From nojo:
Might as well call it: We’re about to endure one of the ugliest elections in American history.
Granted, we’ve only been around for sixty years of it, so we might be giving undue weight to the present, which, unlike the past, is always uncertain. And granted as well, the 1860 election had certain consequences that we’re not facing. Yet.
Funny thing about the Civil War: It broke out five weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration, and ended—
See, that’s the funny thing. It hasn’t.
We grew up thinking it had, that the Civil War was long past, that the colored drinking fountains of Jim Crow were artifacts revealed in old photos, that the moral arc of history was indeed bending towards justice, that there was an inevitability to it all, although you had to be very patient about it.
We were also born in an America that was almost nine in ten white folk.