence.
Today, that foundation is as solid as ever. It is visible in the epidemic of sexual violence on reservations, where jurisdictional loopholes created by the colonizer state allow predators to act with impunity. It is visible in the disproportionately high rates of rape and murder for Indigenous women, a crisis so ignored it has its own hashtag, #MMIW. It is visible in the fight for reproductive rights, a fight that is fundamentally about whether the state has the right to control a woman’s own body. It is visible in a prison system that arrests and warehouses Black and Brown bodies at unjustifiably higher rates, a modern form of control that is a direct descendant of slavery and Jim Crow.
To speak of American exceptionalism is to spit on the graves of the millions who were raped and murdered to build this country. To celebrate the Founding Fathers without acknowledging their status as slave owners and rapists is to celebrate a lie. The history of the United States is a history of violence against the bodies of women, particularly women of color.
That violence is not a bug.
It is a feature.
It is the bedrock upon which everything else is built.
To deny that is to deny reality itself.
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“Today, that foundation is as solid as ever. It is visible in the epidemic of sexual violence on reservations, where jurisdictional loopholes created by the colonizer state allow predators to act with impunity. It is visible in the disproportionately high rates of rape and murder for Indigenous women, a crisis so ignored it has its own hashtag, #MMIW.”
I’m going to guess (probably with a great deal of accuracy) that violence on reservations is not being perpetrated by anyone outside of the reservations, themselves.
Reservations are a failed system – even the ones with casinos.
They’re essentially a form of rural public housing.
You cannot have so-called separate “nations within a nation” in this manner, and expect them to function.
Honestly, not sure what should have been done (once a decision was made by the Spanish and Mexican governments to take over the west, for example). In other words, if you’re going to take over a sparsely-populated land, you probably should have a better plan than what resulted. (I guess they did convert some of them to Catholicism.)
At this point, it would probably be politically impossible to eliminate reservations. For one thing, the wealthier tribes have a lot of political influence these days.
There are, however, people with indigenous heritage (a lot of them, I assume) who don’t live on reservations and are just plain old “Americans” live everyone else.