Oluo considers “the idea of a white man going it alone” as “one of the strongest identifiers of American culture and politics, where cooperation is weakness and others are the enemy-to be stolen from or conquered.” “They would shoot a few interlopers who would then run away and leave the Mormons to the land they had rightfully stolen.” One of those Mormons was the ancestor of the Bundy family, who mounted the armed takeover of an Oregon wildlife refuge in 2016. “It was supposed to be a quick ordeal,” Oluo writes. Eventually in Bill’s show, Mormons replaced Natives as the villains, and those Mormons may’ve been based on a group in Utah, who fought a Christian wagon train. So to start Oluo goes back to Buffalo Bill and his stage show, in which his “scalping of Yellow Hand was an act of justice.” Across the chapter, in a few deft leaps, Oluo ties this fraught narrative of the independent cowboy and the American West to the present. The sovereign right of white men is as pervasive as some of our other national myths-the American Dream, Manifest Destiny-and inextricably linked with them.
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