Leonard Pitts: If 'good' white people don't decry Arbery's death, then, maybe, you're not that good

[c-rational]

10. K&R. "This is America so don't hold your breath." Unfortunately so true, another iteration.

There was a chilling Book Review in the New Yorker's April 27th issue, "City Limits", What a white-supremacist coup looks like by Caleb Crain. It reports that on November 10, 1898 , just after Election Day, white supremacists overthrew the city government of Wilmington, North Carolina and forced the resignation of the mayor, the aldermen and the chief of police, who were all black. The white mob then burned down the office an an African-American newspaper and killed an unknown number of black townspeople.

The truth of this travesty was finally recovered in 1951 by two black historians. As the review states, memory and understanding alone are morally ambiguous- in my words whites need more than a history lesson. In 2018 North Carolina passed an amendment that limited the vote to holders of state-issued ID's. This measure reprises the kind of obstacle to black voter registration cleared away in 1985 (by the Fusionists), and restored by white supremacists in 1899. The article concludes with the sentence"Merely remembering the past will hardly stop those who are trying to repeat it."

What am I doing is a very good question.