The American Experiment
Why does America call itself an experiment, and who consented to be tested?
The metal legs of roughly two dozen chairs scraped against the linoleum in chaotic unison as a classroom of 12- and 13-year-olds rose to face the flag.
My hand moved to my heart like a choreographed routine I’d been practicing since kindergarten. The PA system crackled to life with that familiar static before the principal would lead us through the morning ritual.
I don’t know why, but for some reason that day, I decided to put my hand down.
I stayed silent.
Not because I was radical. I was 13. I didn’t know what radical meant. But something about performing allegiance to something I never consented to felt like lying. So I stood there with my hands at my sides while everyone else pledged.
My teacher called my name, motioning with her eyes to join in. I kept my mouth closed.
“Everyone says the pledge in this class,” she said after it ended. I firmly told her I would no longer participate. Twenty-four pairs of eyes turned to watch my small rebellion. I remember feeling their confusion mixing with my own. Why wouldn’t I say it? The words had never bothered me before.
“And why not?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
That was the truth. I didn’t have language for what I was feeling. I wouldn’t for years. I later learned that the Supreme Court had decided this issue in 1943. West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette said no one could be forced to say the pledge. But when the teacher's eyes narrowed and 24 faces turned toward me, constitutional rights felt theoretical. It was about what was enforced. Conformity replaced law. Shame replaced force.
For the rest of 8th grade, I stood silently every morning while my classmates recited words written by a Baptist minister trying to sell flags to schools. I became the kid who wouldn’t say the pledge, adding it to my growing list of ways I didn’t quite fit the mold. Too Black for some spaces. Not Black enough for others. And carrying secrets about who I might love that would make all of it irrelevant anyway.
That morning in 8th grade was the first time I questioned what it was to be an American. I didn’t know it then, but I was already confronting the question: Some of us are born into the experiment, while others are shielded from it. Now, at 42, after years of reporting on housing, racism, and the ways this country tests its people, I can finally name what my 13-year-old self was feeling.
“I’m Black. I’m gay. I’m undeniably American. I'm proud of all those things. Not because America made it easy, but because these identities are mine.”
What is an Experiment?
America calls itself an experiment. The word is everywhere. In our founding documents, our political speeches and our self-mythology.
In science, an experiment is straightforward. You start with a hypothesis — a testable prediction about how something works. You identify your variables such as what you’re changing and what you’re measuring. You establish a control group that remains unchanged to provide a baseline for comparison. You collect data systematically. You publish results whether they support your hypothesis or not. And most importantly: Ethical experiments require informed consent from every participant.
When we call America an experiment, we transform systemic oppression into clinical trials. Slavery becomes a “peculiar institution” instead of centuries of torture and theft. Redlining becomes “housing policy” instead of economic warfare. Mass incarceration becomes “criminal justice” instead of social control. The language of experimentation sanitizes violence, making it sound reasonable. Even necessary.
I’m not claiming America deliberately designed itself as a laboratory; I’m saying it functions like one. Whether through intention or systemic momentum, this country continuously tests how much its people can endure. The methodology remains unchanged, even as the designers do. Experiments can have casualties. That’s sometimes the cost of knowledge. Experiments can be repeated with slight variations until you get the results you want. And although they should end, experiments can continue indefinitely as long as someone benefits from the data.
But what happens when a country experiments on its own people for centuries, updating its methods, but never its hypothesis? What happens when you realize you’ve been both researcher and test subject your whole life?
PHASE I: THE HYPOTHESIS
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America…”
In 1787, men gathered in Philadelphia had a hypothesis. Could people govern themselves without a monarch? It was a question born from Enlightenment thinking, from philosophers who believed in rationality, natural rights and the human capacity for self-governance. Thomas Paine had already made the case in Common Sense that it was absurd for an island to rule a continent, and that hereditary monarchy was as ridiculous as hereditary mathematicians.
The founders called it an experiment because nothing quite like it had been attempted at this scale. They were asking, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 1, “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force." But here’s what they didn’t say out loud: The experiment had already decided who was fully human.
Look at the numbers. In 1790, the first census counted more than 757,000 Black people in the newly minted United States. Of those, nearly 698,000 were enslaved, roughly 92%. By the time the experiment was designed, nearly one in five people in this country were property.
They weren’t asked if they consented to this hypothesis. They were the equipment.
