Bret Devereaux

The problem with this argument is that it completely begs the question. If indeed the US was institutionally racist and organized around slavery from its founding the existence of an opposition movement and egalitarian rhetoric wouldn't disprove that at allhttps://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1460374958530568195 …

My own view is that both narratives, the - to use a simplistic label - 'America's original sin' narrative and (also simplified) 'America land of the free' narrative are equally true, but incomplete without the other.

The latter obviously goes astray when proponents of it try to deny the very obvious deep flaws and injustices that run like cracks through the founding. Slavery is the most obvious, but by no means the only one.

But the former narrative, I think, errs when it treats those things as unique to the American project, rather than something you can find in the history of basically any current state. The number of countries currently founded on stolen land is all of them...