"Read Thy Self" is the standard method I use to investigate slavery and the Civil War. At some point you tire of yelling about the evils of Nathan Bedford Forrest, and you settle into a much different frame. I believe, as Hobbes lays out here, that I am subject to the same whims as any slaveholder. I don't feel that there is anything in my bones that makes me any more moral. Thus the question becomes not "How awful was Robert E. Lee?" but "How could I have acted as he did?" And you work to not ask that question with incredulity, but at the same time without apology It's "Read Thy Self" not "Construct Some Way To Excuse Thy Self." My favorite historians always manage this trick--explaining exactly how morality is violated, without endorsing the violation of morality. "Reasons" are not "excuses."

Outsider status: although all these conflicts and anxieties and desires are common and mainstream, there's still the desire to stand outside of the mainstream, to be special and also be to be a bit oppressed. This is partly adolescent, partly American (wherein our entire identity hinges on overcoming challenges and being individual), and partly guilty-white-girl. The last one is why so many urban fantasy heroines are mixed race (never just poc, though.) In this post-civil-rights-movement era, outsider status is most quickly vouchsafed by being a person of color. But, of course, no white woman REALLY dreams of being black, so it's always American Indian or Asian (although the half-Asians are usually the sidekicks.)