The paper argues that the racist underpinnings of the dominant narrative of American exceptionalism require radical exposure as a first step in turning around this discourse to serve democratic ends. As a key pedagogical element in this vision of renewal, insights from ignorance studies are employed to illustrate how teachers might integrate difficult knowledges of genocide, slavery, and imperial conquest into their respective encounters with the nation's hotly contested yet often forgotten historical legacies. Activating the nation's democratic potential requires the formation of a new civic aesthetic rooted in a psychoanalytically informed integration of truthful images of the past.