Exceptionalist denial of past wrongs is itself a threat to freedom

Evidence

Presciently, just before making its final recommendations, the commission put forth this warning: … The belief that we Americans are exceptional often threatens our freedom by allowing us to look complacently at evil-doing elsewhere and to insist that “it can’t happen here.” Recalling the events of exclusion and detention, ensuring that later generations of Americans know this history, is critical immunization against infection by the virus of prejudice and the emotion of wartime struggle. “It did happen here” is a message that must be transmitted, not as an exercise in self-laceration but as an admonition for the future. Among our strengths as a nation is our willingness to acknowledge imperfection as well as to struggle for a more just society. It is in the spirit of continuing that struggle that the Commission recommends several forms of redress. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 206

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The commission positions historical memory of injustice as civic immunization against future prejudice — an argument that reframes reparations as protective infrastructure, not self-laceration.
• XREF: connects to: The denial of embodiment is itself a flight from human freedom’s risks — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 455