Corrupted Methodology
Every experiment needs honest methodology. Ours began with mathematical sleight of hand. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution counted every enslaved person as three-fifths of a human being. Not for their own representation, for their enslavers’. The more people you owned, the more political power you received.
What kind of experiment begins with that kind of math?
The Constitution never used the word “slave.” Instead, it spoke of “all other Persons” and those “bound to Service for a Term of Years.” Linguistic evasion didn’t hide the moral corruption — it codified it.
In 1927, the Supreme Court heard Buck v. Bell, a case about the forced sterilization of a woman deemed “feebleminded.” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The ruling authorized states to sterilize citizens without consent. Though never formally overturned, Buck v. Bell has been widely discredited and is no longer considered valid law, but it remains on the books.
Meanwhile, the laboratory itself was stolen. The land where this democratic experiment would unfold wasn’t empty. It was razed. Indigenous peoples weren’t part of the hypothesis; they were obstacles to be removed. The Constitution counted them as “Indians not taxed,” which is a polite way of saying they didn’t count at all.
Decades after my quiet refusal in 8th grade, I found myself in graduate school studying public diplomacy — the art of shaping how nations see each other. America’s story, I was taught, was always about freedom. Never about testing. We exported the hypothesis, but kept the methodology classified.
Establishing the Control Group
Every experiment needs a baseline. America never officially named its control group, but the 1790 census data tells the story. According to estimates cited by historians and fact-checked by PolitiFact, only 20-25% of the population could vote when the Constitution was written. And who were they?
White. Male. Property-owning. Protestant.
In Pennsylvania, about 8% of the rural population qualified for voting rights. In Philadelphia, just 2%. In Rhode Island, 9%. Everyone outside this narrow group became a variable to be tested. Women couldn't vote. Free Black people, like the nearly 60,000 counted in that first census, had no say in this experiment. Poor white men were excluded in most states. Catholics were barred from voting in five colonies, Jews in four. They weren't testing self-governance. They were testing how much the excluded could endure.
But the control group wasn’t unchanged by the experiment. They were shaped by believing they weren't the subjects. When you’re holding the clipboard instead of being strapped to the table, you develop a different relationship to the proceedings.
This is how Manifest Destiny became protocol. It extended the laboratory westward, always needing fresh subjects and new variables to test. John O’Sullivan wrote in 1845 that it was “our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty.” Even conquest was wrapped in experimental language.
The hypothesis was never just about self-governance. It was about who counted as “self.” The control group has always been narrow, and it's narrowing further.
"They weren’t asked if they consented to this hypothesis. They were the equipment.”
“My country, ‘tis of Thee
Sweet Land of Liberty
Of thee I sing”
Nine hundred miles south, Nat Turner was planning the rebellion that would shatter white America's fiction of contentment among the enslaved. The 92% of Black Americans held in bondage weren’t singing about their country.
“Land where my fathers died
Land of the pilgrims' pride”
The nearly 4 million enslaved people counted in 1860, whose ancestors died in the holds of ships, in cotton fields, on auction blocks.
“Let freedom ring.”
I sang these words as a child, not understanding I was participating in historical erasure. We all did. The song tests whether repetition can overwrite reality, whether melody can make mythology feel like memory. Children don’t know they’re being programmed. That’s what makes them perfect subjects.
PHASE II: THE TEST SUBJECTS
“And to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible…”
Once the hypothesis was established and the control group identified, the testing began in earnest. Experiments shared common characteristics. They targeted people who couldn’t consent, used deception when necessary and treated human suffering as acceptable data.
In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service partnered with the Tuskegee Institute to study what they called “untreated syphillis in the Negro male.” They told 399 Black men with syphilis they were being treated for “bad blood.” They weren’t being treated at all. They were being watched. For 40 years, researchers documented how the disease destroyed their bodies, even after penicillin became the cure in 1943.
In other parts of the South, Black women who entered hospitals for appendectomies received hysterectomies instead. Medical students called them “Mississippi appendectomies” — unnecessary sterilizations performed as practice surgeries. The experiment asked: How much can we take from Black women's bodies while calling it medical training?
From 1907 into the 1970s, 32 states ran eugenics boards with the power to sterilize anyone deemed “unfit to reproduce.” California led the nation, sterilizing more than 20,000 people before repealing its law in 1979. The state was so efficient at forced sterilization that Nazi Germany borrowed their methods.
