Ignorance Is No Excuse

> Most white Americans are fuzzy on the cause of the Civil War—slavery—and even more are unaware of the decades of racial terror and oppression that followed Reconstruction: lynching, convict leasing, mass incarceration, racist labor practices.
... ‘Why are they so focussed on this, when Americans seem to do their best to forget history?’ In a certain sense, that question, the ways in which the Germans have faced their national crimes and catastrophe, has been on my mind ever since.”<

The only way to not know is to deliberately choose not to. Germany has faced the horrors of her past and can be proud of the fact that they have cleansed themselves of its evil. America, like Japan, remains stained and fouled with the filth we refuse to wash away.

When I put this down to write more about the subject later, I failed to record the article from which I excerpted the quote.

There’s so much more I can say about this, yet when I look at it, I think it actually covers the subject rather well. It is a very brief post but one which should stimulate a great deal of discussion and thought.