We cannot rethink history to console those it embarrasses.
The Reckoning is not an organization, a motto, or even a defined objective; dictionaries tell us that the word itself only means “the settlement of an account” or, more ominously, that a “day of reckoning” is “a time when something must be atoned for or avenged.” Today’s Reckoning is a multifaceted effort by educators, journalists, and political figures to re-evaluate the entire sweep of the Western narrative according to novel considerations of how deeply the story has been tainted by hitherto overlooked forms of discrimination and oppression. Where conventional accounts have duly acknowledged (say) the existence of slavery or the suffragettes, the Reckoning holds that white supremacy and the patriarchy were—and still are—essential to our social systems; that our notions of public and private life, from governments and laws all the way down to our art and entertainment, have been but convenient myths obscuring fundamental cruelties and inequalities that have gone unrecognized until now.
