We know about Jim Crow, but we don’t know about it. We read the history in the books, we see the trite movies. But we don’t understand the horrific and total devastation that institutionalized racism wrought…. Just like my mind can’t truly conceptualize things like infinity or four-dimensional space, so too is it incapable of understanding the reality of centuries of historical racism. You can see a movie, or attend a lecture. But it’s the small glimpses into this particular negative infinity (glimpses Ellison provides) that makes you at least begin to understand how little you actually know.

The first step then isn’t so much to adopt this or that remedial policy, but to simply step back and acknowledge it. Show it the respect it deserves. I won’t pretend to speak for African-Americans. But I suspect many crave a sincere acknowledgment of reality more than a particular set of remedial policies. That’s because if you know enough (or, perhaps, forgotten enough) to acknowledge this reality, then the policies will work themselves out. For instance, it’s impossible to believe that someone who has truly acknowledged the gravity of the historical crimes could ever bring themselves to oppose voting rights legislation. These same people could never bring themselves to speak in code, and so on.

In a perverse way, Bull Connor is almost reassuring. That’s because his very existence at least validates the historical reality. We know the history is real because Bull Connor exists – because he unleashes the dogs. And as long as he is the enemy, he will lose in the end.

But the second wave – the post-Connors (Nixon, Atwater, Rehnquist, etc.) – are far more clever and insidious. That’s because they do something worse than unleashing dogs – they deny the historical reality. Their preferred tactic is to convince people to ignore it, or to pretend like it’s been magically fixed. To them, the consequences of racism aren’t the problem anymore. The problem is that you, white person, are being discriminated against. It’s this latter argument that has been so ingeniously effective. It allows people (non-racist people) to ignore historical reality – “The Reality” – and to oppose civil rights legislation not for racist reasons, but for reasons of perceived self-interest…