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Before earning her Ph.D, Dr. Leigh McKagen pondered what her research would look like. A Virginia Tech graduate twice over (in 2006 and 2009), Dr. McKagen was teaching at her alma mater and was mentally working herself into the right state of mind to go for the doctorate. Her problem was settling a subject for her dissertation from the world of culture, politics, history, and ethics.

One evening, after putting their daughter to bed, Dr. McKagens husband invited her to watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with him. This was fortuitous, as she had been considering looking at American Science Fiction as a subject. Before she knew it, the long time science fiction fan had been sucked in by TNG, and soon Voyager, watching two and three shows a day logging every single episode over a year and a half.

She found Picard to be an amazing leader, but it was Janeway who really piqued her interest. She dove headfirst into the world of the U.S.S. Voyager and its adventures in the Delta Quadrant, and how those stories reflected a style of storytelling that can trace its roots from Gullivers Travels to Gunsmoke. Even without knowing it, Janeway and her crew were a part of an imperial saga, told by the Spanish, French, English, and yes, Americans, to justify conquest.

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In between teaching at Virginia Tech, raising her three-year-old, giving birth to a baby boy, and through the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. McKagen wrote her masterpiece, which looks at the cultural significance of Star Trek: Voyager, and how the show and its star, Kate Mulgrew, both pushed the boundaries of what had been done for a female characters in the role of leader within the boundaries of the genre of American Science Fiction.

StarTrek.com: Tell us about your project:

Dr. Leigh McKagen: My dissertation is a case study, essentially, of Star Trek: Voyager, and the various ways that European Imperialism and imperial ideologies and practices are written into the narrative. This happens in a number of ways, including the reliance on castaway and adventure narratives that serve to establish the right of the explorer in the way of American settler colonialism.

I explore the way that Voyager taps into the creation of the domestic space-home against the wilds of the frontier of the Delta Quadrant, as one of the many traditions of American imperialism. That was fundamental in the creation of an American empire and an American nation.

Then I ended the project with an exploration of ways that Voyager offers some moments of exception to these imperial narratives. The way to think about how the genre, Star Trek in particular, and American Science Fiction television more broadly, could move beyond that.

The overarching purpose of moving beyond these narratives is the crisis known as the Anthropocene the Climate Crisis of the 21st Century that was in large part caused by Western imperialism and capitalism. Im seeking a way to use this work as a way to not only diagnose the problem, but also see where change could come, or where change could happen within those dominant, and often unacknowledged narratives.

How did you become interested in using Star Trek for this huge project?

LM: It sort of happened almost by accident. In terms of general interest in the show, and then well speak academically, they are sort of two separate things. I actually did not watch a lot of Star Trek growing up unlike a lot of academics who work with Star Trek. So I think I come at it sort of from the perspective from writing about it, which puts me in an interesting position. I was familiar with it, and I had seen a few episodes. I knew the pop-culture significance of the series, but I hadnt really dug into Star Trek. I was very interested in popular culture as a teaching tool.

I started using a lot of science fiction and fantasy TV in my classes. I would show a Buffy the Vampire [Slayer] episode and we would talk about communication. I used those tools as a way to bridge the gap for my students between the academic stuff that they were reading and their real life.

So when I started thinking about a Ph.D. I sat down and talked with [the director of the academic program], and said I want to write a dissertation on science fiction, on science fiction television. I want to explore how this genre engages with America and American culture. This particular genre of American television engages with the story that we tell ourselves about what it means to be American.

And then my husband, Branden, said Hey, lets start watching Next Generation! I said sure. I had never really sat down and watched from start to finish. It sounded great.

It didnt take long of watching it for me, not only to get hooked as a science fiction fan, and also as someone who was working with the genre from an academic standpoint. My original ideas for the dissertation actually involved talking about and tracking 20 years worth of American television.

But my committee said this was really a big project. They encouraged me to cut it down and to pick just one show to work with. It was hard enough to juggle the 172 Voyager episodes, not to mention the many others.

Through all of this I still was not really sure exactly where I was going to engage with the genre, but I started reading more about imperialism and in particular, ways that imperialism is still a very much present and ongoing formation and player in not only the global order but also in our daily lives in ways that we often dont talk about or dont acknowledge. America has always pushed against the label of being an empire, even though we absolutely always have been, from the early days of settler colonialism.

