What Appomattox wrought

THE Civil War formally ended slavery but it begat another form of black enslavement: Informal Apartheid. That ended only after the horrific trials of the Civil Rights Era, some 45 years ago. In other words, yesterday. With that (and the Barbour flap) in mind, one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers at the Atlantic, a white Southerner born in the late 1960s, offers an insightful critique on the meaning of guilt, shame and selective memory in the Deep South. An excerpt: "I'd bet money that Haley Barbour is just like his contemporaries in my hometown, including my parents: they have genuinely convinced themselves that things were Just Fine Here ... it's a way of being able to look on all the nice older folks you grew up loving and respecting without having to reckon with the fact that they did horrible things to their black neighbors, either actively or by standing passively by." Powerful stuff. Read all of it here.