Dissent

ABSTRACT:

In recent years, the United States has seen the entrenchment of an insurgent and overtly racist hard right, a retreat from fleeting but once seemingly sincere commitments to addressing the injus tices of police brutality and mass incarceration, and a growing backlash against voting rights, affirmative action, and other gains of the civil rights movement. How should we relate to history in a time like ours? Journalists Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Afropessimists Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton, have exhorted us to face the facts that the United States was founded by slaveholders who defined democracy in opposition to Black people, and that hoping to change that reality is at best naïve and at worst a distraction from the more urgent project of learning to live and thrive in a white supremacist nation. Meanwhile, many conservatives and progressives remind us that, from the founding, Black and white Americans have challenged the racial limits of democracy. For liberals, this means we should retain hope, as Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” For the right, that day has already come.