I agree. Lots of us have ancestors who were involved with slavery in the US. For me it's at least one great great grand father who held twenty plus enslaved peo

I agree. Lots of us have ancestors who were involved with slavery in the US. For me it's at least one great great grand father who held twenty plus enslaved people in South Carolina. His son was drafted into the CSA at 16 in the final months of the war. His son, my grandfather, was a big influence on my life until I was 21. The gggrandfather lost a lot after the war and was bitter and resentful for the rest of his life. His son, born into privilege and wealth, grew up poor, lived an honest, meager life and died a horrible death as the result of a steam boiler explosion. I didn't learn these things from my grandfather. I learned them when I did my own research into these people and uncovered their stories. I have not lived in the South for fifty years, have no accent, consider myself unbiased by race and extremely progressive politically. Yet, as I found and verified these traces of my personal history, I could feel a certain resonance between them and aspects of myself. Not particularly admirable aspects, but present nonetheless. Like a tendency to resent others who seem to have things given to them when I have always worked. Or a deep anger that (very) occasionally leaps out in disproportionate response to slight things. Like I say, not admirable, but there. I am not suggesting they were 'caused' by ancestral experiences. But I do think they are consistent with them. And what was I to do with the knowledge my ancestors were slave holders? What happens to a person to make it OK for them to engage in such a hideous thing in the first place? Next was what am I supposed to do? It is extremely uncomfortable to sit with these things. I can not imagine the emotions I would feel sitting with knowledge that my ancestors were enslaved. For myself I decided I could acknowledge the truths my family never talked about. I could look at my own patterns of denial and identify the traces of them wrapped up in racist rhetoric. And when folks are having discussions about slavery being something in the so distant past I can point out that my personal connection to it is not all that distant. I offer this bit of personal history to support the OP - the civil war was not that long ago. The repercussions and the sentiments of it are still with us and passed on intentionally or not. They are the sort of thing that turns into a background hum against which systematic inequality seems correct and harmonizes with the rhetoric of nationalism and racism. The original story illustrates that we are still paying, metaphorically and actually, for the civil war.