I wasn’t tired anymore, just pissed off and deeply unsettled. I had grown up in the American South—a weird, tropical version of it, filled with transplants from other parts of the country; but still, the South. But I’d never really confronted its ugly past. I’d never been forced to; I was a wealthy white kid in a mostly white town. I felt ashamed that I had never really reckoned with it, never imagined what a simple road trip through my own state might’ve been like for anyone who didn’t look like me. And not just in the past. Just because Jim Crow was dead didn’t mean racism was. Hell, in some
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