The Opening Question
Part 2 of THE SUPPLY CHAIN - A Series on Immigration, Empire, and the Lie We Tell Ourselves
Let’s start simply. Because simple is all this requires.
Would you trust someone you believed was inferior with the things that mattered most to you?
Your children? Your home? The food on your table? The body of your nation?
I wouldn’t. Most people wouldn’t. That’s not a political position — that’s just basic human logic. You don’t hand your most precious things to someone you genuinely believe cannot be trusted with them.
So here is the question I need you to sit with — and I need you to sit with it quietly, without reaching for your usual answers:
Why did you?
Not metaphorically. Literally.
The children of the American ruling class were raised by Black women.
The homes were built and maintained by people you legislated into permanent subordination.
The food was grown, harvested, processed, and cooked by hands you classified as less than your own.
The railroad that connected this continent — laid by Chinese workers, Irish workers, the people you were busy writing laws to exclude.
The cotton. The tobacco. The sugar. The steel.
The domestic infrastructure of the most powerful nation in human history, built overwhelmingly by the people you told yourselves — and your children, and your laws — were inferior.
This is not a rhetorical trap. It is a genuine question with a genuinely uncomfortable answer.
Because there are only two possibilities.
♦️ The first is that you didn’t actually believe it. That supremacy was always a story told for other purposes — economic, political, psychological — and that somewhere beneath the mythology, everyone involved understood the truth. That a people who could build a civilization from nothing, survive conditions designed to destroy them, raise other people’s children with tenderness while separated from their own, and do it generation after generation without breaking — are not inferior. Have never been inferior. And that the system that required their labor while denying their humanity understood this better than it ever admitted publicly.
♦️ The second possibility is that you did believe it.
And if that’s true, then the entire architecture of American greatness was built by people its architects considered subhuman.
Which means the greatness was never in the architects. It was in the builders.
Either way, supremacy loses the argument before it begins.
Now let’s ask the more interesting question.
Not whether white people are superior — that question has been asked and answered so many times it has become genuinely boring. The more interesting question — the one that actually requires some intellectual honesty — is this:
Does a particular cultural arrangement, combined with geography, historical timing, a unifying enemy in the British Crown, and the uniquely American innovation of a permanently subordinated labor class, allow for a level of organized brutality at scale that is specific enough, sustained enough, and systematic enough to have produced the most prosperous nation in human history?
That is the actual question.
And I don’t think it’s a question about race at all. I think it’s a question about empire — about mechanism, about what conditions are required to build something this large this fast, and whether those conditions can be called virtuous or whether they need to be called what they are.
Here’s what the science says before we go any further. 🧬
All of us — every human alive — descend from African ancestors who lived approximately 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. This is not opinion.
In 1987, Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan Wilson published “Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution” in Nature, tracing every human lineage on every continent to a single common female ancestor in Africa [1].
Y-chromosome research confirms it from the paternal line.
We are all, genetically speaking, African descendants.
And Africa — precisely because humanity has lived there the longest — contains more genetic diversity within its borders than exists between Africa and every other continent combined. The genetic difference between two random Africans can exceed the genetic difference between an African and a Norwegian [2].
Science measured it.
The number for what racial differences actually account for across total human genetic variation: three to six percent [3].
Three to six percent.
Everything else is shared.
The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has made this point bluntly: Africa is home to the shortest people and the tallest people, possibly the slowest and the fastest — and yes, the full range of intellectual capacity too.
Because that is what it means to be the origin point of a species.
You contain the whole distribution. Everyone else is a subset.
So when we’re talking about supremacy as a biological fact, we’re not having a scientific discussion.
We settled that.
What we’re actually talking about is whether a particular culture, at a particular historical moment, enabled a particular scale of brutality.
And on that question, history is also very clear.
Empires have looked like every shade of human. 🌍
The Achaemenid Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great — not white, not European — controlled 44% of the world’s population at its peak, the highest proportion any empire has ever governed.
The Han Dynasty commanded a quarter of world GDP for centuries.
The Mali Empire under Mansa Musa — a Black African king — produced what historians estimate as the wealthiest individual in human history, with a pilgrimage to Mecca so lavish it crashed the price of gold in Cairo for a decade.
The Islamic Golden Age preserved and advanced mathematics, medicine, and astronomy while Europe was in the Dark Ages. Ibn Sina’s medical encyclopedia was the standard textbook in European universities for six hundred years.
