Reflection of the Gilded Age
“You are the God who sees me.” — Genesis 16:13
Today, for the third time, I drove all the way to Staatsburg, New York, to visit the Mills Mansion, and finally, I made it in time for a tour. I drove alone on purpose. I just wanted to think and free my mind from the stressful week this nation has had. There was so much noise—disdain and distortion among Whites and Muslims, disgust over the government shutdown, fears that the ceasefire in Gaza would collapse, and even questions about salvation and Jesus Christ. My mind had been consumed with it all. I needed to breathe, to exhale.
So I drove. I didn’t listen to an audiobook this time. I let the music play and connected with God as I took in the power of His beauty reflected in nature. There’s a stretch between I-87 and I-287 North where there’s nothing but open miles before you and a bright blue sky above. As you trespass from New Jersey into New York, the mountains rise—big, consuming, and full of splendor. Puffy white clouds floated across the sky like proclamations of God’s glory. It brought me peace and stirred my imagination, filling me with hope and the simple joy of being alive.
The Mills Mansion is something to behold. It overlooks the Hudson River like a backdrop to a painting. The water shimmered, and in its midst, a bright orange boat drifted, a single vibrant stroke against the calm blue. Inside, the mansion spoke of another time. There was an eeriness in the air as our tour guide led us through private bedrooms once belonging to the wealthy of the 1800s and early 1900s, the Gilded Age. Everything was polished, proper, and glowing with the illusion of perfection. It was a time of old money merging with new money, of butlers, footmen, servants, and chauffeurs.
But as I looked around, I couldn’t ignore what was missing. Not just missing from the stories told, but missing from the crowd itself—Black people. It was as if the North was void of Blackness. The wealthy white elite dominated New York and stretched their influence through the region, while the Black story, our story, was nowhere to be found. As I listened to tales of love, loss, money, and extravagance, I felt strangely out of place. It was as if the slave story had been erased entirely. The servants’ quarters told only part of the truth, yet they hinted at so much more.
This was the era after the Civil War and between World War I. It was the rise of Jim Crow and the penal systems in the South that oppressed Black men. It was also the time of sharecropping’s invention, a system that kept many African Americans enslaved in all but name. While the North built mansions and fortunes, the South was building prisons and poverty for Black families. The North’s factories and fortunes grew richer because Southern cotton, picked by Black hands, fueled their industry. The wealth of the Gilded Age was never separate from the suffering of the South.
What struck me most was that the Gilded Age also birthed many of the inventions that would define the modern world: electricity, the telephone, the light bulb, and the phonograph. It was a time when technology redefined human connection, labor, and imagination. Standing there, I couldn’t help but see the parallel to today. We are living through another great shift, this time powered by artificial intelligence. Just as electricity transformed how people lived, AI is transforming how we think, work, and even wage war. Both eras carry the same undercurrent of unease, a sense that something vast and uncontrollable is building. It feels like the tremors before an earthquake, a world bracing for change.
“Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.” — Mark Twain
And just as in the Gilded Age, beneath the shine and progress lies division. There is talk again of a civil war, not fought with muskets, but with words, policies, and ideologies. Color and religion have become weapons, distractions used to divide. I recently watched a debate where Mehdi Hassan claimed Muslims built America, and Matt Walsh, in anger, insisted it was founded by white men. Both are wrong, and both presume to speak for a people they can never represent: the American Descendants of Slavery. Our story is still being told, and too often, still being told by others.
As I left the mansion grounds, the echoes of the Gilded Age followed me. And as I turned on the radio, the voices of today’s so-called leaders reminded me how little the structure of power has changed.
Looking back, I felt sad. Just as we were not relevant to Whites in the North during the Gilded Age, I can’t help but feel this is exactly what’s happening today. The faces have changed, but the silence feels the same. With the rise of AI and the sweeping transitions ahead, it seems that ADOS, the American Descendants of Slavery, once again have no voice.
When I listen to the noise surrounding the government shutdown, I hear mostly White, Hispanic, and Muslim commentators shaping the national conversation. The only Black voice that seems to rise to the surface is Hakeem Jeffries. And I can say a great deal about him. Hakeem Jeffries is paid to keep his seat, not to shake it. He stands as a symbol of what happens when representation is confused with advocacy. He does nothing to challenge the machinery that keeps us muted.
“The Gilded Age was a period of glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath.” — Mark Twain
There is a strange familiarity in this moment. During the Gilded Age, wealth and innovation created the illusion of progress while silencing the laborers who made it possible. Today, the same pattern repeats itself, only now it is coded into algorithms. The people who built this nation, whose sweat and faith carried it forward, are once again on the margins of history, while others debate who really built America.
On my way home, I couldn’t stop thinking about that mansion and its servants, the quiet figures who kept the Gilded Age glowing from behind the curtain. During that time, simply working for a wealthy family in America could transform the life of a poor white man. Service became opportunity. A butler and servants could travel with his employer. Butlers were so well respected they lived in a separate home on the estate with their families and enjoyed a kind of stability that others only dreamed of. Those privileges, though humble, opened doors for whites. Yet somehow, none of those opportunities were afforded to the many maids, servants, and cooks who were slaves. Wealthy whites in America wanted a house full of servants, especially men, because they paid more for men than women. They were paid, but slaves worked without pay for 240 years while this country built itself on our ideas and our labor.
