Eric Christensen: retired English teacher, Marshall Plan researcher

Arriving during a time of increased bigotry and willful obliviousness, Collective Amnesia American Apartheid, African Americans’ 400 Years in North America, 1619—2019 is a must read for Americans who are ready to understand our racial birth defect and its tragic legacy and ready to help move on to a better future. It’s not a polemic. It’s not a harangue. It’s a factual account of two peoples, whites and blacks, and the flawed civilization we share. It is an unblinkered account of race in America, the details of which tell the story of terrorism supported by church and state. Readers have to be ready to undo myths concerning the happy slave in the Antebellum South, racial superiority, imagined causes of the Civil War, and much more. Readers will read stories of families that were reunited after the War and families that were not. They will read a different account of Reconstruction than the stories they may have heard as children. And they will see that racism continues to cast a dark shadow, and not just in the South. No American can be fully American without completely understanding this history, a history clearly laid out by Dr. Bétit.