| Summary/Abstract |
Over at least the past quarter century, observers, historians, and journalists have painted a damning picture of the treatment that African Americans have received from their government and fellow citizens, not only during slavery and the era of segregation but far into the twentieth century. Yet many of these observations and reports have simply been ignored and, although others received some attention for a time, none has become part of the country’s standard public history. My premise is that the continued failure in the United States to incorporate these observations and reports into its standard history has a profound effect on its political culture. I therefore begin by briefly recalling some aspects of post-Civil War African American history and consider the American antipathy to confronting this history by looking at Charles Mills’s account of “white ignorance.” While some theorists have tried to supplement Mills’s realist framework with a more sophisticated one indebted to Critical Theory, I move in a different direction, drawing out some of the implications of the distinctive approach known as philosophical hermeneutics. By doing so, I hope to demonstrate how a hermeneutic perspective can contribute to serious discussion among U.S. political scientists and political educators about the links between racial inequality and historical understanding and its absence.
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