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"A great nation does not hide its history, it faces its flaws and corrects them."-President George W. Bush, Opening of the NMAAHC, September 24, 2016

A great Nation does not hide its history. Let that sink in for a moment.

Truer words were never spoken than those offered at the grand opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture last September, by the man who signed the legislation authorizing the Museum, George W. Bush.

Remembering is powerful. Remembering, forces us to become wiser.

We think of the words Never Forget and we instantly remember 9-11 or the Holocaust. We connect because we remember. We look. We learn. We discover. And hopefully, with a little faith, self-discovery and humility we grow into better, more loving human beings.

We do not learn when we run from our wrongs. We learn when we face them.

This is why I, as a black woman, who is a direct lineal descendant of African slaves in my maternal family tree (my grandmother "Viney" was brought to America in the hull of a slave ship in the early 1800s, around 1803 we believe from Africa and was sold to the Henry plantation in Georgia), am opposed to the removal of Confederate statues in the south whether it be here in Richmond, Virginia or deeper south in Alabama.

Although I agree with the powerful words and sentiments expressed by Mayor Landrieu of New Orleans last week about why he thinks Confederate statutes and symbols should come down, I do not think it reflects the great first amendment freedoms America was founded upon.

Let me be clear: I felt very differently about the Confederate flag because it was a waving symbol of hate, rebellion and division flying over modern day state capitols throughout the south. However, I am not opposed to people wearing the confederate flag on their hats or flying it in their yards. That's called "free expression" and in America it is sacrosanct.

Just as we cannot tell people not to buy Nazi paraphernalia or collect it in their homes (no matter how abhorrent we may find it), we likewise cannot tell people they are not allowed to honor family members who fought for the confederacy or that their forbears could not raise monuments to southern heroes like Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson-both of whom were decorated and beloved West Point graduates and union officers before the south seceded from the union in rebellion.

In July 2015 when former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, now UN Ambassador Haley, ordered confederate flags down after the horrific shootings of nine black church members in the historic AME church in downtown Charleston, she was 100% correct.

The symbol was used by Dylan Roof to stoke his murderous rage one night after a Bible study where he killed nine God-fearing black church members. After that incident, the public sentiment shifted and the flag had to come down. More powerfully, South Carolinians taught us all a profound lesson of love, compassion and reconciliation as tens of thousands of them marched together on the famed Arthur J. Ravenel Bridge.
Related: Opinion: Racial Hate Is Infecting College Kids in America
But here is my point: In America, we pride ourselves on free thought. Free expression. Freedom to worship as we believe. Freedom to speak our minds without terrorizing or harassing others (hate speech is not free speech as defined by the US Supreme Court). Freedom to associate with groups and have ideas that may differ from each other, even if they are the "wrong" ideas.

At the end of the day, I don't want statutes of Robert E. Lee to come down.

I attended Washington & Lee University in Lexington Virginia as a first-year law student. It was an experience I will never forget. We had racial threats made against us as the largest black class of law students in the schools storied history, (which I wrote about in a 1998 Washington Post article entitled, "A Black Law Students First Trials"). But our white classmates were as outraged as us, and the Dean reacted swiftly and firmly to handle the perpetrators. We endured.

I don't fear 150-year-old statues of old dead white men. What I fear is the hatred we see in real time in 2017 on social media and in our political rhetoric.

The people who hated having black classmates at their school didn't hate us because there were statues of Robert E. Lee or George Washington (our nation's first President and a slave owner) on campus. It wasn't because of a Gen. Stonewall Jackson monument VMI or downtown.

They didn't like having black classmates because they had racist hearts. They honored racial prejudice. They harbored cultural bias. That, my friends, is what we must work toward eradicating.

And we won't do it by hiding from our racist, slave owning, segregated past. If we start taking statues down, well, we better go for old Thomas Jefferson (master of a slave who was his mistress and mother of at least four of his children). And let's not forget President Trump's favorite president, Old Hickory-Andrew Jackson. Another slave-holding Indian-killing president of our nation. Get my point?

