Ending American Exceptionalism: Common Futures Beyond Empire

“At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.” — Aimé Césaire, Discourses on Colonialism, 1955:37.

“To will oneself free is also to will others free.” – Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947.

Sangeeta Kamat, University of Massachusetts Amherst

In Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Grimonprez, 2024), a brilliant documentary based entirely on archival footage, Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez takes us through the 1960-61 years that prove to be formative in the making of the U.S. empire. The long arc of American imperialism is set into motion when President Eisenhower collaborates with the Belgian government to assassinate the first democratically elected leader of Congo, Patrice Lumumba. The background or rather foreground to the coup d’etat is the electrifying music of America’s Jazz Greats, among them Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone and many more unsuspectingly recruited to be the foil in a covert CIA operation to assassinate the young and  popular pan-Africanist leader Lumumba and install in his place a corrupt dictator who would rule for the next thirty years, effectively ensuring US control and usurpation of Congo’s precious minerals. What we see in the extreme immiseration and internecine violence in Congo today and much of Sub-Saharan Africa is a continuation of the imperialist subjugation initiated in the 1960s by the US and its  colonial allies. The film documents in unnerving detail the cold-blooded massacre of the democratic aspirations of the Congolese people by the American state with the unwitting complicity of the American people, in this case through the Jazz Greats as cultural ambassadors of the American state. Their innocence though is not incidental but a corollary to American exceptionalism, an overriding belief in America as a superior nation, a trope that remains ineluctable from then to the present.

The film also documents how the instrumental use of the Jazz Greats in the making of  empire has unintended consequences. The encounter becomes a catalyst for pan-African solidarity between African people asserting independence and an end to colonial rule, and African Americans demanding equal rights and an end to segregation. The film captures a moment in history when African Americans recognize their shared plight and common future with the struggle for freedom and equality on the African continent. A gripping scene in the film is when Maya Angelou and Abbey Lincoln storm the United Nations (UN) General Assembly calling out their government’s role in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Another thrilling scene in the film is when the streets of Harlem are jammed with people eager to catch a glimpse of the meeting between Malcolm X and President Nkrumah, Prime Minister Nehru, and President Castro who leave the hallowed halls of the UN to declare their solidarity with the civil rights movement of Black Americans  – a historic encounter between the former enslaved and the former colonized showing up together in a moment that is poignant and filled with possibility.

As the United States hurtles towards authoritarianism, it is these remarkable scenes in the film –among many others — of internationalism and solidarity between the disenfranchised peoples of the global North and the global South that need recovering and can offer us not only inspiration but also practical pathways to combat the divisive politics that are ascendant today. American exceptionalism has been particularly damaging to global solidarity struggles as it has cultivated a deeply held belief among Americans of all races and backgrounds that America is unique, extraordinary and incomparable and is a shining example for all countries to emulate. It is not simply that American exceptionalism minimizes the prospects for global solidarity but is dangerous for the sense of superiority and condescension it engenders among the American public that in turn animates supremacist thinking and ideology. American exceptionalism results in a profound level of ignorance and disinterest in learning about the Majority world and how our destinies are intertwined, a willful ignorance if you will of ‘Other’ worlds and peoples, the luxury to not know that is assiduously promoted by our schools, politicians and the media.

