"It took an outsider—Charles Dickens, visiting on a lecture tour in 1842 during the last stages of “Indian removal”—to actually register the sadness of it all; he described the Native Americans’ “strong attachment to the familiar scenes of their infancy, and in particular to the burial-places of their kindred; and of their great reluctance to leave them.” What I’m trying to say is: my life, and the life of other people like me, was built in very real part on the suffering of others. That’s not wokeness, and that’s not “critical race theory.” That’s history. And the fact that, to some extent, we’ve stopped doing these things doesn’t mean we get to ignore the effects of earlier actions. As Richard Rothstein observed in his classic account of segregation, The Color of Law, “let bygones be bygones” is not a very noble principle if you came out on top."
The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened" by Bill McKibben: https://a.co/ex04une
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