The Portal of Pompeii. Plus, Africans Built What Became the United States

Peace y’all,

Yesterday, I entered the chat of the ominous “Immigrants Built This Country” rhetoric that was front and center the Grammy’s broadcast the previous night (and many other places). I recorded and posted a video on my Instagram account that combined a critique of award-winning artist Shaboozey’s acceptance speech, with statements made by TV host, author, and model Padma Lakshmi, who at a recent protest said to the crowd, “We are here because we want our country back!”

Unable to sleep through sunrise lately, I saw each of these clips while scrolling Instagram in the wee, pre-dawn hours. I didn’t bother with reviewing the existing discourse. I punched out a couple of comments to IG, then began talking to myself—my typical first approach to forming a public statement or essay of my own.

I immediately grasped the alarming aspects of both narratives. In the case of Shaboozey who opened his speech with, “Immigrants built this country—literally,” he valorizes labor as the primary means of human acceptance in a world divided by empire-constructed borders. He underscored this with examples of the ways immigrants add “culture” and “color” to their new home. I’m sorry—immigrants don’t owe their traditions to the empire that likely caused the destabilization that led to their needing to move in the first place.

No one thinks, ah well the United States military took out my elected president and bombed my neighborhood to pieces. Never mind my losses and grief and trauma. Never mind my Ph.D in engineering. I will pack up some cumin, beg and plea for refugee status, wait anxiously for years, then bake bread on the streets of Manhattan! Living the dream!

With Lakshmi, her statement nodded to the frivolous notion that there is anything in the American story worth going “back” to that could ever be perceived as nostalgic or welcoming to an innumerable number of people. Particularly Black Americans—the descendants of enslaved Africans, and relatives of family members who distinctly remember Jim Crow rule and the “terror lynchings” that sent 6 million Black people to far corners of the United States during the Great Migration.

My mother being a native Los Angeleno when both her parents were born and raised in the Deep South, is a direct outcome of the centuries of social, political, and relational knowledge acquired by Black people, who understand on a spiritual level what American rhetoric does to control, disenfranchise, and kill people they don’t respect.

Regardless of intention, both of Shaboozey’s and Lakshmi’s statements undermine the experience of the oppressed and embattled people who made the container for immigrants to step into. I refuse to engage in trauma olympics, but it cannot be overstated that it is African people—Black people—who were categorically captured for their skills, sorted, poked, prodded, and assaulted, their families infested by enslaver rape and psychological horror, their native and adapted customs obliterated in the name of Christianity, all to create Big Ag and empire.

Even if, in Lakshmi’s case, she meant she wanted the country back from the hands of a right-wing backed zealot, I would not be the only one to argue previous governance and the resulting policies have never made up for history. Our rhetoric demands not just intention, but thoughtful context. People with platforms as big as the Grammy’s stage and Lakshmi must be mindful of how even heartfelt calls for engagement can land, and what narrative such comments support. (Current ratings aren’t out yet, but in 2025 the Grammy’s telecast garnered 15.4 million viewers and 102.2 million social interactions; Lakshmi has 2 million Instagram followers.)

No amount of protest or performative gesture will suffice to unravel the climate of social collapse we are experiencing, if we do not understand that the entirety of what we face today stands on the shoulders of diabolical dehumanization. The trans-Atlantic trade of African human beings created bottomless capital for global cities, and built the socio-political structures we navigate today. It is the duty of all able people to not only tell the truth about the making of the United States, but to combat the lies and myths that obscure our complicity in its current iteration. True embrace and repair is the only way.

POLL RESULTS

The first TEXTURE poll asked about your views on recording strangers. Just over 70% of you are keeping stranger’s faces out of your phones. Bravo!

Perhaps it would not surprise you that I've been thinking almost constantly about the culture of societal collapse.

The many ways such deterioration can show up: war, invasion, famine, environmental disaster, incompetent governance and leadership, economic inequality, disease, or mass migration. I've been thinking about the patterns that signal its arrival. And the random events that come seemingly out of nowhere. And post-collapse recovery.

I read that we are apparently in the "transitional generation." The thing hasn't happened yet. But we will probably experience the thing. And some of us will be here for the recovery from the thing. Human beings have navigated destruction and chaos since time, and despite ourselves we're still here. Could that be optimism? Is there any real lesson upon winning a real-life Squid Game? Is surviving the same as winning?