In Los Angeles, Mexican women were coerced into sterilization while in labor at LA County-USC Medical Center. Spanish-speaking women, many of whom could not read the English consent forms, were approached during childbirth, some heavily medicated, and pressured to sign paperwork they didn’t understand. When they asked for pain relief during contractions, doctors would say, “Do you want the painkiller? Then sign the papers. Do you want the pain to stop? Sign the papers.”
These weren’t isolated incidents. Between 1970 and 1976, doctors sterilized up to half of Native American women. In Puerto Rico, researchers tested birth control pills on poor women without telling them the drug was experimental. Three women died. No investigation followed.
Then there was COINTELPRO, the FBI’s “counterintelligence program” that ran from 1956 to 1971. The stated goal was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" Black leaders and organizations. They surveilled Martin Luther King, Jr. They infiltrated the Black Panthers. They sent fake letters to incite violence between groups.
During World War II, 112,000 Japanese Americans were forced into camps, two-thirds of which were American citizens. The economic losses of removing these citizens from their communities totaled $6.2 billion in today’s dollars. When asked why they were imprisoned “for their own protection,” one incarcerated person famously replied: “If we were put there for our protection, why were the guns at the guard towers pointed inward, instead of outward?”
The federal Indian boarding school system forcibly removed tens of thousands of Native American children from their families. At least 973 children died in these schools. The Interior Department found 74 burial sites at 65 different schools, many of which operated from the 1800s into the 1960s. Children were beaten for speaking their languages. They were given English names. They were told to “kill the Indian to save the man.”
Being queer in this country also meant being scrutinized. First, as pathology. The American Psychiatric Association didn't remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders until 1973. Before that, we were test subjects for conversion therapy, electroshock treatments and lobotomies. Then, as threat. During the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, more gay people were purged from government jobs than communists. Then, as novelty — Will & Grace, Ellen, Queer Eye. We became entertainment, our lives packaged for straight consumption. Now, as market segment — rainbow capitalism shows up on T-shirts, storefronts, and social media calendars. Queerness becomes branding, timed to Pride and tied to profit.
Being queer also means constant calculation. Which version of ourselves is safe here? The code-switching, both as a Black and gay man, is exhausting. Safety means reading every room, every street, and every interaction for threat levels.
Each of these experiments violated the fundamental principle of informed consent. But the overall American experiment perfected control subtler than force. It manufactured compliance through a thousand small surrenders.
The experiment didn’t only happen in institutions and history books. It filtered into the daily survival of people like me. I learned this navigating college while sleeping in my car for a year — a 2002 Mercedes parked in a Pep Boys lot and on low-traffic streets. Seat reclined, windows cracked, keys clutched ready to flee. The community college library closed between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. depending on the day. The YMCA opened at 6 a.m. My life ran on other people’s schedules. How do you maintain a high GPA when your study hall is a driver’s seat? It felt like the system watching me fail on purpose.
Therein lies the sophistication. You can have agency while still being a test subject. Look at the larger pattern: redlining maps from the 1930s still visible in city planning. The same neighborhoods marked “hazardous” then are where people sleep in cars now.
Controlled Reform
After the Civil War, America launched its first attempt to include Black Americans as full citizens. Reconstruction promised radical change. By 1868, more than 80% of eligible Black men had registered to vote. Black legislators were elected to state and federal office. Schools for Black children became a priority. But Reconstruction never questioned the hierarchy itself, only Black people’s placement within it. Between 1865 and 1877, at least 2,000 Black people were lynched. Thousands more were assaulted, raped, or terrorized. The experiment was simple: How much Black political power before white violence?
A century later, Lyndon Johnson declared War on Poverty. The 1964 Economic Opportunity Act created Head Start, food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid. But these programs treated symptoms not the causes. The question was never if wealth should be redistributed. It was: How little can we give while maintaining order?
Brown v. Board of Education was supposed to end school segregation in 1954. But look at what integration actually tested. Black children like Elizabeth Eckford faced mobs screaming, “Lynch her!” while trying to enter Little Rock High. The 101st Airborne had to escort nine teenagers to class. Everyone knew segregation was wrong. But instead of ending it swiftly, the country seemed intent on seeing how much trauma Black children could take.
