Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

by Kevin M. Kruse

The idea that the protests of the classical phase of the civil rights movement remade the United States into a color-blind country is one reason that by 2021, a majority of white Americans experienced no cognitive dissonance in believing that Rosa Parks’s action to desegregate bus seating was right and just but could not countenance the slogan “Black Lives Matter” as a tool against structurally racist police violence. Or, instead of remembering African Americans’ Depression-era boycotts in the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign, led by Black women practicing gendered consumer politics, they deplored boycotts as “cancel culture.”