Enslavement provided not merely the foundation of white economic prosperity but the foundation of white social equality and thus the foundation of American democracy. But that was 150 years ago. And the slave South lost the war, after all. Was it not the America of Frederick Douglass that had prevailed and the Confederacy of Jefferson Davis that had been banished? Were we not a new country exalting in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream? I was never quite that far gone. But I had been wrong about the possibility of Barack Obama. And it seemed fair to consider that I might be wrong about a good deal
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