By the 1990s, welfare reform asked a different question: How much assistance could be withdrawn before families collapsed? The 1996 legislation introduced time limits, pushed states to enforce 30-hour work requirements, and allowed sanctions that could cut off benefits for entire households. These weren’t implementation failures. They were carefully calibrated experiments in discovering how little change the system could get away with.
Current Protocols
Walk through any American city and you’ll see the experiments running in real time. No lab coats required.
The minimum wage hasn’t moved since 2009. Still $7.25. In 1968, minimum wage workers could afford a two-bedroom apartment working 40 hours a week. Today? In Los Angeles County, they’d need to work 116 hours a week just to afford a modest two-bedroom rental. That’s nearly three full-time jobs. The hypothesis was never about wages. It was about discovering the exact point where desperation meets compliance.
The gig economy refined the experiment. No benefits. No security. Just algorithms deciding if you eat today. Uber drivers might earn $20 an hour — before gas, maintenance, and depreciation. After costs? Many make less than minimum wage, but they’re not employees. They’re “independent contractors. The experiment asks: What happens when we remove every protection, but call it freedom?
Infrastructure became a testing ground. Flint’s water crisis wasn’t an accident. It was data collection. What’s the threshold before public health becomes a scandal? Years. The crisis began in 2014. By the time a state of emergency was declared in January 2016, at least 12 people had died from Legionnaires' disease. An estimated 9,000 children were exposed to lead.
Look at what we eat. Red Dye 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6 — all banned in Europe, but perfectly legal here. More than 1,900 grocery items contain titanium dioxide, another chemical banned elsewhere. Every aisle is a clinical trial. Every bite becomes data. How far can the line be pushed before people push back?
COVID-19 made the clinical trials visible. Essential workers became frontline test subjects — exposed daily, but rarely protected. We clapped at 7 p.m. for grocery clerks, bus drivers, and nurses, then sent them back into the virus without hazard pay. Black, Latine, and Native American communities bore the brunt of exposure and death. These were observations. What happens when survival depends on service and service comes without safety?
But some of the most invasive experiments now target bodily autonomy. In February, Adriana Smith, a 31-year-old Georgia nurse, was declared brain dead. But because she was nine weeks pregnant, her body remained on life support for four months until the fetus could be delivered. Her family had no legal authority. The state turned her body into an incubator. Consent didn’t matter and the experiment continued.
“Experiments can continue indefinitely as long as someone benefits from the data.”
Updated Methods
I didn't realize I was living in the largest behavioral laboratory in human history until I started paying attention to my own phone. Every click is data. Every swipe mapped. Every pause is measured. We scroll, and the algorithm learns. You like a post about depression. Now you're being stalked by therapy apps. You watch a video about protests. Your feed shifts. You search for pregnancy tests. Your data gets sold to anti-abortion groups.
Facebook nonconsensually tested emotional contagion on nearly 700,000 users by manipulating their newsfeeds to see if they could make them sadder. When users saw fewer happy posts, they posted fewer happy words. The experiment proved emotional manipulation worked. The subjects never knew they were being tested. Cambridge Analytica harvested data from 87 million Facebook users to influence elections. Ring doorbell cameras create neighborhood surveillance networks. Alexa records conversations in living rooms. We volunteered for total monitoring and called it convenience. Predictive policing algorithms decide which neighborhoods get surveilled. Healthcare algorithms determine who gets treatment. Credit algorithms decide who gets housing. Each system claims to be neutral, but neutrality is impossible when the training data reflects centuries of experimental results.
AI systems now screen resumes. In one study, white names were preferred 85% of the time. Black names? Never. The machines didn’t learn to be fair. They learned to be perfectly biased.
We carry the lab in our pockets. We upload our lives voluntarily. And we pay for the privilege. The experiment no longer needs institutions. It’s asking, ‘How much will you accept? How much of yourself will you give away? How long before you notice you’re not the user, but the product being tested?’
We don’t live outside the experiment. We are confined within it.
PHASE III: THE RESULTS
“With liberty and justice for all.”
Ferguson, 2014. I was living in Los Angeles that August, working on a TV show as a stand-in, still chasing dreams of being an actor. The notification popped up on my phone between takes. Another Black teenager shot by police. Michael Brown. He was 18 years old. My stomach tightened in that familiar way. But this time felt different.
