"Yes, you’re a racist… and a traitor."

"it was a war based on a fundamental social conflict that is still not resolved and simmers under the zeitgeist, rearing its ugly head every so often to remind us it hasn’t gone anywhere. It was not resolved in 1865, not in 1965, and sadly, not in 2015.

The “heritage” of the Confederacy, the enduring belief in Lost Cause romanticism, the invention and adoption of revisionist “traditions” and culture, has become society’s Old Faithful: a cultural geyser that periodically lets off steam; a spectacle at which we ogle and wax poetic about the fragility of our condition. But one day it’ll explode and it’ll be a catastrophe from which we might not recover."
https://medium.com/@thejohnprice/yes-you-re-a-racist-and-a-traitor-6c4bb12c5b63

This was just kinda cathartic to read during the mood I was in.

American history is sometimes overwhelming in its intensity and mythology and in the politics around the way that it is taught. I hope that there will be a time when we properly reckon with the fact that our country began as a colony whose economy was heavily based on chattel slavery and the products and infrastructure around chattel slavery. And think about what that means for how we can feel attachments and safety in this country and what it means to identify with its history. We claim a lot of civil rights successes as part of our history and as part of our heritage, but those successes should also be understood as fights against American history and identity.

I feel like we're in that struggle right now, and I want to look at it directly.