In my own life, these elements formed a very particular identity, one I shared with many other children of color born in the ’60s and ’70s. I was a “third world” American. I grew up in a household that did not see the history of the United States as a long, exceptional national drama about the fulfillment of founding ideals. Instead, I was raised to view the US through the struggles against colonialism that were engulfing Asia and Africa. The United States was divided between racially privileged insiders and nonwhite peoples, whose land and labor served as the basis for elite wealth and power. As in apartheid South Africa, the fact that American society was founded on oppression meant that liberation would require more than inclusion in the existing social order. It would require a full-scale transformation of the country, on terms of real material equality for those subordinated. The goal was not civil rights but decolonization. I was thoroughly American, but of a specific kind: in my family, Malcolm and Martin were linked not to Jefferson and Washington but to Lumumba and Cabral.