WHEN YOU FIND YOURSELF YOU FIND FLAWS:

[I]n today's woke age, Americans have yet to find an equilibrium for evaluating who they are. Recognizing the country's legacy of flawed, incomplete national stories does not entail replacing one lopsided narrative with another. After all, in an ideal world, US citizens of all colors, ethnicities, and classes would honor and discuss multiple layers of the past.

The problem for many Americans is that embracing "wokeness" requires them to grapple with their whiteness. Although much of the United States' past has been racially whitewashed, Americans can't simply erase that whiteness or treat it primarily as a problem to be overcome. We cannot resolve one imbalance by creating another.

Part of the challenge is America's unusually binary culture, at least in terms of its prevailing national narrative. In the 1950s, the dominant narrative featured a country uniquely driven by freedom, middle-class prosperity, democracy, and a voice for all. The story of slavery was a redemptive one, with the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation demonstrating that the US had morally strayed but ultimately returned to the righteous path. The end of post-Civil War Reconstruction and the subsequent Jim Crow era of legally enforced racial segregation in the former Confederate states were elided almost completely.

This was a triumphant narrative whose heroes were, by and large, white men. Native Americans were visible, if at all, only in brief benign cameos at the first Thanksgiving and then as enemies on the frontier. A few African-Americans - such as George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington - made brief appearances to reinforce the story.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, there was an almost complete reversal of that narrative, and one-time heroes became villains. This narrative discovered new heroes like the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and the women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony, and brought out of the shadows buried injustices, including widespread lynchings of blacks and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre (100 years ago last month). The oppression that America had conveniently and purposefully air-brushed from the historical picture was now crowding back in. As Malcolm X memorably put it, "Our forefathers were not the Pilgrims. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock; the Rock was landed on us."

Today, rejection of the "whitewashing of American history" and efforts to confront structural racism have triggered a conservative backlash, with Republican lawmakers pushing bills through state legislatures that ban the teaching of "critical race theory" in school curricula.

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