I can understand the basic principle you use to condemn the sins of the past while seeking to heal its wounds, for if the parties to a conflict never find a way to accomodate each other, there is no end to the conflict, whatever forms it takes.
The problem is that the history of your country is replete with a determination by some people, whether they are in organized groups or not, to deny Black people the place they deserve in the writing of that history, and I am not sure if the South, in some respects, has ever been reconciled with its defeat, even less the right of its Black citizens to be considered their equal.
It means that Americans, or anyone without proper tuition, live in ignorance of what Black Americans have achieved, when they achieved it, and why so often an 'Age of Achievement' was replaced by an 'Age of Failure'. It would be like the 45th President not only saying, as he has, that Black people are stupid and lazy, but adding, as if it were a generous concession, 'but they are good at sports and can play music very well'. But it becomes deeply problematic when the writing of history becomes an opportunity, not to record it, but to re-write it in order to eliminate people, ideas, movements that the historian doesn't like, to justify the present and those who benefit most from it. So many statues of men appear long afte they were dead, to honour them more for their present meaing rather than their past 'achievement', given that so many were in fact, like the Confederate Generals, losers. Indeed, are these statues not intended to reverse the historical record in some way? As with Robert. Lee in Richmond, so Oliver Cromwell outside Parliament, once the most hated regicide in England, erected in 1899 to remind 'us' of the moral superiority of the British Empire, opposed to the corrupt influence of Roman Catholicism on 'Home Rule' for Ireland.
Because Race in America is a state of mind as well as a state of fact, you have to go beyond Slavery and the Civil War to ask how the country dealt with the aftermath of those two processes. I argue that you find that from an initial fear, indeed, terror, that freed slaves were going to run rampage across the South in violent revenge on their former masters -the fear that led to the first Federal laws on gun control- you find that by the end of the century, Black Americans who had passed the National Civil Service Exam had become an integral part of the US Administration mostly but not solely empoyed in Washington DC, educated, responsible and utterly committed to the Republic.
Add in the cultural explosion of the early 20th century in the music of Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver, and you can see Black Americans not only proving themselves worthy as equal citizens, but shaping the destiny of popular music that would take American music across the world. Aside from the European classical tradition imported by immigrants, American music at one time was Black music, and Black music was American music.
Yet in the first two decades of the century, Roosevelt, Taft, and crucially, Woodrow Wilson, embarked on a sustained campaign to rid the US Administration of its educated and responsible Black employees. It had nothing to do wih efficiency, it wasn't budget cuts leading to job cuts, it was, in stark language, racism, and it came from the very same people who had defeated Slavery and won the Civil War. Thus-
"“Long ago we determined that the Negro never should be our master,”
explained one of Wilson’s administrators, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury John Skelton Williams. Williams vowed “stern, final, definite prohibition” of any “social or political equality.”
Wilson appointed white men to important executive positions usually held by leading black politicians, and racist bureaucrats went out of their way to humiliate, demote, and dismiss ordinary black clerks."
https://theconversation.com/how-the-...stration-52200
When I was an undergraudate, my first impressions of Wilson was of the President who brought the US into the First World War in 1917. It was a decisive move because it tilted the balance of power away from Germany, to the extent that the Germans were unable to reap any benefit from the Bolshevik Revolution and the end of the war with Russia in March 1918. Wilson went further and in his 13 Points offered an aternative 'World Order' to that of the European Empires which in some respects -National Self-Determination' for example- was not so different from what Lenin called for. So revered was Wilson that the first Chair in International Relations in a UK University was established at Aberystwyth in 1919, and it was not until years later that I discovered what an appalling racist this man was.
You might argue this is a good case for reconciling the good with the bad, but if it is also the case that he was reflecting the morals and politics of his age, is not also true he was only representing one trend of that age, that he was also repudiating the morals and the politics that had enabled Black Americans to improve their social and economic position while also contributing to the progress of the USA?
In this attempt at a balancing act, it is difficult to reach a moral conclusion about a man so morally compromised. He did not need to expel Black Americans from their positions, it was not a necessity -it was a choice. Indeed, one wonders if history is being re-written today, or if it is in fact, the same unbroken narrative of American history that has seen multiple and diverse people -freemen and slaves- make the US what it is today, but rarely appear in its history as the
equal creators of that history, because of a need for a few privileged White folks to hang on to their High Command of that narrative.
And is there not a danger that this complex history of inclusion and exclusion, of grudging respect from some, sneering dismissal from others, breeds the resentment that provokes violence on both sides, locked in a monotone narrative of permanent victims?
It seems to me that the divisions that exist in the US run so deep that reconciliation is impossible right now because there is no common ground in the narrative that explains it, no common ground that can end it. Just as there are historians who interpret the Civil War, not as a fight for freedom from slavery, but the birth of the Imperial Presidency the Founding Fathers were opposed to, that Lincoln tolls the death-knell of the American Revolution, and individual liberty as a 'sacred' right.
To paraphrase Ophelia, 'We know what America is, but not what it might be' -history cannot answer the question, because you are still trying to define who you are, and who your country belongs to. On that level, so are all, in the UK, in France -but owing to your size, you are 'writ large' on the world stage. And a gripping, fascinating narrative it is too. I wish you well in your attemp to shape the future, but your past shakes it weary head.