Has it, though? Always? Have you really grappled fully with the question?

You wrote a powerful piece with many good points--there's no sane way to deny the hugely unjust and quite often wicked way that white people enslaved and oppressed black people.

But the question itself was in part about whether we were living in the past too much, wasn't it? You can't answer a question like that very effectively by appealing to the past--you quoted something from 1662. For historical perspective, it's important, but logically, it's assuming the consequent.

The final words of the questioner remain unanswered: does that help segregate or does that help unify?

Perry didn't answer that (as quoted by you). She gave a moral answer and a self-empowering answer--good things!--but didn't actually answer the question. Implicitly the answer is, "Helps segregate, and we want it that way."

You don't answer the question either, but again, the implication of your words which I quoted above is, "Helps segregate, and we want it that way."

Should we want it that way?

On Medium you could find no lack of writers, many of whom identify as black, who were confidently predicting that Ahmaud Arbery's killers would go free, based on the presumption that Arbery was a hyphenated American who would be viewed through a racial lens. When Rittenhouse wasn't convicted, their beliefs redoubled, again, apparently based on the same presumption that Rittenhouse wasn't hyphenated and the reason that he was not convicted was a racial issue.

But it didn't seem to happen. Arbery's killers were convicted as murderers, probably because they murdered someone. The "ignorant" approach matches what happened. It matches traditional (non-CRT*) principles of law. And murderers got locked away because of it. Isn't that the kind of thing we want? If conceptual segregation is promoted--whether maliciously or because "it persists and it's unethical to evade it" — doesn't it make that harder?

Now, the answer might be: yes, it makes it harder, but because of the other things it brings into focus (e.g. housing discrimination, unequal policing, etc.), it's worth it. Or it might be no: it makes nothing harder--the hard things are hard regardless--and here's why.

But I don't think you actually addressed that part of the question. Just kind of talked around it.

(* Aside: if you've read CRT literature, it is extraordinarily generous to call it 'evidence-based'. It threw its lot in with the critical legal studies tradition, not legal realism (that's the evidence-based one), after Bell initially leaned more towards legal realism; and Delgado & Stefancic proudly point to adopting a narrative approach (= very low standards of evidence) as one of CRT's crowning victories. When evidence is there, CRT doesn't hesitate to point to it, but it is fundamentally a justice-first, evidence-secondary approach, like all critical theories are by design (c.f. Horkheimer's Traditional and Critical Theory).)