Tish Harrison Warren, a white Anglican priest, addressed the question lately roiling the political landscape: “Is America Willing to Tell the Truth About Its History?” (The New York Times, November 14, 2021)

“Yes, the white American church has sometimes conflated a sanitized story of America with Christianity to embrace loyalty to ‘God and country,’” Warren wrote.

As a child of the American south myself, I appreciated her commentary. I accepted, as children do, without reflection, the racism of my early years: the separate drinking fountains for “Colored” and the segregated schools.

I began to change as court decisions mandated an end to separate school systems. My undergraduate study was in an all white Southern Baptist college (at the time) in Alabama. Yet we students, especially in our church groups, discussed how wrong this segregation was. By the time I studied for a graduate degree in a state school in Georgia, it had changed. The school was integrated without, it appeared, whites thinking much about it.

Only much later, I confess, did it occur to me that I indeed had been favored by my white skin. I never had to think about my color when I applied for a job or went shopping or approached a teacher in school. I realized that any American of color, stepping into the larger society, knew that the people around them, even if not consciously racist, noticed first that the person before them was not white.

Within my lifetime, black Americans have been killed and mutilated by whites without the whites, at the time, in any way being called to account for their sins.

Do we need to understand this? Do we need to repent? Yes, we do. It can’t be said often enough.

The old South, where white school children, including myself, stood up for “Dixie” as they did for the national anthem, has to repent.