We do not learn when we run from our wrongs. We learn when we face them.

Keep the statues where they are so that people can explain history to their kids. Keep them so that we can have a constructive dialogue at places like Montpelier (the home of President James Madison, who is considered the father of the Constitution).

Montpelier has a series called The Mere Distinction of Colour, a provocative new exhibition examining the institution of slavery and its legacy. Mount Vernon has done something similar with its new slave exhibit as of last year. Monticello announced earlier this year a new wing about Sally Hemings and of course, the new National Museum of African American History and Culture (which was the victim of yet another hateful racial act yesterday) is the place that every American family should go and take their kids, and their grandkids. And teach them, so that they do not repeat our mistakes.
Related: Is Removing Confederate Monuments Like Erasing History?
America is different because we value freedom. Freedom of thought. Of Speech. Of Heritage. Of celebration.

I don't fear 150-year-old statues of old dead white men. What I fear is the hatred we are seeing in real time in 2017 on social media, on our college campuses, in our workplaces and in our political rhetoric (i.e.: Kathy Griffin).

America is advanced citizenship. You have to want it, work at it, and trust that it ultimately works for us all.
Sophia A. Nelson is an NBCBLK Contributor and author of the new book, "E Pluribus One: Reclaiming our Founders Vision for a United America." Follow NBCBLK on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

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Opinion: Confederate monuments should stay and here's why

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I don't fear 150-year-old statues of old dead white men. What I fear is the hatred we see in real time in 2017 on social media and in our political rhetoric.

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Proposal to remove monument

Durham, N.C.

Confederate soldier monument toppled by protesters

Protesters pulled down a statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the Durham County Courthouse in Durham, N.C., on Aug. 14. The statue, which had stood since 1924, was protected by a special law. On Aug. 19, Duke University removed a Robert E. Lee statue from Duke Chapel.

Tampa, Fla.

Confederate statue considered for removal

A Confederate monument in Tampa will only be removed if enough private money is raised, Hillsborough County Commissioners decided on Aug. 16. On Thursday, Tampa's three major sports teams said they would help pay for the monument's removal.

Washington, D.C.

Proposal to remove Confederate statues from U.S. Capitol building, park

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey tweeted late Aug. 16 that he plans on introducing a bill to remove Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol building. On Aug. 17, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, called for the removal of the statues, describing them as "reprehensible." There are at least 12 Confederate statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection of the Capitol building. D.C. officials have called on the National Park Service to remove a statute of Albert Pike, a Confederate general, from a park.

More removed monuments

Ellicott City, Md. "

Confederate memorial removed

Late Monday night, Howard County officials removed a Confederate memorial that had stood outside of a courthouse in Ellicott City, Md. "The more appropriate place for the memorial is in a museum," said Alan H. Kittleman, the county executive, in a post on Facebook.

San Diego "

Plaque honoring Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, removed

The plaque at Horton Plaza Park was removed on Aug. 16. "Monuments to bigotry have no place in San Diego or anywhere!" City Councilor Christopher Ward wrote on Twitter.

St. Petersburg, Fla. "

Plaque honoring Stonewall Jackson removed

A marker honoring the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Highway was taken away on Aug. 15 by city officials who said they did not want it to become a "flashpoint in this national debate."

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Confederate Monuments Are Coming Down Across the United States. Here's a List.

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Proposal to remove monument Confederate soldier monument toppled by protesters Protesters pulled down a statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the Durham County Courthouse in Durham, N.C., on Aug. 14. The statue, which had stood since 1924, was protected by a special law. On Aug.

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Why Cities Shouldn't Take Down Confederate Statues

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If America forgets its past, we won't appreciate the good that has emerged from our national trials.

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In the wake of Charlottesville, a chorus of media outlets, political activists, and random people on the Internet have called for the removal or destruction of Confederate statues in cities across the country. They say we shouldn't honor a bunch of racists who fought to preserve slavery, and that it's long past time for these painful reminders of our past to come down-stow them away in a museum or smash them to pieces, just get them off the streets.

