Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dog walker who lives and works in Contoocook.

In August, my family and I took a bus tour around Ireland. I was struck by many things: the dramatic landscapes of the Atlantic coast, the gentle green landscapes of the agricultural midlands, the ubiquitous sheep, and the flags I saw everywhere, proclaiming support for local Gaelic football and hurling teams.

What struck me the most, however, was the powerful presence of the past. I saw ancient stone walls, abandoned tower houses, little stone cottages, and big stone churches without roofs, braving the elements and bearing witness to the passage of time. In Derry and Belfast, in Northern Ireland, the past was even more present. We saw dozens of monuments and murals dedicated to the Troubles and others devoted to historical events going back to the 1600s and the ongoing struggles between Ireland and England.

History in Ireland does not just mark the landscape; it is even something you can eat and drink. We visited a brewery with roots in the nineteenth century and a distillery that was founded in the eighteenth century. When we were in Northern Ireland and expressed interest in Bushmills Irish whiskey, our tour guide told us, only half jokingly, that we didn’t really want to drink that Protestant whiskey.

That’s it in a nutshell; centuries of antagonism and distrust between Ireland and England are never very far from the surface of things in Ireland. Feeling the strong presence of the past in Ireland had the odd effects of sending my mind back home, to the United States, and to something very curious that is going on — the movement to ignore, deny, or erase our own history by declaring that the racism that has harmed people of color in this country is dead and gone.

Just as Ireland has lived through centuries of conflict with England, our country has lived with its original sin of slavery, and its aftermaths, for more than four centuries. (And, lest we forget, slavery is one of two original sins, the other being the way that Europeans treated the First Americans.)

Slavery in this country officially ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, but no one could seriously argue that the Emancipation Proclamation wiped the slate clean and remedied the effects of nearly 250 years of slavery. The Tulsa race massacre of 1921 and the scourge of lynching well into the twentieth century are ample evidence, and there is much, much more, that the Emancipation Proclamation started our country on a path toward getting past the effects of slavery but hardly finished the job.

Throughout the twentieth century, there have been efforts to continue the project Lincoln started. Those efforts include Brown v. Board of Education, the Voting Rights Act, and affirmative action in college admissions. But no fair-minded observer could conclude that we now live in a color-blind society with equal opportunity for all, regardless of the color of their skin.

Yet, the Supreme Court’s recent decision that guts affirmative action feels like a judicial decree that racial discrimination that disadvantages people of color is now a thing of the past. The whole anti/woke-divisive concepts movement in state legislatures has much the same flavor.

Opponents of affirmative action say it is unfair for people today to pay the price for the sins of the past. That argument has surface appeal but wilts under scrutiny for failing to account for the benefits that continue to flow, often unnoticed, to people who are not people of color.

My parents never owned slaves, and I don’t think that any of their ancestors did, either. But, in 1964, when they bought a house in a leafy suburb with an excellent school system that propelled me into a good college, it was far easier for them to buy a house in our suburb than it would have been for people of color who had the same financial resources my parents had. The effects of the original sin of slavery are still felt by people of color in ways that I cannot even begin to understand.

In short, it is disingenuous, if not farcical, for the powerful and privileged members of a court or a legislature to declare that our society has moved past racial discrimination. Ahmaud Arbery was hunted down and murdered while jogging through a predominantly white neighborhood just over three years ago, and we continue to see instances of discrimination against people of color with harmful if not fatal consequences.

When we were in Northern Ireland, a guide who lives in Belfast, when discussing the Good Friday peace accords, told us that in his experience, the twenty-five years since the accords have been better than the twenty-five years before them. From his words, I conclude that the end of racial discrimination in our country is not something for the more privileged among us to announce to the less privileged in a judicial opinion or a new statute. Racial discrimination will exit the stage, and will be replaced by racial equity, when we Americans decide, collectively, that this is the kind of nation we want to live in, and when we live such a nation into existence.

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