The Freedom You Make for Yourself

African-American Responses to Slavery. Reviewing David Hackett Fischer’s ‘African Founders’

In debates concerning critical race theory and American history there seem two extremes: one for whom nothing ugly about our racial past should be raised and another for whom nothing but ugly exists. And, as Tom Wolfe said in The Right Stuff, “All holes in the argument”—on either side—“were immediately vulcanized by the heat of the emotion.”

Into that sm…