Do whites really run scared of black history?

In my blog post yesterday, I encouraged readers to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay, 'Other People's Pathologies, in The Atlantic.  As I normally do, I tweeted a few times with a link to my blog post:

Without slavery there is no democracy; without slavery there is no American dream; without slavery there's no America http://t.co/s5ghnITEgG
— Chris Connolly (@Cripipper) April 1, 2014

The United States didn't save black people; black people saved the United States of America: Ta-Nehisi Coats nails it http://t.co/s5ghnITEgG
— Chris Connolly (@Cripipper) April 1, 2014

Black culture, white supremacy, and American democracy. http://t.co/s5ghnITEgG
— Chris Connolly (@Cripipper) April 1, 2014

What's been fascinating to observe is the reaction to it, and by that I mean the relative lack of reaction or interest.

Normally when I tweet a blog post, no matter how banal, it registers about 5 or 6 click-throughs from Twitter to the blog post.  Each of these tweets got somewhere between 0 and 1 person clicking to read it, at roughly the same times of the day as I would normally tweet the link.

Regular sources of traffic to the blog (from the UK), such as Lib Dem Blogs and Lib Dem Voice have been noticeably quiet in terms of traffic.

Have I failed to sell the blog post as well as others I have written, or is indifference to black history as bad as (or perhaps even worse than) I alluded to in the post itself?  Writing the post has been almost as enlightening as reading the Coates essay.

White supremacy and the birth of American democracy

Had the Union soundly and quickly defeated the Confederacy, it's very likely that slavery would have remained. Instead the war dragged on, and the Union was forced to employ blacks in its ranks. The end result—total emancipation—was more a matter of military necessity than moral progress...

The United States did not save black people; black people saved the United States of America.  With that task complete, our "ally" proceeded to repay its debt to its black citizens by pretending they did not exist.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written one of the most powerful essays on American history, and the black experience within it, that I have ever read.  I hesitated about including the words "and the black experience within it" because, at its core, it runs against the spirit of the truths that Coates writes.