Past Imperfect

Matthew Karp is right to worry that reducing America’s racial history to biblical or biological terms [“History As End,” Essay, July] leaves out critical social and historical context. Slavery was evil, but to call it our “original sin” or to argue that it is in our DNA is to ignore what we have learned about how and why human beings inflict unspeakable cruelty on one another.

Yet, it’s critical to engage with the politics of the past, because they’re also the politics of the present. Slavery was a caste system whose vestiges are still apparent…