This iconoclastic impulse is a mistake, even after the harrowing events in Charlottesville last weekend. It's a mistake not because there was anything noble about the Confederacy or its raison d'être, which was slavery, but because there is something noble-and, for a free people, necessary-about preserving our history so we can understand who we are and how we should live.

For all the tough talk this week about the problems with these historical monuments, there hasn't been nearly enough discussion of their history. Most of them were built a half-century after the war, as the Civil War generation was beginning to die off. Before the turn of the century, Confederate graves had for the most part not been cared for in federal cemeteries, and erecting a Confederate monument was considered treasonous.

But as the veterans of the war began to die, there was a renewed push for reconciliation between North and South, and with it an outpouring of filial piety. Of course, the monument boom across the South during the first two decades of the twentieth century came at a time of terrible race relations, mass immigration, and the pernicious influence of the Lost Cause mythos, which poisoned the South.

So the monuments reflect more than one current of early twentieth-century America. They served to venerate Confederate heroes like Robert E. Lee, thereby cementing the narrative of the Lost Cause and all its misty-eyed nostalgia about the South. But they were also an outpouring of grief and remembrance for the hundreds of thousands who had died in the war. Nearly a quarter of Southern white men in their twenties were killed or died from disease. Is it any wonder that decades later, as families began to bury Confederate veterans in greater numbers, there would be a push to erect memorials to that generation?

And for as much as Lost Cause mythology adorns so many of these monuments, their purpose was also to convey to future generations why so many people kept fighting, for years and in the face of staggering casualties. For the ordinary soldiers who fought and died, devotion to the Confederate army did not arise primarily from a devotion to the institution of slavery (just as most Union soldiers were not fighting primarily to end slavery) but from a devotion to their home states and a sense of honor and duty to defend them from what they considered to be an invading army.

That they were wrong about slavery does not excuse us today from the burden of trying to understand what motivated them to fight-and what motivated them and their families to undertake a flurry of monument-building decades later as the surviving veterans began to die off.

Speaking on Memorial Day in 1884, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a Union veteran who saw a great deal of action, talked about the importance of transmitting the emotional weight of the war from one generation to the next, and he specifically mentions the role of monuments: "I believe from the bottom of my heart that our memorial halls and statues and tablets, the tattered flags of our regiments gathered in the Statehouses, are worth more to our young men by way of chastening and inspiration than the monuments of another hundred years of peaceful life could be."

For Holmes, it was also the duty of Civil War veterans themselves to convey the significance of the war to posterity. He said, "the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire... we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after."

This Isn't Really About Confederate Monuments

Nevertheless, a common objection to these statues today is that because they occupy public spaces, they serve to venerate their subjects, who were of course racists and fought to preserve slavery. But if we know the history, why can't we see them in a different light? Why shouldn't we view them as we should, as a haunting and cautionary tale?

Certainly, the statues were not originally meant to educate future generations about the evils of slavery and secession, but that doesn't mean that we can't take them as such today. Indeed, the fact that these statues were erected in prominent public places is itself a powerful lesson in American history-a testament to our turbulent past that would be diminished if they were removed to a sanitized display in a museum. Not every statue or piece of public art has to comfort and console us. Sometimes, they should oblige us to grapple with our nation's history and the vagaries of human nature.

Even so, some conservatives are willing to let the things go. Kevin Williamson at NRO urges conservatives to do nothing. "The Left's vandalism is intended mainly to get a rise out of the Right, in the hopes of getting some Republican to wrong-foot himself over a racial question," he writes. Even if some conservatives sympathize with those who want to remove Confederate memorials-and plenty of prominent right-of-center writers clearly do-there's no need to join them because the iconoclasm sweeping the country, says Williamson, "mainly consists of local authorities making democratic decisions about the disposition of public property," and thus "there is a case for political quietism in this matter."