I was 32. I experienced homelessness for the first time at 18 when I left my parent’s house. I’d witnessed 9/11, and the 2008 financial crisis. I’d been focused on my own survival, my own dreams, my own small world. Maybe it was willful ignorance. Maybe I just didn’t have the bandwidth to look beyond my immediate circumstances. But Ferguson changed that.
By evening, the images were everywhere. Brown’s body lay in the street for four hours in the summer heat in front of children and seniors. Something about it felt deliberately cruel, like leaving a lesson on display. I watched Ferguson burn from my apartment in North Hollywood. People weren’t just protesting. They were publishing the results that had been accumulating for decades. See, experiments generate data, but that data has to be interpreted. Ferguson forced me to start reading what had been written all along.
The responses were divided along predictable lines.
“We don’t know all the facts.”
“He robbed a store.”
“The officer feared for his life.”
But I started seeing the pattern differently. This wasn’t random violence. This was systemic. For the first time, I saw MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles) rolling down American streets. The same tanks we’d sent to Iraq and Afghanistan were now aimed at protesters in Missouri. “Hands up, don’t shoot” became more than a rallying cry. The gesture meant something bigger. It was data visualization. Every raised hand in every city was a data point saying we know how this experiment ends.
The psychic rupture was immediate. Something broke in me that couldn’t be fixed. Not because police violence was new — it wasn’t. Rodney King was 1991. Amadou Diallo was 1999. Sean Bell was 2006. But Ferguson was different for me. Maybe because of Twitter. Maybe because I could no longer pretend I wasn’t part of this. Maybe because I finally had to confront what I’d been unconsciously navigating my whole life. Stanford researchers found that people were more supportive of harsh criminal justice policies the more African Americans they believed were in prison. The experiment wasn’t failing. It was working exactly as designed. Create the conditions. Document the results. Use those results to justify more experiments.
By December, when the grand jury decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson, I wasn’t surprised. Pew Research Center found just 27% of Americans thought race was a major factor in the decision. Among whites, only 16%. Among Black people it was 64%. Even our interpretations of the results were divided by race. The experiment trains us to see different realities.
View from Outside the Lab
It took leaving the U.S. to see the experiment clearly.
When I went to study for a master’s degree in Dublin in fall 2023, I paid $160 for an entire year of medical insurance that covered all my basic needs. I met students who couldn’t understand student debt. Irish residents get free tuition at public universities and pay a max €3,000 (about $3,240) in contribution fees. Danish and German students often receive stipends or pay only small fees — the opposite of our crushing model. In America, we average $38,000 in federal student loan debt. The test? How much financial stress people can bear before breaking.
In more than half the world's countries, labor rights have actually improved since 2016. In 141 countries, new mothers get paid maternity leave. Estonia offers 86 weeks. The U.S. offers zero weeks federally-mandated leave, testing how quickly women can return to work without endangering themselves or their infants.
These other nations aren't utopias, but their problems were political, not experimental. Every time I return to the U.S. I come back to a country still running trials. One that is always asking how much can people endure. The answer always seems to be…more.
“The experiment wasn’t failing. It was working exactly as designed.”
The Pandemic as Published Results
COVID didn't create new experiments. It published the results of experiments that have been running for decades. In March 2020, governors issued executive orders defining "essential services.” It was clear some lives were more disposable than others.
The answers were written in death certificates. Essential workers couldn’t Zoom from home. They rode packed buses to jobs that would kill them. One in eight essential workers had union protection. In health care, just 10%. Black and Latine/Latino workers made up the majority in food service. They died at twice the rate of white workers. Essential meant expendable.
Vaccine rollouts revealed the hierarchy with mathematical precision. Health care workers went first, then nursing homes. By occupation, age and value. The algorithm was simple. Who keeps the system running? Who has power? Who can wait? Despite bearing disproportionate death rates, Black people were vaccinated at rates 2-3 times lower than white Americans.
School reopenings ran their own trial. Some classrooms packed, others remote, private schools with HEPA filters while public schools cracked windows. The experiment asked how much chaos and trauma children could absorb and who got to learn safely.
