American history is not pretty: It is blood-soaked and horrifying; its accomplishments are stained by genocide, slavery and moral apathy to those horrors and more. That is why white Americans, in particular, do not like to look at America as it is.
Instead, to make themselves feel good, they've learned to rewrite our history. In the decade following the Civil War, the country began to rebuild, creating an environment that was at least moving toward equality for Black Americans. However, institutionalized racism, entrenched in the government, forced the Reconstruction era to come to a screeching halt in 1877. White people began to erase the true monstrosity of their ancestors' actions while draping themselves in the facile separate-but-equal justifications of Jim Crow laws and the anonymity of Ku Klux Klan robes to commit new crimes.
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