That would be fine advice if it were true that this is really just about local authorities making democratic decisions about statues. It would even be fine if it were just about the moral preening of Democratic politicians and activists, seizing on an opportunity to shame and embarrass Southerners for gradually abandoning their party in favor of the GOP.

But the iconoclasm on display now is about more than anathematizing the Confederacy or scoring cheap political points against hapless Republicans. It's part of the Left's overarching critique of American constitutionalism, the goal of which is to overthrow that order.

The Real Reason The Left Wants To Forget The Past

President Trump was mocked for suggesting that if we tear down statues of Lee then activists would demand the removal of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson next. But sure enough, later in the week the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC was vandalized with spray paint. A Lincoln statue in Chicago was burned. Al Sharpton said the Jefferson Memorial should be abandoned. A pastor in Chicago asked the mayor to remove the names of Washington and Andrew Jackson from city parks because they owned slaves. A writer at Vice News called for Mount Rushmore to be blown up. One columnist in Philly even argued for tearing down a statue of Frank Rizzo, who served as police commissioner and mayor in the late 1960s and '70s. In some cases, any monument would do.

All this sounds crazy, but jumping from Confederate statues to Lincoln to Rizzo follows a certain logic. For the Left, the Confederacy is just a small part of a much larger problem, which is the past. Iconoclasm of the kind we've seen this week is native to the Left, because the entire point is to liberate society from the strictures of tradition and history in order to secure a glorious new future. That's why Mao's Cultural Revolution in China torched temples and dug up ancient graves, why the Soviets sacked Orthodox churches and confiscated church property, and why various governments of France went about de-Christianizing the country during the French Revolution.

The modern-day American Left isn't as bad as all that, but its ideology about the past is more or less the same. Hence the statement issued Thursday by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray calling for the removal of all "symbols of hate, racism and violence that exist in our city." Murray is at least consistent, as he includes not just Confederate symbols but also a well-known statue of Vladimir Lenin. These symbols, Murray says, represent "historic injustices," and "their existence causes pain among those who themselves or whose family members have been impacted by these atrocities."

He is not interested in the history of the statues themselves, the people or events they depict, or "what political affiliation may have been assigned to them in the decades since they were erected." Don't be fooled by the therapeutic language about causing pain. The statues must go because they remind us constantly of a past that needs only to be overcome and forgotten.

A more mature society would recognize that the past is always with you and must always be kept in mind. There's a reason Christians in Rome didn't topple all the pagan statues and buildings in the city, or raze the Colosseum. Edmund Burke had strong words for the French during their revolution, while they were doing their best to destroy a rich past and slaughter one another in the process:

You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you... If the last generations of your country appeared without much luster in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour: and you would have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourself. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789.

That is part of why these memorials and statues are important. Perhaps not all of them need be preserved, but giving into the iconoclasm of the Left, with temperatures running high, will mean we lose far more than we gain by hiding these physical reminders of our nation's troubled past.

Let them stand as a memorial of our ancestors who died, a challenge to understand their time and its troubles, and a warning for the present day.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Why We Should Keep The Confederate Monuments Where They Are

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In the wake of Charlottesville, a chorus of media outlets, political activists, and random people on the Internet have called for the removal or destruction of Confederate statues in cities across the country.

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Protesters toppled the 'Silent Sam' Confederate statue on Aug. 20 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gerry Broome/AP

When protesters tore down the "Silent Sam" Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill on Aug. 20, it wasn't just destruction of state property - a crime for which the protesters are now being investigated.

Rather, the protesters knocked a powerful symbol of white supremacy from its pedestal - both literally and figuratively. Silent Sam, after all, was meant to pay tribute to those who wanted to maintain slavery.

With the backing of the state, Silent Sam has stood proudly and defiantly at UNC Chapel Hill since 1913. Now the statue has become one of many in dozens of cities and municipalities where monuments of Confederate soldiers and generals have been removed - mostly with official sanction.

