| "We should know the good, the bad, everything," President Biden said this week. "That's what great nations do: They come to terms with their dark sides. And we're a great nation." Biden was talking about the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, in which hundreds of Black people died after Whites torched a 35-block part of town known as Black Wall Street. But, as columnist Michele L. Norris suggests in our newest Opinions Essay, America's larger founding myths are long overdue for interrogation as well. "The United States does not yet have the stomach to look over its shoulder and stare directly at the evil on which this great country stands," Michele writes. "That is why slavery is not well taught in our schools. That is why the battle flag of the army that tried to divide and conquer our country is still manufactured, sold and displayed with defiant pride. That is why any mention of slavery is rendered as the shameful act of a smattering of Southern plantation owners and not a sprawling economic and social framework with tentacles that stamped almost every aspect of American life." Michele's essay looks to Germany for lessons about what a country can do — and what it can learn — when citizens to look their real history in the face. It is perhaps understandable, she notes, that Americans have resisted peeling the whitewash from the past. "But at a moment when the United States is dangerously divided, when we are having bitter and overdue conversations about policing, inequality and voting rights, when marauders fueled by white-nationalist rhetoric can overwhelm the Capitol," she asks, "the more important question is this: What happens if we don't?"  (Brian Stauffer for The Washington Post) For too long, we've ignored our real history. We must face where truth can take us. By Michele L. Norris ● Read more » |    | | | |
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