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

by Suzy Hansen

When you are in love, you feel a superhuman amount of empathy because, crucially, it is in your self-interest to do so. It wasn’t until I loved like this that I could understand why only love could solve America’s race problem, and by extension its imperial one: that it is not until one contemplates loving someone, caring about that person’s physical and emotional well-being, wanting that person to thrive, wanting to protect that person, and most of all wanting to understand that person, that we can imagine what it would feel like if that person was hurt, if that person were hurt by others or, most important, if that person was hurt by you. Only if that person’s suffering becomes your suffering—which is in a sense what love is—and only when white Americans begin to look upon another people’s destruction as they would their own, will they finally feel the levels of rational and irrational rage terrifying enough to vanquish a century of their own indifference.