I was very interested in how that started playing out in these narratives that we tell about the present, as science fiction does, but also about the future, which Star Trek, in particular, really tries to engage with.

Why did you focus on Voyager, and not TNG or Deep Space Nine?

LM: In large part, it was a practical decision in picking Voyager, because a lot less people talk about Voyager, which made it seem more manageable for me and also perhaps, more interesting. Everyone wants to talk about The Next Generation because its amazing.

Voyager is often a footnote in somebodys book. Im reading these books about the myth of Star Trek and even ones that were written in the late 90s and early 2000s, there are only two pages on Voyager. I still really dont know why people dont talk about it, but I did, and it was fun.

One of my committee members kept pushing me on [saying] youve got to think about what was going on in the 90s and why Voyager was doing these things and tackling these issues.

It is very important and interesting to look at the time period in which these shows are being made. I think that Deep Space Nine and Voyager really do reflect the deep uncertainty in the 90s, where we the government and the popular narrative was really trying to figure out what was going on. In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and in the wake of the Cold War and the rising Culture Wars, and I hit on this in a couple places trying to figure out what was really going on. To some degree, those shows are a reflection of that.

What were some episodes of Star Trek that got away from the imperialistic narrative?

LM: The Next Generation episode that did this best was Inner Light. Its one of everybodys favorites; it won a Hugo for very good reason and its a phenomenal episode because they lose. Because Picard just lives that life unable to save things; Picard as Kamin, he does not win and they do witness the natural destruction of the planet. Picard has to take that and live with those ideas.

Theres something to be said in studying and exploring those episodes, and Voyager plays with those in a couple of ways. Like Memorial and theres definitely potential there. I think its important to note that and I think that is why I really wanted to keep that last chapter but maybe thats not the point right now. Its important to engage in that, even though its a minor part or an afterthought of the project in some ways it might seem. But to note when something is going well or perhaps differently in completive ways and more could be done with that.

Why is Janeway so important?

LM: Theres a cover of the January 1995 Entertainment Weekly that has Janeway in uniform, which was out right before the series aired as the flagship show of this new network (the UPN). And the tag of the cover of the magazine says boldly going where only men have gone before. And I think that in a lot of ways, that was really important in the 90s. And it continued to be important to me, maybe as a female audience member, but certainly someone who was engaging with the show, even in my 30s, that this is such a male-dominated show up until the 90s.

Entertainment Weekly

While theres a lot of Janeway thats masculine, they at least wanted to engage with that, or straddle that kind of passionate captain in ways that not even Picard isnt quite able to be.

For me, I think that makes Janeway a more interesting study than someone like Picard or Sisko, who was great, and even Archer. Trying to watch through all these series, all the captains were unique in their own way and they have their own battles to fight, which make each series unique. But Janeway was in the position as being the only female captain, but being the only female captain in exile. She cant just go and get new crewmembers when something isnt going her way.

She cant just turn to the Federation for help not that Picard and others could do that either, but sometimes there were problems with communications or what have you. So shes very much the solo figure. [At the same time], shes just such a strong character and always so decisive and really smart. Theres definitely a lot to admire about Janeway.

What does it mean now that Michael Burnham an African American woman is the face of the Star Trek franchise?

LM: Its two fold: I think its amazing that we also had a second in command main character (Burnham) but we also had the captain (Georgiou). The captain and the second in command are both female and not white, and I think that those are great things.

I think that theres some very interesting things happening with Discovery, and I look forward to sitting down and watching that series a lot more carefully, and engaging with it as perhaps a follow-up to the things that were happening in the earlier series. In particular, in Voyager, a female-led show, going where no man has gone before.

What could Star Trek do to change the narrative in science fiction?

LM: Thats someplace that I definitely want to go with my research. The final chapter engages with some of the ways they could have done that. Then I think that if Western Science Fiction, and particularly American Science Fiction will have to move away from the classic western approach and shift to stories like AfroFuturism and other alternatives. Thats ultimately what Id like to see.

Some of the ideas from Ursula K. Le Guin, who was such an amazing science fiction author, and the ideas of thinking about stories that dont have to have a beginning, middle, and end. Where you dont have to triumph over something or return home. What would have happened if the Voyager story ended like it did with Oblivion did in that one episode. It would have been depressing, sure, but substantially more realistic in the long run.

