Not very well, I would say. For the most part, we have dealt with them through a combination of justification, amnesia, and avoidance. By justification, I am referring to the ways in which the destruction, for example, of Indian, Mexican, and Chinese communities was regarded as a necessary and inevitable by-product of modernization and Progress. The second way in which we have dealt with atrocities past, especially since World War II, is through amnesia. The further we have moved away from the tragedies of the nineteenth century, the more we have forgotten and trivialized them.
Textbooks still tend to marginalize the topic, or put it into sidebars.
There is still a dearth, for example, of Californios, Mexicans, and Indian peoples represented in memorials, statues, and cultural icons. Travel guides still have a tendency to gloss over the past, make it easy for tourists to visit sites of slaughter with an untroubled conscience. When we don t practice amnesia, we often use avoidance, by mentioning the topic, but tiptoeing around its implications. But this approach tends to minimize the tragic past in order to communicate an image of positive agency. This approach detracts from an understanding of the common experiences of racism and a grappling with the public implications of the state s racial history.