But for Black Americans of that same era, the story was starkly different. We were the ones picking cotton, building railroads, fighting to claim even a small place of our own in the country our labor built. Yet our presence was erased from the narrative of America’s wealth and progress, especially in the North, where the story of success was whitewashed, polished, and presented as the American dream.
And I can’t help but see how little has changed. Watching Bernie Sanders and AOC on CNN a few weeks ago, I was stunned that they are now the faces of the Democratic Party, a party that depends on over 90% of the ADOS vote. How can they claim to represent a struggle they neither lived nor understand? Our story has become their rhetoric. We are invoked only when it suits their platform, when the topic is abortion or food stamps, as if other races don’t terminate pregnancies or receive public assistance. When the issue is crime, they pull out the Civil Rights playbook and quote Dr. King to attack Trump, but never to confront the injustices happening within their own ranks.
Even commentators like Mehdi Hassan and Mamdani use the Black struggle as intellectual currency. Mehdi Hassan boldly proclaimed that Muslims built America, pointing to his own background, his own religion, and ignoring the legacy of the African slave, those Africans who truly built America. To be clear, they were mostly African Christians, and none of them were Indian or Arab. Mamdani, meanwhile, likened his aunt’s fear of wearing a hijab after 9/11 to Rosa Parks’ defiance on a segregated bus. Yet it was Muslim extremists who attacked America that day, and somehow, the narrative of victimhood shifts back to them while our own history is borrowed for their validation.
It is the same distortion we have seen for generations: white commentators labeling Black communities as violent while ignoring the violence embedded in their own history. The hypocrisy is exhausting.
And where is the ADOS voice in all of this? Why is there no pushback when AOC and Bernie Sanders parade as the conscience of the Democratic Party, speaking as if they have carried our cross? Why are there no visible leaders challenging this narrative? Even Joy Reid, who constantly uses our struggle as her backdrop, celebrates getting into Harvard and Yale through Affirmative Action, a policy meant to uplift descendants of American slavery. She boasts that she earned her place through intelligence, yet fails to see the irony of her privilege. She is not ADOS, yet she builds her platform by speaking as if our story were her own.
Maybe that is the tragedy of America’s racial story. Everyone wants to borrow its language, but few want to live its truth.
Joy Reid represents a type of public voice that seems to have more contempt for America than concern for its citizens. She often speaks on behalf of illegal immigrants and uses the language of the Black struggle to justify policies that have little to do with ADOS realities. Recently, she shared a clip showing ICE agents being harassed by a protester and praised the behavior, calling it activism. It reminded me how easily moral outrage can be misdirected when it is filtered through ideology rather than truth.
Reid often aligns herself with figures like Mamdani and Mehdi Hassan, treating their experiences as parallel to the African-American story when, in truth, their battles are different. What troubles me is how quickly this alliance turns into open disdain for Americans, especially Black Americans who refuse to follow the Democratic script or who dare to support Donald Trump. There is a growing movement among progressive elites to merge the ADOS struggle with every other social cause, folding it into immigrant, religious, or gender politics until our unique story disappears.
Mamdani, for example, promotes policies in New York City that sound generous—free bus service, rent freezes, reduced policing—but beneath the slogans is a vision that ignores the moral and spiritual foundation on which America was built. This country was shaped by a Protestant-Christian ethic that valued personal responsibility, community, and faith in one God. It is not intolerance to say that those values matter; it is acknowledgment of the nation’s identity. Yet today our leaders seem afraid to defend that heritage. They chase approval from every ideology but their own.
I am glad I went. Walking through the Mills Mansion gave me a rare chance to peek into the lives of America’s wealthy, up close and personal. The place itself feels like a scene pulled into The Gilded Age series on AMC, only this time, I was standing inside it, surrounded by the evidence of privilege and power that once defined an era. Every polished surface, every chandelier, every servant’s corridor whispered a story of excess and hierarchy.
It was beautiful, yes, but also bittersweet. Because as I took it all in, I couldn’t shake the thought of how easily the Black struggle in America has been dismissed, erased, or reimagined through someone else’s lens. Even today, that history hasn’t changed. We are still fighting for acknowledgment, still watching others profit from our pain, and still being written out of the story we helped build.
I am glad I went. Walking through the Mills Mansion gave me a rare chance to peek into the lives of America’s wealthy, up close and personal. The place itself feels like a scene pulled straight from The Gilded Age series on AMC, only this time, I was standing inside it, surrounded by the evidence of privilege and power that once defined an era. Every polished surface, every chandelier, every servant’s corridor whispered a story of excess and hierarchy.
It was beautiful, yes, but also bittersweet. Because as I took it all in, I couldn’t shake the thought of how easily the Black struggle in America has been dismissed, erased, or reimagined through someone else’s lens. Even today, that history hasn’t changed. We are still fighting for acknowledgment, still watching others profit from our pain, and still being written out of the story we helped build.
As I drove back across the Hudson Bridge, I watched the mountains disappear in my rearview mirror. The blue sky had begun to shift into a bright red hue as the sun descended, and with a grateful heart, I decided that one day America will finally see us.
