This article should not be threatening or upsetting to any American...
As a stand-alone article, it’s excellent. Our founders DID pronounce that all men were created equal, endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights. But they allowed slavery to continue for a long time after that declaration.
We paid for that, with the bloodiest war of our history; but even for a hundred years later, many still tried to keep black people as second-class citizens; even, in some places, denying them literacy.
I would just rather have seen the author’s talents turned to the actual facts of the recent tragedy to which he is obviously responding - if the date of this article is correct.
“This article should not be threatening or upsetting to any American...”
I agree.
But the article was weak. It was just empty virtue signaling.
For example he says “For too many years, white Americans simply ignored the contradiction that they didn’t want to see.”
That’s not true at all. That it was simply ignored. There were anti-slavery movements all along up until it was finally ended.
And when the Democrats instituted their Jim Crow and progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson segregated things again there were people speaking against it, such as Republican President Warren Harding and others.
And this: “Long before that, Frederick Douglas correctly noted that tolerating slavery while celebrating the Declaration of Independence made the celebration a “sham” filled with “fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy.””
Douglas made a fine rhetorical point but celebrating the Declaration of Independence was not a sham, even while slavery was still in place.