But what, if anything, will this latest removal of a Confederate statue accomplish?

While the removal of Silent Sam was a joyous moment for protesters who had long requested that the university acknowledge that the statue was a divisive symbol of white supremacy - for the opposing side, it was an example of what they call the intolerance of the left, particularly among those who oppose the views and policies of President Trump.

Slavery at root of divide

This divide has deep historical roots. Silent Sam and the other 700-plus Confederate statues still standing in the U.S. represent a legacy of slavery and the structural racism that followed.

My book, " The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History," documented one important aspect of antebellum slavery. The harsh and devastating reality of slave auctions meant that profit mattered more than people. My book is one of many new books that seek to remind a forgetful public of America's original sin.

Beginning first in Virginia in 1662, with the other colonies and states following suit, officials enacted laws to specify that slave status followed the condition of the mother. This continued right up to the eve of the Civil War in 1861 where the enslaved were still bought and sold on the open market. And so, until the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, to be black in America was synonymous with a separate and unequal status.

The American Civil War was fought to settle the question as to whether blacks should continue to be separate and unequal or whether the United States of America would finally be united - united in its commitment to the notion of justice and equality put forth in the Declaration of the Independence.

The simple fact is that the North won the war, and in winning it, the North preserved the union. The Confederate statues, therefore, represent a step backwards - a symbol of what the United States once was - not what it is now.

Averting a civil war over statues

Today, the nation is experiencing what some call a civil war over statues. The only way to avert this new civil war - in some ways a symbolic one over the outcome of the original Civil War - is to have dialogue. And after dialogue, actions must follow. It could be that protesters who toppled Silent Sam acted out of a sense that dialogue had reached a standstill after years of debate.

Communities may decide to take the statues down or replace them with monuments that honor abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, William H. Seward or Thaddeus Stephens. They may also choose to keep the Confederate statues intact with a plaque that gives a more balanced view of the causes of the war. In this way, they would be used as a tool to teach about the Civil War - one of the bloodiest chapters in American history and one that none of us should want to repeat.

Tearing down Confederate statues may actually do little to further the goal of ending the legacy of slavery. It will not bring about systemic change or end notions of white supremacy or eradicate structural racism.

The more difficult work when it comes to dismantling the legacy of slavery involves ending some of slavery's byproducts, such as mass incarceration of black and brown bodies and systemic educational inequities for children of color. The hope is that those protesters will channel their zeal and apply it to these thorny and persistent problems. There is no easy fix. But if and when that fix does come, 100 years from now, America will be remembered not only for its technological advances - such as its computers, its robots or its driverless cars - but for its commitment to human rights.

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Tearing down Confederate statues leaves structural racism intact

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When protesters tore down the "Silent Sam" Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill on Aug. 20, it wasn't just destruction of state property - a crime for which the protesters are now being investigated. Rather, the protesters knocked a powerful symbol of white supremacy from its pedestal - both literally and figuratively.

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Full speech: Mitch Landrieu addresses removal of Confederate statues

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On May 19, 2017, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu delivered a moving speech about why the city took down four Confederate monuments that had been installed by supporters of the "Cult of the Lost Cause."

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As last week made obvious, America still has a race problem on its hands. And that problem is much larger than President Trump and whether he ultimately repudiates groups he doesn't want to repudiate. When it comes to race in America and the way we let it drive us crazy, our problem, in a word, is us.

Dismissing Trump's most ridiculous claim is relatively easy. A mob with torches, spoiling for a fight, shouting, "Jews will not replace us," is simply not in the same moral universe as terrified protesters, arms linked, trying to fend off vicious attacks. Thank God the deadly violence did not carry over to the demonstrations in Boston on Saturday.
More: More: Other countries have healed, and so will we: Ellis Cose Charlottesville unmasks Trump. Stop expecting him to denounce white supremacists.
Nonetheless, Trump's claim that destroying Confederate monuments somehow crosses a line, that it somehow rips apart the nation's culture and history, takes a bit more reflection. For while Trump is far from right, he is not totally wrong. Valuable lessons can indeed be learned from studying the history of these monuments, but they are not lessons Trump would welcome.

