As Lilla suggests, embracing that immediacy, striving to understand the people of the past “as they understood themselves,” is a mark of fairness to them; but it is also good for us. He points out that “the concept of ‘racism’ is today applied to everything from theories of racial inferiority and calls for genocide to unintended ‘microaggressions’ against particular individuals,” which means that “a small forest of useful concepts that used to grow between ‘racism’ and ‘woke-ness’—blindness, stereotyping, prejudice, bigotry—has been cleared.
