American goodness narratives erase the value gap rather than confront it

Evidence

For her and her Tea Party supporters, America has always been good. Even when we were wrong, we were right. So in this misstatement of fact, the image of America as an ethnic melting pot, an Ellis Island image, is read back onto our national beginnings and the end of slavery is seen as part of our founding. The value gap gets completely lost in her insistence that America has been abolitionist since its beginning. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 124

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘even when wrong, we were right’ formulation echoes the reader’s own writing on national myth-making and how exceptionalism forecloses reckoning. — connects to: The American absence of shame at paid work perpetuates economic injustice — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 217