Author's Note: Written in December 2020 — the tail end of a genuinely chaotic year — this essay is addressed, loosely, to the incoming Biden administration, using historical analysis of imperialism, labor hierarchies, and racial ideology to argue that the United States needs to reckon with its past in order to navigate its present. It pulls together King Leopold's Congo, Heart of Darkness, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism, and Ernest Renan's theory of nationhood