At the heart of American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States is a beacon of democracy, peace and stability, a myth cultivated in the shadows of imperialist conquest of the Black and Brown worlds (including in the United States itself) and its capacity to terrorize countries around the world with its 877 military bases in 95 countries. The popular sentiment that the United States is a defender of human rights and peace around the world is an illusion that is bolstered by American exceptionalism, an illusion that masks the expropriation of the Global South and the ever present threat of war hanging like a Damocles sword over countries that dare to oppose the political and corporate interests of America – such as claiming sovereignty over their natural resources be it minerals, crude oil or water. The invasion and devastation of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria – and now Venezuela — are recent examples of America’s wars to seize natural resources and subjugate nations in the name of gifting democracy to these countries. In the post-war period, celebrated at home as the “golden era of American capitalism”, middle class Americans benefitted from US covert operations and usurpation of wealth from Black and Brown nations that subsidized the infrastructural projects and manufacturing that made for the “American way of life”.  The plunder of resources and exploitation of labor abroad contributed directly to the comforts of life and cheap goods accessed by a broad swath of the population. This “golden era” relied on the trope of the ‘hardworking American’ (almost always portrayed as white heterosexual male) while keeping hidden from view American imperialism, its covert operations to install corrupt governments in newly formed nations, and mafia style trade policies that unfairly enriched US corporations with some of the surplus redirected to subsidize the lives of ordinary Americans.

It is imperative that education equips young people with an understanding of how racial inequality, white supremacy, and disenfranchisement in the United States are inextricably linked to inequality and expropriation in the majority Black and Brown nations of the world. These connections are not only rooted in the histories of slavery and settler colonialism, but are continuously reproduced through post–World War II regimes of unequal trade, militarism, and predatory capitalism that extend into the present moment. U.S. foreign policy has consistently been justified in the name of the American people, framed as serving the nation’s “security”– a security purchased at the cost of untold misery, displacement, and devastation for much of the world’s population.

Decades of U.S. intervention abroad — military adventures that have ruined entire countries and torn apart societies — are routinely explained away through the ideology of American exceptionalism. Within this worldview, the United States is cast as the global icon of democracy and freedom, a model of good governance and civil rights, and therefore uniquely entitled to bestow democracy upon others. This self-appointed role as the world’s “policeman” has, in practice, functioned as a form of global extortion — one that has directly contributed to the consolidation of an all-powerful, white supremacist oligarchy at home. Domestically, the costs are increasingly visible, as this oligarchic class turns its rapaciousness inward, systematically stripping away the rights, security, and social protections of ordinary Americans.

White supremacy, in this sense, has long masqueraded as American exceptionalism, forming the bedrock of U.S. patriotism and national identity. If we are to meaningfully oppose a white supremacist oligarchy, we must interrogate and contest its most ordinary and pervasive expression: the deeply embedded belief in American exceptionalism that animates the body politic. This demands, urgently, curricula and pedagogies that challenge this myth — a myth that is thoroughly bipartisan. American exceptionalism is woven into both expert and popular narratives, propagated by media and political elites, embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike, and reproduced across racial and ethnic lines.

Nowhere is this more evident than in school curricula, where American exceptionalism appears as seemingly innocuous lessons about the United States as the “oldest democracy,” lessons that over time harden into shallow binaries and prejudicial understandings of the U.S. in contrast to the rest of the world. Increasingly, schools abandon the teaching of world history in its complexity, opting instead for a narrowly framed national history centered on triumph and glory. While all nations engage in some degree of myth-making within their curricula, when such narratives become common sense and serve as ideological cover for imperial violence, the consequences of historical erasure reverberate globally. ^[1]It is relevant here to note that Colleges of Education too have largely stopped teaching world history and politics, subjects that would offer future teachers a historical framework from which to … Continue reading Educators, therefore, must recognize and actively refuse the narrative of American exceptionalism that depends upon willful ignorance—what Tuck and Yang (2012) describe as “white innocence.” Only through such critical refusal can education contribute to the cultivation of a genuinely internationalist and justice-oriented political imagination.

In Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat, America’s jazz greats are unwitting albeit enthusiastic allies in the US plot to thwart Congo’s independence. However, their faith in American exceptionalism is shattered once they recognize the tragic similarities of their situation at home with the Africans whom they have been sent to convince that the United States is their friend and benefactor. The musicians realize that it is the same bullets aimed at the Congolese that are killing their people engaged in non-violent action to end segregation. Upending the myth has explosive consequences, memorialized in the scenes of Abby Lincoln and Maya Angelou storming the UN General Assembly calling out the criminality of the US state. This act of solidarity is possible precisely because they recognize in the Congolese people a mirror of their own struggle and aspirations. It is this internationalism that is desperately needed to combat the ‘Make America Great Again’ nationalism, — a nationalism, make no mistake, is sustained only through the ongoing expansion of the American empire, unfolding before us in real time. Just as the Jazz Greats recognize their righteous demand for equality at home is being suppressed even as they are courted by the state to advance its imperial ambitions abroad, this contradiction persists today. An oligarchic class erodes economic and social rights at home while prosecuting wars overseas in the name of defending the American way of life – wars whose material consequence are not freedom and security but the enrichment of corporate elites. Only by renouncing American exceptionalism will we recognize that the violence of the imperial project does not stop at the borders but turns inward on disenfranchized groups within — weaponizing the tools of empire against its own people, from policing and austerity to the criminalization of dissent. When this crisis is reduced to Trump alone, we once again fall prey to American exceptionalism, reassuring ourselves that the problem will be resolved by replacing a single individual rather than confronting the structure that produced him. American exceptionalism encourages us to see Trump as an aberration rather than as a systemic outcome of imperial power — a dynamic that Aimé Césaire famously described as the imperial “boomerang,” whereby the violence and brutality perfected in the colonies returns, with full force, to the metropole. ^[2]Hannah Arendt in her work on Totalitarianism (1951) written around the same time as Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism makes a similar argument about Nazism being a mirror image of colonial … Continue reading

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État forces us to confront a truth that has been hiding in plain sight: the American empire was never an accident of history, nor the unfortunate byproduct of noble intentions gone awry. It was engineered—through covert operations, economic coercion, and cultural spectacle—to secure resources, discipline the decolonizing world, and preserve the illusion of American innocence at home. The tragedy of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination is not an aberration but a blueprint, a founding act in the postwar international order that bound anti-Blackness, extractive capitalism, and imperial violence into the architecture of US power.

Yet the film also reminds us that empire is never total. In the cracks of the system, a different story insists on being told. When the Jazz Greats begin to see their reflection in the Congolese struggle, when Maya Angelou and Abbey Lincoln storm the UN, when Malcolm X meets Nkrumah in Harlem, a radical proposition surfaces: that the fight for Black freedom in the United States and the fight against colonial domination in the Global South are not parallel struggles but the same struggle. Internationalism is not an idealistic add-on to liberation movements; it is their historical condition of possibility.

This is the lesson we must recover in our present moment. As the United States edges toward authoritarianism under the banner of restoring a mythic greatness, we are called to reject the ideological glue that holds the project together: American exceptionalism. To refuse exceptionalism is not to despise the country; it is to love its democratic possibilities enough to name the forces that are killing them. It is to insist that democracy cannot be built on the subjugation of others, that peace cannot be built on militarism, that prosperity cannot be built on dispossession.

If a different future is to be won—one beyond oligarchy, beyond endless war, beyond the borders that divide the formerly enslaved from the formerly colonized—it will emerge from the kind of solidarity this film documents and invites: a solidarity grounded not in pity or charity, but in recognition. Recognition that our struggles are entangled. Recognition that freedom is indivisible. Recognition that there can be no liberation at home without decolonization abroad.

The soundtrack of empire is violence. But the soundtrack of resistance—the one that pulses through Congo in 1960 and Harlem in 1961, the one that echoes in our own crisis-filled present—is jazz: improvisational, insurgent, collective. It is time, once again, to learn to hear it.

References:

Cesaire, Aime (1950, 2000) Discourse on Colonialism. English transl. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.

De Beauvoir, Simone (1947, 2018) The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. Open Road Integrated Media Inc.

Grimonprez, J. (2024) Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat [film]. Produced by Dean Milius & Remi Grellety.

Erakat, Noura (2025) The Boomerang Comes Back. Boston 50 Review. Retrieved at https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-boomerang-comes-back/

Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang (2012) Decolonization is not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1:1, 2012, 1-40.