Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

by Suzy Hansen

“This is the way people react to the loss of empire,” he once wrote, “for the loss of an empire also implies a radical revision of the individual identity.”

White fragility also prevents elite white Americans from accepting—even with their meritocracy and Ivy League degrees and good intentions—that they, too, might not be exceptional, that they were the beneficiaries of a period of unprecedented national prosperity and military might, and that they, with their ignorance and even exploitation, had contributed to the anguish of foreigners and the pain of their own people.

“Empires rot from the inside even as emperors blame the barbarians.”