The Mongols built the largest contiguous land empire in history.
The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán was five times larger than London when the Spanish arrived.
According to Angus Maddison’s historical GDP data, China and India together accounted for more than half of world GDP for most of the last two thousand years [4].
European economic dominance is roughly 250 years old in a human record that stretches back millennia.
Empires rise. Empires fall.
They have always looked like all of us.
We just happen to be in a particular pale age.
And this should frighten you.
Not just here — this is happening around the world.
If I were a white mother watching this moment unfold, this is what would keep me awake at night. 📉
In 2022, Singapore outscored the United States in mathematics by 110 points on the international PISA assessment — the equivalent of nearly three years of additional schooling [5].
The top six countries in math were Singapore, Macao, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea.
The United States ranked 26th, below the OECD average.
American 13-year-olds just recorded the steepest math score drop in the history of the assessment, falling to levels not seen since the 1990s. Reading scores have fallen to levels not seen since the 1970s [6].
These declines happened across all demographics, all income levels, all regions.
Meanwhile, China overtook the United States in total research output in 2024 for the first time. Chinese institutions now dominate the top spots in the Nature Index.
China files more than three times the number of patents the United States does annually.
They produce four times as many STEM graduates.
And here’s the final irony — the part that should really sting.
Forty-six percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children [7].
Fifty-five percent of America’s billion-dollar startups have at least one immigrant founder. Immigrants are responsible for 36% of all American Nobel Prizes in science — from 13% of the population.
At America’s top ten patent-producing universities, 76 percent of patents had at least one foreign-born inventor [8].
You don’t need a crystal ball to see what happens next.
You just need eyes. And a mind not addled by the intellectually numbing effect of believing your own mythology.
Supremacy doesn’t just make you morally wrong.
It makes you slow.
And the rest of the world is not waiting for you to figure that out. ✊🏾
What you get in the series:
When an argument begins and ends with a sarcastic question, that already tells me there isn't much of a counterargument underneath it. A country addicted to racial and economic supremacy, at odds with itself because immigration exposes the conflict.
Part 2 — The Opening Question 🔍 ← You are here
Would you trust someone inferior with your children, your home, your food, your nation? No. So explain to me why you did.
Part 3 — The Origin Document 📜
Slavery is not a metaphor for immigration. It is immigration policy. The first imported labor force. No wages, no citizenship, no path to permanence. And what happened when the paperwork changed but the system didn’t.
Part 4 — The Pattern 📊
144 years. Chinese, Irish, Italian, Mexican, Central American. The same play. Different cast. The Bracero Program as America’s confession. The 11 employers prosecuted per year versus 125,000 workers. The numbers that make the argument for you.
Part 5 — The Current Theater 🎭
The farm raid pause that revealed everything. The $150 billion enforcement bill with zero E-Verify. The private prison stocks up 42% on election night. The border deal killed to preserve the crisis.
Part 6 — The Exhaustion 🕯️
We built this together. All of us. By every measure of history, data, and common sense. And they are putting it up for sale — for a smaller, more violent, less stable version of itself. You don’t need a crystal ball. You just need eyes. And a mind not addled by the intellectually numbing effect of believing your own mythology. This is why Black people are so tired. Not from the hatred. From the obviousness of it.
References
Cann, R. L., Stoneking, M., & Wilson, A. C. (1987). Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution. Nature, 325(6099), 31–36. https://doi.org/10.1038/325031a0
Yu, N., et al. (2002). Larger genetic differences within Africans than between Africans and Eurasians. Genetics, 161(1), 269–274. https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/161.1.269
Lewontin, R. C. (1972). The apportionment of human diversity. In T. Dobzhansky, M. K. Hecht, & W. C. Steere (Eds.), Evolutionary Biology (Vol. 6, pp. 381–398). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-9063-3_14
Maddison, A. (2007). Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD. Oxford University Press.
OECD. (2023). PISA 2022 Results: The State of Learning and Equity in Education (Vol. 1). OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/53f23881-en
National Center for Education Statistics. (2024). NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment Results: Reading and Mathematics. U.S. Department of Education. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/
Anderson, S. (2023). Immigrants and Billion-Dollar Companies. National Foundation for American Policy. https://nfap.com/research/
Hunt, J., & Gauthier-Loiselle, M. (2010). How much does immigration boost innovation? American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2(2), 31–56. https://doi.org/10.1257/mac.2.2.31
Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH
Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective
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