Why America Is at War Over the History of Slavery

"As half of the country earnestly searches for a new understanding of our racial history, the other half violently denies it. Half of our neighbors are demagoguing critical race theory, while the other half are busy reading it. Smith has bravely stepped into that fray, asking a large swath of the country to soberly consider how their communities, and even their own families, contributed to our nation's original sin. “You have millions of people who are recalibrating their understandings of what America was and what America has been and what America is today,” Smith told me. “And as a result, you have this incredible amount of pushback from people for whom asking questions of American history is an existential threat to them because then they have to ask questions of themselves.”