Not all Americans have been so willing to forget. Black Americans, because of our particular experience in this land, because we have borne the brunt of this forgetting, are less given to mythologizing America’s past than white Americans. How do you romanticize a revolution made possible by the forced labor of your ancestors, one that built white freedom on a Black slavery that would persist for another century after Jefferson wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”?