In order to move beyond the hero-journey, which is very imperialistic, we must ditch the hero. If anybody could do it then I think it could be Star Trek and that would have a whole lot of power.

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Eric Pesola (he/him) lives in Virginia with his wife, children, shitzhu, and cats named Archer and Hoshi. The dog is not named after a Trek character. Hes on Twitter as @epesola .

See the original post here:
How Voyager, Janeway, and Star Trek Pushed Science Fiction into Bold New Directions - Star Trek

Nothing surprising has happened, Koppel continued. Nothing surprising is anticipated.

Surprise was an interesting metric for assessing value. Not significance. Not importance. Not expectation that reporters report. Just a demand for surprise, like a 7-year-old might make after giving a grudging kiss to Great Aunt Mary.

Its painful to think what Koppel and his viewers might have learned, the foreshadowing of foreshadowings, had he not grabbed his condenser mic and gone home. Would Koppel have been able to connect the language of the 1996 platform with the rhetoric of the 1992 Republican Party convention, a platform which now not only demanded full constitutional rights for the unborn, but denied them to the just-born? Could he have seen the significance of the platforms proposed constitutional amendment denying automatic citizenship to infants whose parents who are either not legally present or not long-term residents of this country? Could he have projected that far forward, and imagined implications for 2016 or 2020?

After all, it was in 1992 when the Republicans met in Houston and heard failed candidate and very successful influencer Pat Buchanan warn of the dangers that lay ahead in what was framed as his Culture Wars speech.

My friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are, cautioned the future Patron Saint of Hanging Chads. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans.

There is a religious war going on in this country, " Buchanan continued. It is a cultural war this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side.

Its 1992, and Pat Buchanan has already painted an indelible bulls-eye on Hillary Clintons back. Its 1996, and the sound of silence is 15,000 credentialed media not following Ted Koppel out the door.

I get the need for pageantry, the need to distract from such grim messengers. I have seen my share of balloon drops. (Indeed, I was once caught in a blind corner in the Astrodome during the balloon drop when an overhead net of balloons got stuck, relentlessly dumping its entire load in one spot. When the high tide mark passed 5 feet with no end in sight, a woman from the Michigan delegation took a deep breath, dived into the balloons, and emerged moments later, waving her shoe victoriously over her head. She then proceeded to methodically puncture each balloon with a swift swack of her stiletto. Years before Romneycare, Mitts sister-in-law saved my life.)

And I get the need for excitement.

My first convention was Detroit in 1980. I was only 23, and by the time the Republican convention was gaveled into order, Ronald Reagan still hadnt picked his running mate. During pre-convention negotiations, an unorthodox proposal emerged: Former president Gerald Ford would join the ticket as Reagans vice president, but with unspecified expanded powers. Fords representatives in these negotiations reportedly included Henry Kissinger, who would become secretary of state in the co-presidents Cabinet. Rumors of the possible deal began to leak did I mention Henry Kissinger was involved? but in those pre-cell phone days, the best delegates and reporters could do was try to puzzle out the body language as Ford and Walter Cronkite settled down in the CBS skybox for a friendly chat.

In the end, of course, it was George H.W. Bush, but not before there were some spectacular multi-reporter pileups as people ran back and forth through the narrow corridor connecting Joe Louis Arena with the media workspace in Cobo Hall.

Conventional wisdom among the regulars reporters, campaign staff, and consultants who have inhabited the same bubble long before COVID is that this will be the year that the nominating conventions are finally finished off.

No business gets done at a national convention that couldnt be done remotely, Steve Grossman, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, told the Globe recently, a sure sign hes getting a bit socially distant from reality.

This has been a hard year. Social distancing has exposed the limitations of social networking. We need to gather. Four years from now, when the parties must select their nominees, there will still be much rebuilding to be done. To do that, people need to come together all the people who see a chance to be part of something bigger than themselves. That includes the protesters, the true believers, and the T-shirt vendors. The numbers crunchers and the no-free-lunchers. The retired and the dead tired. And of course that guy with the boot on his head.

Individuals without community are without substance, while communities without individuals are blind, observed the great 19th century philosopher Josiah Royce. It will be as true in 2024 as it is today.

Margaret Doris is a Boston-based writer.

