Were the deaths of 620,000 Americans fighting the Civil War enough of an apology for slavery? Are you kidding? Really??? First of all, the 620k number is *total* American deaths, which includes those from the South who were fighting to keep slavery. It also assumes slavery was the only reason the Civil War was fought. It wasn’t. But, even if it was, even if every one of those deaths was lost in abolishing the abhorrent system and practice of slavery, the answer is still no.

I don’t really know why I’m bothering to write this, as I suspect you are just trolling, but in case you missed it, the Civil War was followed by 150 years of utterly hateful, inhuman bullshit, including the Three-Fifths Compromise, Jim Crow, the assassinations of both Malcolm X and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and decades upon decades of lynchings, institutionalized racism, and social injustice that continues to this day.

And in response to your comment that the color of your skin does not make you a racist, I gotta say that it seems you missed the entire point of the article. Move past your defensiveness if you can (it was hard for me too — it SHOULD be uncomfortable as hell), and see that the life of Black Americans today are still lived within the context of a system that is stacked against them in every possible way, and that is in fact completely structured to work to the benefit of White Americans. The message is that as long as we quietly sit and reap the benefits of living in a society that is normalized for White Americans, that supports and protects only White Americans, while Black Americans are marginalized, criminalized, and profiled and freaking GUNNED DOWN by our police force at incredibly disproportionate rates, we are perpetuating the problem, and that makes us part of the racist machinery that runs this country. Do I, as an individual (there’s that word again), think of myself as a racist? Hell no. But living in this society and doing nothing substantive to help change things equates to being racist all the same.