Hillary Clinton in 2010 on the effects of racist colonialism on Africa:

For goodness sakes, this is the 21st century. We’ve got to get over what happened 50, 100, 200 years ago and let’s make money for everybody. That’s the best way to try to create some new energy and some new growth in Africa.

Antonin Scalia in 1993 on the effects of racist segregation on America:

At some time, we must acknowledge that it has become absurd to assume, without any further proof, that violations of the Constitution dating from the days when Lyndon Johnson was President, or earlier, continue to have an appreciable effect upon current operation of schools. We are close to that time.

I was going to leave the comparison there. But there’s an even more unsavory precedent: the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, which helped legitimate the racist backlash of Jim Crow. In that case, decided less than twenty years after the abolition of slavery, Justice Joseph Bradley argued that discrimination in places of public accommodation were the private acts of white citizens having nothing to do with the institution of slavery. They thus could not be prohibited by the state.

After giving to these questions all the consideration which their importance demands, we are forced to the conclusion that such an act of refusal has nothing to do with slavery or involuntary servitude . . . It would be running the slavery argument into the ground to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to the guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car, or admit to his concert or theatre, or deal with other matters of intercourse or business. . . . When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws . . .

After all, what’s 250 years of chattel slavery when you’ve had 18 years of freedom? Or 500 years of colonialism next to 50 years of independence? Get over it!