KEN BURNS give speech about Race. Excellent!!

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/21/1386320/-Ken-Burns-Commencement-Speech-line-On-BlackLivesmatter-Gets-Huge-Applause-In-One-for-the-Ages?detail=facebook

Today in Ferguson 150 years after the Civil War we see "ghastly remnants of our great shame emerging still"/Lincoln warned of "national suicide" if we neglect to be a "nation of freemen"/Mark Twain's Huck Finn deciding to "go to hell" instead of turning in the "property" of his runaway slave friend Jim "may be the finest moment in all of American literature"/Our insistence on "Exceptionalism" blinds us to making necessary fixes/BlackLivesMatter because we have not achieved a post-racial society when institutional racism is still enshrined.
If you like to get a little history now and then from your tv on these United States (which I do and enjoy as a supplement to reading books) and are not a cave dweller in New Mexico or something then Ken Burns needs no introduction. He is an icon of documentary film-making, with techniques that have revolutionized the art of historical story-telling. His style is so well-known and vaunted in documentary film-making that one could say he's as much a standard as The Beatles "Sgt. Pepper" was to serious album-making (even the I-Photo program of Apple Mac's has a "Ken Burns effect" feature). Which is probably why he's been an exclusive part of a legacy that values nuanced and critical story-telling (PBS), rather than one that pumps out sensational and often jingoistic pap for the undiscerning (The History Channel).
Given that he occupies such strata through his lifetime devotion to history, his decision to lay bare the moment we find ourselves in, with respect to America perhaps finally coming to terms in grappling with, after a very long avoidance of, the malignancy of systemic racism, was a very powerful and instructive deed.