See the article here:
The community of political conventions - The Boston Globe

Arp, too, saw the issue through the lens of Trump-era polarization. Theres something in the ethos or the zeitgeist of the country currently, in which people have decided theyre going to be on one side or another of some sort of, you know, great woke divide, Arp told me, adding: Anything thats patriotic is automatically evil in some peoples eyes. Its automatically aligned with some sort of ism or phobia, without any discussion of merits or actual history.

5

So what was the actual history? Like many other arguments in the Trump era, that question would soon boil over.

One of the first people it started to scald was Geoff Paddock, the other Democrat on the city council. At first he had little interest in the debate. Whereas Hines had vehemently objected to the Wayne Day resolution, Paddock had not spoken up during the meeting, and then he joined the majority who voted for it. In the moment, Paddock later told me, his only thought was that it would look bad for the city if its council spurned its namesake.

But a few days later, a retired pastor in Paddocks district, John Gardner, asked him for a copy of the resolutionwriting that from what he had heard, it appears to express the sentiments and work of a white nationalist, according to emails I obtained under a public records law.

Paddock, who also ran a nonprofit organization that developed a riverside park near downtown, passed on the request to the councils administrator, Megan Flohr, telling her he would try to convince the pastor that he was no white nationalist.

Theres no win on this one, Flohr wrote back. If it failed, you all would have gotten dragged for not supporting history. But passing it is bringing up these points. No win.

Yes, Paddock wrote. I knew that when it was introduced. Hopefully, we will get by this one.

Gardner later told me that he had been stewing about Wayne Day since first hearing about it, seeing it as a bully move that, in his view, seemed to reflect the same toxic racial animus behind 2017s Unite the Right rally by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia. But after receiving a copy of the resolution, Gardner decided to read a biography of Wayne.

What he learned in the book about Waynes actual life, he said, caused him to become even more enraged.

6

As I sorted through this debate myself by studying books and interviewing historians, it struck me how sanitized my childhood exposure to my hometowns past had been. In the period after Fort Wayne was built and before the natives were forced to leave, it could be an ugly place.

The government used the fort to distribute annual treaty payments it had promised the natives in exchange for giving up their lands. The money attracted white traders who sold them manufactured goods and liquor, turning annuity days into exploitative bacchanals, contemporaneous accounts show.

Beset by rising alcoholism and dependency on annuities, tribes in the region like the Miami declined, able neither to adapt to the new culture of private property and yeoman farming, as an aging Little Turtle urged, nor to preserve their way of life. Between annuity days, the traders encouraged the tribes to buy on credit, running up debts that their existing payments could not cover. The government leveraged this dynamic to continually push Miami leaders to sell ever more reservation land, and then to agree to the tribes eventual removal.

Read more:
When the Culture Wars Hit Fort Wayne - POLITICO

The debate over wearing masks was never part of a culture war, and when we refer to it as such we miss the depth and danger of its significance. The debate was, instead, another marker flashing red on the march toward authoritarianism in the days of Donald Trump.

Mercifully, when Trump reversed his stance and recommended mask wearing at a press conference last Tuesday, he lost. It was a significant setback for him. But what he lost has nothing to do with culture. It had to do with his power over America's reality.

Words mean things, and in these confusing times it's critical that we use our words precisely. We should take special care with words that have to do with two most urgent matters in our country the coronavirus, and Donald Trump's presidency.

Culture wars are not just any fight between Donald Trump and his followers and the rest of they country, they are arguments over values. A culture war is won once a critical mass of the population has reached a consensus on one side of a debate or another, then that value is generally accepted. Most Americans move on after that, some never do.

This is not what is happened in the mask debate. In fact, it's imprecise to even call what happened a debate. It was an attempted imposition of reality.

To begin, public health is not a value judgement, it is scientific. It has nothing to do with what is right or wrong. It has to do with what is dangerous and what is not dangerous for the human body. Unlike most battles in America's culture wars, it is concerned not with one's perception based on religious affiliation or political party, but only with objective fact.

It is Trump's treatment of public health facts his desire to bend them to his will that makes his stance on masks not another attempt to start a culture war, but rather an attempt at petty despotism.

In a perfect totalitarian regime there is no objective fact, there is only reality imposed by the leader and the regime. Trump was recalcitrant about wearing masks even as the consensus among an overwhelming number of Americans was that masks help slow the spread of coronavirus, and that we should wear them in public.

A consensus like the one we see in this case would settle any culture war, but this was not a culture war. It was a battle between reality and an autocrat, Donald Trump. This has nothing to do with reaching consensus.

