THE MISSING SEAT • RACE & EQUAL HUMANITY

You Can Talk About Racism and Still Be Happy

Remembering history is not the same thing as blaming the people alive today.

I keep wondering why talking about American slavery and racism makes some people so uncomfortable that eventually somebody asks, “Why are we still talking about this?” I live in Germany, and that makes the question even stranger to me. Germany still talks about the Holocaust. It teaches it, preserves the places where it happened, remembers the victims and keeps the records available. That doesn’t mean Germans walking around today are personally responsible for what Hitler did, and it certainly doesn’t mean Germany has to be defined forever by Hitler.

Germany moved on. Of course it did. The country rebuilt itself, changed politically and socially, and generations have been born who had absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust. People here work, raise families, complain about the government, go on vacation, watch football, laugh, argue and get on with their lives. Remembering the Holocaust hasn’t somehow prevented Germans from being happy. The important part is that moving on didn’t require sweeping it under the carpet.

So why should the standard be different when we talk about slavery and racism in America?

I’m not saying slavery and the Holocaust were the same thing. They weren’t. I’m talking about the way we handle history. We seem to understand that remembering the Holocaust doesn’t mean accusing every German alive today of being a Nazi. Yet talk about slavery, Jim Crow, segregation or the things that followed them and suddenly somebody thinks the conversation is an accusation against white people living today.

It isn’t.

I don’t blame some white guy born in 1985 for slavery. What the hell would be the point of that? He didn’t own anybody. He didn’t write the Black Codes or create Jim Crow. And I don’t think white people should spend their lives feeling guilty for crimes they didn’t commit any more than I think Black people should spend every waking moment angry about things that happened before we were born.

But not being guilty of something and pretending it didn’t leave anything behind are two completely different things.

Slavery ended, thank God, but that wasn’t the end of the story. Black Americans went from slavery into a country that still restricted where they could live, vote, attend school, own property, work and build wealth on equal terms. Those restrictions changed over time and many were eventually outlawed. That was progress, and we should call it progress. But changing a law doesn’t automatically undo everything that happened while the law, policy or practice was in place.

That shouldn’t even be a controversial idea. If an innocent man spends thirty-nine years in prison and is finally released, we celebrate his freedom. But nobody would seriously argue that giving him the key to the prison gate returned the thirty-nine years. The wrong stopped. The loss didn’t disappear.

The same basic question applies to history. If one family was allowed to buy a house, build equity and leave something to their children while another family was deliberately kept out of that opportunity, repealing the discriminatory rule matters. It doesn’t magically make the previous fifty years disappear. That isn’t accusing the first family of anything. It’s just understanding how time works. And money. And property. And inheritance.

Maybe that is where these conversations keep getting screwed up. Someone says America discriminated against Black people and somebody hears, “You personally are a racist.” Someone says some of those decisions still have consequences and somebody hears, “Everything you have is because you’re white.” Then everybody starts fighting over things nobody actually said.

I’m not interested in that fight.

I’m interested in the receipts.

What happened? How long did it happen? Who was affected? What changed? What was repaired? What wasn’t? Are there consequences we can still actually see and measure today? If something really has been fixed, fine. Say that. I don’t need every problem to remain a problem forever just to prove racism existed.

That is actually one of the reasons I think America could learn something from Germany. Germany doesn’t have to wake up every morning announcing, “We are the country of Hitler.” It isn’t. But it also doesn’t need to pretend Hitler never existed in order to prove that it has changed.

America should be able to say the same thing about slavery and racism. We are not living in 1850. We are not living under Jim Crow. Black Americans have rights that people fought and died to secure, and pretending none of that progress happened would be dishonest.

But pretending the progress erased everything that came before it would be dishonest too.

And none of this means Black people have to spend our lives miserable. Black history isn’t just what was done to us anyway. We built businesses, families, churches, movements, music, literature, inventions and institutions. We fought in America's wars. We changed its culture. We changed its laws. We survived things designed to stop us and somehow kept building anyway.

I can know all of that and still go have dinner. I can read about Rickey Jackson losing thirty-nine years of his life and still laugh with my friends that evening. I can talk about racism and still love people who don’t look like me. I can love parts of America and still say America did some terrible shit. None of those things cancel each other out.

That is probably the part I wish more people understood.

Remembering is not the same thing as blaming.

Germany does not have to be defined by the Holocaust to understand why the Holocaust must not be forgotten. America does not have to be defined by slavery to understand why slavery, segregation and what followed them shouldn’t be reduced to a paragraph we rush through because the subject makes somebody uncomfortable.

Nobody alive today needs to inherit somebody else’s guilt.

But we should be very careful about inheriting somebody else’s version of the story just because it is easier to live with.

That is what The Missing Seat is about for me. Not forcing people to feel guilty. Not keeping Black people angry. Not dragging America backward.

It is about looking under the carpet before we declare the room clean.

Because if there is nothing there anymore, great.

But if there is, we should probably stop arguing about why somebody lifted the carpet and deal with what we found.

Who is missing? The people whose losses become easier to ignore once the law that caused them is gone, and the people today who might actually listen if we stopped treating historical truth as personal accusation.

What can I do? The next time a conversation about racism starts sounding like blame, ask what the actual claim is before defending yourself against it. Check the evidence. If the claim is wrong, challenge it. If it is right, let it be right. Remembering history is not a confession of personal guilt.

Ally = Action. 🪑

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Sources and Receipts

Verification notice: Sources refreshed October 6, 2026. The Germany comparison concerns public remembrance, not historical equivalence. The 2019 inheritance figures are historical survey measurements, not current 2026 measurements. Group disparities do not establish every individual’s experience or the cause of every present-day difference.

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