America must apologize for slavery, he says.
Not the states of the Confederacy, The United States of America.
There, I think, he is mistaken.
Since the failure of Reconstruction, it is the South and no one else that has chosen and still chooses to celebrate its crime.
It is true that American culture as a whole, and especially pop culture, is far too indulgent toward the Confederacy.
There is far too much "brother against brother," a kind of "moral equivalence," involved.
The collapse of Reconstruction was too complete.
But it is only the South that actually was the Confederacy, that actually broke the Union and fought the bloodiest of our wars on our own soil for nothing else than the expansion and perpetuation of race-based slavery, a human institution damned twice over for horror.
And it is only the South that never left off honoring and celebrating as heroic that "Lost Cause," and championed since then the cause of unending racist cruelty, violence, and oppression.
Public monuments, events, or commemorations of the Confederacy and its struggle are as perverse and horrible in the American South as would be such a public embrace of the Nazi past in Germany, Bavaria, or Munich.
America can only be better, not for forgetting, but for rejecting this past.
We Americans who have all along celebrated Lincoln and the Union dead should think again whose image we would find more congenial on our currency, Jackson the racist destroyer of the Cherokee Nation or Harriet Tubman, heroine of the underground railway.
And think again of the propriety of adopting and celebrating distinct national holidays at least for each of the defeat of the Confederacy, the emancipation of the slaves, and the end of slavery forever with ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment.
Holidays to be celebrated everywhere in the country, most especially including the South.
And this is NOT a time for tu quoques.
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