Contrary to what the president and Ku Klux Klan sympathizers seem to believe, the Confederate monuments are not honoring great patriots or even great soldiering. Most of those monuments did not go up in the wake of the Civil War but much later, "as Southerners put Jim Crow in place - and Northerners gave up on racial justice," notes W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

In order to make commemorating symbols of racial hatred and oppression palatable, champions of the Confederacy had to rewrite history. Gen. Robert E. Lee, who led a war that killed more than 600,000 Americans for the patently immoral purpose of extending slavery, "became a convenient icon of reconciliation who was depicted as having reluctantly fought to protect his native state ... and then after the war devoted himself to ... binding the nation's wounds," Brundage writes.

That image of Lee is false in every important aspect. It makes a joke of the history Trump supposedly wishes to rescue. That would-be Nazis and KKK sympathizers attach such importance to the Confederacy should tell you all you need to know about Confederate heroes. Even so, most Americans seem unconvinced that their statues should be taken down.
More: POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media The reality of racism America continues to deny
In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll released last week that asked Americans whether the monuments should " remain as a historical symbol " or "be removed because they are offensive to some people," 67% of white respondents thought they should stay, as did 75% of whites who were not college graduates; 65% of Latinos were fine with keeping the statues, as were 44% of blacks.

In short, a majority of Americans - even many blacks - are fine with leaving the statutes alone, or at least they see no reason to remove them just because some folks are offended.

I'm curious how poll respondents would have answered if given more compelling reasons for statue removal than them offending people. Even so, I understand why so many Americans of all races might be fine with keeping Confederate figures in place. Why spend so much energy trying to topple statues, offensive and ugly as they might be, when the statues are not really the problem, and when their removal riles up so many people - some of whom are pathologically violent?

Also, there is likely a feeling among many Americans that, as Trump suggests, the statues do, in fact, tell us something important about our past - and that it might be better to keep them than to simply wash history away. But that is only true if we can be honest about why those monuments exist and what they were meant to promote, which is racial oppression.

If we are prepared to face what those statues really are, perhaps we can more capably tackle the question of why appeals to prejudice still resonate so strongly, and why so many people eagerly voted for a presidential candidate of questionable competence who made bigotry the central plank of his campaign.

Americans find it difficult to deal with such questions in part because we are not ready to own the full weight of our history - much of which is noble and beautiful, but some of which is sickeningly ugly. And we certainly are loath to seriously contemplate how much that history still shapes who we are today.

Under pressure to remove Woodrow Wilson's name from certain structures on Princeton's campus, the trustees named a committee that proposed the following: Keep Wilson's name on the buildings, but publicly and widely acknowledge that Wilson "held and acted on racist views." They resolved to recognize "Wilson's failings and shortcomings as well as (his) visions and achievements."

Perhaps, given the apparently widespread sentiment to keep Confederate monuments, we should consider doing something similar with these symbols littering America's landscape. Wherever such monuments remain, we should put plaques and other material in place that point out that these men were traitors, not American heroes, and that their ugly legacy haunts us still.
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.
In illuminating how vulnerable Americans have long been to ugly racial appeals, and how willfully blind we have been to racial injustice, those statues could remind us of the catastrophic consequences of not putting bigotry aside.

What other useful purpose could those monuments to evil possibly serve?

Ellis Cose, senior fellow and writer in residence at the American Civil Liberties Union, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. He's author of The End of Anger, The Rage of a Privileged Class and other books. Follow him on Twitter: @EllisCose.

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Keep Confederate monuments, but put their horrific history on center stage

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As last week made obvious, America still has a race problem on its hands. And that problem is much larger than President Trump and whether he ultimately repudiates groups he doesn't want to repudiate. When it comes to race in America and the way we let it drive us crazy, our problem, in a word, is us.