Latest Data
June 2025. The experiment updates its protocols. Immigration raids emptied classrooms across Los Angeles just before the school year ended. Federal agents chased day laborers behind Home Depot while graduation ceremonies played out next door. Parents huddled inside, afraid to leave. Teachers carried bullhorns to warn communities. The hypothesis? What happens when you remove people who were never supposed to be variables? One in 10 California children has an undocumented parent. Businesses shuttered across immigrant neighborhoods. Even workers with legal or protected status fled. The experiment measures how quickly fear can spread through entire communities.
Book bans test how much history can be erased. There were 10,046 instances in the 2023-24 school year alone. The targets are predictable: 44% of banned books feature people of color, 39% include LGBTQ+ characters. They’re refining the question of how much of the past can be deleted before people resist.
Add trans rights rollbacks and voting restrictions in 29 states since 2013, and the pattern becomes clear. Each law is another data point in an ongoing experiment about subtraction. Can progress be reversed? Can you remove democracy from democracy itself? Even those who believed they were safe watch their own rights start to narrow, still believing they're observers rather than subjects. The data accumulates relentlessly. Empty desks, closed stores, banned books, restricted votes. We’re all variables now.
Proof of Life
July Fourth in L.A. was a culture shock after growing up in the D.C. area, where fireworks were controlled and sanctioned. Usually it was a single, unified display on the National Mall. In L.A., they erupted from every direction. At first, the constant barrage irritated me. But eventually I learned to appreciate the chaos. Thousands of individual experiments in patriotism, each family with their own show.
Mostly though, it’s become a day of reflection. Every year brings the same internal debate: Should I feel proud? Should I celebrate? Last July 4 in Dublin, I was deep in research for my thesis. I scrolled through my phone while Americans posted flags and Irish people went about their day, completely indifferent to our national mythology. The distance clarified something I'd never seen from inside: Outside our laboratory, no one else is running the experiment.
I searched my phone for July 4 photos. 2023 in Paris: researching jobs, planning bakery visits, selfies in a park. 2022 in L.A.? A TikTok screenshot saying “Love yourself, take care.” A friend’s party in 2021, and a Venice neighborhood photoshoot I did for fun in 2020. Back in 2018: experiencing homelessness (again), shaving my head bald, photographing architecture I loved at Union Station, stumbling into an Indigenous dance ceremony near Olvera Street, where families in feathered regalia celebrated their own version of America.
The photos revealed what the holiday has become for me. Not Independence Day, but evidence collection day. Each July 4, I unconsciously document not celebration, but survival. Not patriotism, but persistence.
There have been movements for justice and moments of genuine progress. Black Lives Matter. Marriage equality. The Americans with Disabilities Act. Each victory came from people who refused to be good test subjects. People who corrupted data with their resistance.
I now know that the hypothesis was flawed from the start. You can’t test democracy on only some people. You can’t run experiments on human dignity. The methodology has been violent. Slavery, genocide, exclusion and control. The results were buried in unmarked graves, burned records and redacted files. The peer review never came because America refuses to submit its findings to the world.
Communities persist despite systemic hostility. Little Havana continues. Chinatowns endure. Burned Black churches were rebuilt. Queer neighborhoods targeted by police become sanctuaries. Each survival is a data point the experiment did not anticipate. Some of us were supposed to die in police custody, in conversion therapy and in poverty. Instead, we're here, messing up calculations.
You can love something and still demand it tell the truth about itself. That’s really the only honest way to love anything. Gratitude and critique aren’t opposites. The difference between patriotism and nationalism is the willingness to see clearly, to name the experiment and to demand better protocols.
What will you refuse? What will you record? What evidence will you leave?
I’m Black. I’m gay. I’m undeniably American. I'm proud of those things. Not because America made it easy, but because these identities are mine. Not because the experiment succeeded, but because we survived it. Survival itself is the data that proves the hypothesis wrong. We were never just variables to be tested. We were always human.
That 13-year-old who put his hand down didn't know he was refusing to be a test subject. Now I do. ⁂
Curious how this essay came to life?
From six years of buried phone notes to a Nazi salute in a college classroom, I trace the path that led to The American Experiment, including the moments I left out. In this companion essay, I reflect on how distance, doubt, and the fear of being misunderstood shaped every part of the process.
📸 Includes unreleased photos, Notes app screenshots, and more.
Ethan Ward is an award-winning journalist and writer. You can reach him here.
Additional editing by Dana Amihere.