I visited Italy for the first time in 2023. I resisted going for years in lieu of other places I felt would feel like new information to me. American cinema and television is obsessed with Italian culture (albeit usually through an Italian American lens). The Roman Empire, the original influencer, inspired the founding colonizers of the U.S. to shape their ideals in the mold of a republic. So today we have a senate and a president (barely) instead of a king or emperor (for now). In a few days it's Super Bowl LX — those are Roman numerals for goddsakes. I have never not been able to find pizza, pasta, or a number of Italian dishes, evidenced in the range of regional Italian restaurants throughout the country. Their immigration policies were also unappealing. We have fascism at home! I've worked in entertainment, publishing, and media spaces for many years, and too many of my colleagues are always going to Italy. Me, a joiner? Might as well call me a foodie.

But after receiving an invitation to attend a press trip (more on these another time—I have a screenplay in me) that promised among other items, art and food tours in Rome, an overnight in Pompeii, and an evening on the Sorrento coast, I figured it was time to let the place speak for itself.

Rome has a stunning architectural history. Even with the group commitments, I had time for my own adventures—staring through the oculus at the Pantheon, tourist-dodging at the Trevi fountain, counter service at the famed Roscioli where I ate my weight in anchovies. One of my group's tours was hosted by art historian and former pro-athlete Isabella Calidonna, of ArcheoRunning.

She creates running (or walking) itineraries that explore the city. During our Michelangelo Tour, Calidonna guided us through the artist's popular and hidden commissioned work. At one site, the former house of a rich merchant, apparently Michelangelo stopped work when he wasn't getting paid. The commission remains incomplete. See that legacy media? Standing on business. Calidonna taught us that rulers demonstrated the new era by destroying previous symbols of power and slapping new ones in their place, as evidenced throughout the city and particularly at Castel Sant'Angelo. Those popes let everyone know the emperor was no longer in charge. "My city is like the lasagna," Calidonna told us. "Each layer is an era of history."

I was eager to visit the ruins of Pompeii—as eager as you can be to explore a capsule of an ancient town devastated by unspeakable, massive loss. Today's Pompei (one "i") is an active town, but for many, it lives in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius' 79 AD eruption that covered the entire area and its inhabits in more than 4 meters of volcanic lava and ash.

The historic site comprises about 160 acres, a portion of which is open to visitors with varying degrees of access. I saw the domus, homes with atriums for wealthy merchants and land owners. The inhabitants would have enjoyed leisurely meals prepared for them to enjoy laying on a floor covered with pillows. I saw the remnants of shops and retail businesses, that were staffed by the keepers and artisans who comprised the middle class. I learned you can follow the road of engraved penises to the brothels where sex workers conducted their business. Visual "menus" painted or engraved into the walls showed the positions you could ask for; most featured two men. And of course, the city was full of enslaved persons, often brought from other parts of the Roman Empire, who were sometimes able to purchase their freedom and navigate society as freed peoples.

I was most struck by a small sign next to a marble table that noted the material had come from Tunisia, in North Africa. I wasn't surprised by this fact as much as I was not expecting it to be acknowledged. It's rare to see African history passively referenced in contemporary conversations about European history, even more rare to see it sitting squarely in your face.

Researchers from the University of Florence and Harvard University published a study where updated methods and technology revealed new traces of DNA, changing past interpretations of who comprised the ancient city. "Pompeii's status as a port city influenced a wide range of eastern Mediterranean, Levantine and North African DNA samples found," ABC News Australia reported. It wasn't just raw materials excavated from Africa that found its way to Pompeii. That heritage was represented in the people, too. That's not a narrative I'd heard in the pop culture missives finding their way to the U.S. from the Boot. Historians would call the volcanic eruption the social collapse of Pompeii. Yet from beneath the ashes, relics from the past can be bright spots for a skeptical visitor, that urge cultural connection and personal reclamation. History is always becoming.

I do not think it will be a volcanic eruption that brings U.S. inhabitants to a sudden and sobering reality, but I am clear, environmental/natural catastrophe or not, we are in the midst of grave change.

I am often perplexed at what further evidence people need to understand where we are on the spectrum of Things That Lead to the End. But I do know there is always a new beginning. At the site of Pompeii, there is small museum that allows you to view the casts of some of the human remains. I watched visitors take photos, including selfies, and remark with awe (glee?) at the poses of the deceased. Tickets to the site are one way, I suppose, to fund ongoing historical analysis and documentation. The ancient city doesn't care. The ancient city doesn't exist. What will they charge to view the remains of us? And what story will they write about whatever they find?