American Progress (Or, White Complacency)

I’ve been thinking a lot about progress—the idea of progress. How, in America, we are taught to believe progress is inevitable. Our history is presented as a narrative of ever-increasing liberality. The idea being, yes, things were bad in, say, the Antebellum South, but it was all part of the journey to freedom.  So goes the rhetoric. And in our history, inconvenient truths that refute this ideal are eclipsed by the larger ideological mission—democracy. Read Full Piece