Certain Sins

My wife and I spent the day at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It's hard not to leave without a sense of the complete failure of this nation to reckon with its history, nor that there might be some sins from which a nation may never recover.

Upon entering, you descend several floors into a very deep basement, and this also takes you back in time to the 15th century and the origins of the slave trade. You then slowly ascend, both in space and in time, to see how the Atlantic slave trade so thoroughly shaped European and American development that it's impossible to think of them apart. You therefore see how the contours of the Atlantic slave trade, and then the domestic slave trade, permeated every event in American history, from the Revolutionary war, to the Civil War, and on through Jim Crow. Finally, you end in the present day, with the post-Jim Crow era, which is the very briefest of slivers in the long arc of American history, but which is this country's only moment without explicit legally enshrined racism. That anyone could think this country has even remotely approximated the type of national reckoning that might expose and eradicate the entrenched legal, political, and economic discrimination created by almost half a millennia (a millennia!!!) of forced subjugation is beyond me.

After the ordeal of American history, you ascend into a reflecting pool, which I'm sure has been a necessary stop for many to reflect upon their experience and to compose themselves. Today, when we entered, we were just in time to see a marriage proposal. It was a very sweet moment, but as touching as it was, it would be a lie to say that it did much for my sadness or anger.