If transforming racism requires everyone to come to grips with their own ancestry and culture, white folks have their work cut out for them. As Ira Chernus suggests, the stories about the birth of America that many of us learned in school have been exposed for their biased, inaccurate representations, requiring us to reconsider any sense of white privilege as bound to bogus teachings and political agendas:
If the fear of a broken society is, at its deepest level, the fear of a broken foundation myth — a loss of the sense of secure identity that once came from simply living on American soil — then no party is to blame for it and no party can fix it. The parade of candidates on TV promising to make it all better is as hollow as the Columbus Day parade I saw.
The parades continue, though, because saying goodbye to the mythic Columbus and greeting a truly new world, one in which we exercise political responsibility without mythic foundations, is no easy task.
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