Denial of racial history erodes white Americans’ grasp of reality

Evidence

The lie works like a barrier and keeps the nastiness of our living from becoming a part of the American story, while those who truly know what happened remember differently. “What is most terrible is that American white men are not prepared to believe my version of the story, to believe that it happened,” Baldwin declared. “In order to avoid believing that, they have set up in themselves a fantastic system of evasions, denials, and justifications, [a system that] is about to destroy their grasp of reality, which is another way of saying their moral sense.” The marks of Oedipus’s thongs remain, and some, like a Greek chorus, can see exactly where all of this is leading us. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 183

Categorization

• DEFINE: Fleshes out the lie’s mechanism: evasions and denials destroy moral sense by destroying one’s grip on reality itself.
• XREF: connects to: Ideological identity, not ignorance, drives whites’ wrong history answers — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 116