Trump has a myriad of reasons for wanting to impose a reality in which coronavirus is not a danger to Americans. For one thing, in his invented reality, he isn't responsible for this mess. In his reality kids can go back to school, the economy is fine, and out of work Americans can just go out and get a job if they want one.

Instead of doing the actual work to make the country safe for people to move around in, Trump and his allies at the highest levels of government, like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp who is trying to outlaw mask mandates in his state are using their power to enforce a fantasy. This obtrusive game of pretend comes directly from the dictator's handbook. It's how Russia's Joseph Stalin hid an empire-wide famine from 1932-1933, for example.

Of course, this isn't Russia, this is America a place where we are very uncomfortable with our long flirtation with facsism. We collectively cringe when the words associated with totalitarianism are applied to our politics, so we tend to ignore its influence.

Historically, we do not like to accept that the Confederacy was a fascist nation born within our democracy, or that the Ku Klux Klan, a fascist organization, wielded immense political power in large swaths of the country within the last century. This autocratic undercurrent is not included in the song of America we teach our children. We almost never call it by its right name. This denial makes us vulnerable as Masha Gessen, author of the book "Surviving Autocracy" pointed out in an interview with Slate.

"I think one of the weaknesses that Trumpism taps into is American exceptionalism and is what some scholars have called the American civil religion, this religious belief in the Constitution, in the perfection of the structure and this republic," Gessen said. "And this structure is deeply imperfect, and I would also argue that it hasn't been very well tended to in the last few decades. It has become more imperfect, more rickety."

When we reduce Trump's stance on masks to a simple "culture war" it is in part because of our blindness to the imperfection of the American experiment.

While politicians wax superficially about whether or not the founders intended us to cover our faces, Trump thinks only of how he can use his power to bend reality for his benefit, and how he can impose that on us. That is what fascists do. But instead of acknowledging that and what it says about what's happening to us we ignore it and try to call Trump's reality-bending something more familiar, more palatable for our democratic society, like a culture war.

This mask debate also has nothing to do with identities like Republican or Democrat. They are irrelevant if we are to take those words to mean what they've meant for the last few decades.

In the past, a disagreement between those two parties would mean a disagreement between two democratic (little d) parties. That's not what this is. That old distinction was rendered meaningless when Republicans abandoned reality, the rule of law and consensus. Instead Republicans must accept reality as it's handed down by Donald Trump, and their caterwauling over masks is simply another example of that. It has nothing to do with "liberty."

America is in the throes of what Hungarian sociologist Blint Magyar calls an "autocratic attempt." It is the first stage on the way to totalitarianism. In his framework the autocrat tries to bend rules and norms until they break. The attempt is followed by an "autocratic breakthrough" and then "autocratic consolidation." The transition is not a "slide," which implies that it moves at a steady, predictable clip. It is a tug of war.

That is to say these sort of autocratic attempts don't come without some pushback from within the institutions that are being broken . At times we see the GOP struggling with its transition from its old democratic self. And that struggle is especially difficult during the coronavirus because it is such lethal force of reality.

Last week, Trump was was pressing Republicans to subvert reality in his favor by leaving funding for more testing out of the upcoming coronavirus aid bill. Thankfully that attempt failed.

That failure was the moment when Trump lost his crusade against masks. It was because of a lack of raw political power, not because he has any respect for public health or society's consensus. If he senses his power returning, do not be shocked if he reverses course on masks again.

Trump firmly believes he is entitled to control reality, to assert himself and his followers above all else. His politics are not the politics of seeking accord, because fascism is not about accord, it's about domination. It is not a debate. It is a demand. But we do not have to accede.

Link:
Mask debate is not culture war, its Trump trying to distort reality, facts - Business Insider

Americans are living in an era when efforts to forge a new national identity what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. characterized as a "beloved community" free of racial injustice are directly confronting deeply entrenched national myths rooted in white supremacy. We are in the midst of what amounts to America's Third Reconstruction.

In the wake of the Civil War, the architects of Reconstruction (1865-1877) made a valiant attempt to create a new interracial democracy. It faltered in the face of brutal violence, legal decisions that assaulted Black citizenship, and a political system that reinforced racial divisions thought to have been eradicated after the war. In the years that followed, segregationists erected Confederate monuments, massacred Black towns, and imposed a version of American history rooted in vicious racist myths that became part of our national culture.

