Manisha Sinha: “Today’s Eerie Echoes of the Civil War”

“After the Obama presidency …, the country has witnessed a resurgence of racial prejudice, sexism, and anti-immigrant sentiment, and a reassertion of the political economy of robber barons. Beneath the weight of this history, it is little wonder that today’s struggles over the status of Confederate monuments and political demonstrations by avowed white supremacists evoke anxieties about disunion. We would do well to pay heed to the old enmities bubbling up in our politics: it is not that we are on the verge of another civil war, but that the Civil War never truly ended. With the exception of slavery itself, what divided the United States then divides us still today.“