


I've been thinking about this a lot in my study of the crimes of slavery, the Civil War and Jim Crow. I don't think the scales will ever be evened. I don't even know how you would begin to do that in any kind of moral way. That said, I want to differentiate between recognizing your limits, and sweeping a wrong under the rug. Our greatest problem, in regards to the legacy of white supremacy, is not it's effects, it's that we don't understand the rudiments of what happened. We think this was about a few individuals, in another time with a bad attitude, not systems.

Pictured above is James Longstreet, Confederate general, once hailed as General Lee's warhorse and one of the greatest generals of the war, but eventually dismissed as nigra-lover and blamed for the Confederacy's defeat at Gettysburg. I'm dying to read a bio  on James Longstreet, though I have no idea when I'll get to it. Here's the thing: Longstreet was a great general, but there's some controversy over his generalship at Gettysburg. But most distressing to the white South, after the War, Longstreet became a black Republican, supported civil rights, and endorsed Grant.

I don't want to equate Longstreet and Mandella, and more than that, I don't know if it was political courage or cynicism that caused Longstreet's change of heart. (Haven't read that bio!) But what I see in my reading about both of them is an understanding of the limits of blood-feuding. History is important to me because I love narratives. But it's important to me broadly as a  science, as way of understanding "how it happened." History can help us fix some things, but it can't make everything. It can't settle our scores. Some wounds we will have to bear.