This is The Guardian.

Hi, my name is Susie Hansen.

I'm the author of Unlearning the Myth of American Innocence.

This article was an excerpt from my first book, Notes on a Foreign Country,

which I decided to write because I felt there hadn't been a book that showed

a white American reckoning with her role in the world and with her country's historical

imperial role in the world. To the extent that Americans had little to no idea,

I thought how American power had affected the lives of millions of people for the last 100 years.

This meant, too, of course, that they had no idea how that power had shaped and in many ways

warped their own identities.

It's interesting to me that since I published this so much happened in the United States,

having to do with Black Lives Matter and Trump and everything that has gone on in the last

years, and there was this idea that is much more popular now that white Americans have a lot

of work to do on themselves. But one thing I am sometimes disappointed by is that we haven't

really extended that conversation to the way white Americans relate to the rest of the world,

to non-Americans. We haven't really addressed this need for a greater awareness of American

empire and its effect on the American identity. So I'm still hopeful that we'll get to that eventually.

This piece is also about me being a journalist and being a foreign correspondent,

and I think what surprised me is that no matter how much I learned about the history of American

foreign policy and many of the countries that I was going to, I would continue to experience this

history or this new knowledge that I was acquiring with a kind of surprise. I think that

American innocence is so resilient, it's so deep within us, that it almost felt to me as if it was

...