Movies such as "Birth of a Nation" (1915) and "Gone With the Wind" (1939), racist memorabilia such as lawn jockeys, and everyday items such as Aunt Jemima syrup and Uncle Ben's rice reflected not only personal indignities but wider injuries related to policies and systems of racial oppression.

America's Second Reconstruction, the civil rights movement's heroic period in the 1950s and 1960s, attempted to combat the symbols and substance of white supremacy and anti-Black racism, but its mission -- despite watershed legal and legislative victories like Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Fair Housing Acts -- remains incomplete.

America's Third Reconstruction began with the soaring promise of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election and the victory of a campaign that millions took to be a definitive symbol of historic racial progress.

Dreams that a Black president could prove transformative to national race relations proved short-lived, and the emerging Black Lives Matter movement during Obama's second term exposed the limited impact of a Black First Family on entrenched systems of oppression.

This year has ushered in the most dynamic social movement for racial justice in American history as Black Lives Matter 2.0 awakened the entire nation to a reality of White supremacy -- made more legible to millions of White Americans who, in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, shelter-in-place orders and mass unemployment showed new layers of empathy in taking the streets to protest against the killing of George Floyd.

If 2008 reflected hopes that one Black leader could transform racial injustice from the inside out, 2020 bears witness to the power of millions of Americans seeking fundamental transformation of systems of racial injustice from the bottom up.

The 1619 Project, the New York Times' multimedia history of racial slavery and democracy since the arrival of the first enslaved African in Jamestown Colony, Virginia, has become the latest battleground in our long running cultural war over the very meaning of freedom, democracy and citizenship.

Conceived by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project sought to uncover the deep and broad roots of racial slavery and its aftermath on American democracy in ways that have been forgotten, ignored and distorted.

The project brilliantly explored slavery's relationship with capitalism, the creation of a racial caste system and the perpetuation of disparities in wealth and health care that are based on systems rooted in bondage.

Readers of the 1619 Project come away with a better and historically sophisticated understanding of how slavery fostered supply chains of power and privilege for Whites and misery and grief for Blacks -- in ways that have received dedicated scholarly attention but comparatively scant public debate.

Tom Cotton, the US senator from Arkansas who publicly called for the use of military troops to route racial justice protesters in the spring, has introduced legislation designed to prevent the teaching of the 1619 Project in public schools.

The poverty of Cotton's historical explanation is surpassed by the mendacity of his description of racial slavery -- a practice which slaughtered, maimed, killed, raped and crushed the bones, but not the spirits, of generations of Black human beings.

The Civil War's gruesome death toll of more than 600,000 Americans obliterates his assertion that the founders realized that slavery would one day be removed from the face of the republic.

Parts of America still remain divided against itself. Cotton's efforts to impugn the 1619 Project form the latest effort in a war over the narrative that began as soon as the Civil War ended.

While the North won the physical battle, the South proved victorious in retelling the story of racial slavery to future generations. The "Lost Cause" has proven tenacious enough that even 21st century schoolchildren are frequently taught that the Civil War was fought over "states' rights" instead of racial slavery.

The 1619 Project refutes this hollow narrative victory with a national history that reflects the bitter fruits of racial slavery and violence as well as the beauty of generations of Black Americans who helped reimagine democracy with an indefatigable will.

Slavery represented an incomprehensible moral and political evil, one that the founders, subsequent presidents, abolitionists and enslaved Black Americans wrestled and debated -- but it was never a necessary one.

Suggesting otherwise perpetuates the acceptance of slavery's legacy. To believe otherwise is to endorse the continuation of a seemingly unbroken chain of wrong turns and bad choices made collectively by a nation that has remained, until as recently as a few months ago, willfully blind to the racial sins of the past.

Cotton's words remind us that a "narrative war" continues in our own time. The culture wars of the 21st century, like past conflicts, centered around public interpretations of history as a tool to make sense of the present in service of envisioning the country's political future.

The choice ahead of us is as stark now as it was on the eve of the Civil War. America can choose a liberated future that acknowledges past racial sins in a generational effort at atonement and repair -- or we can double down on the same willful blinders that got us in this mess, aided by rationalizations that describe incomprehensible evil as the cost of doing business.

Read more from the original source:
America is on a brink like none since the Civil War - CNN