"Lincoln was a racist." Idiot high school children

One of my best friends is a media specialist at a high school in Montgomery County, MD and I stayed at his place when I was down in MD for an interview last week.

I always ask him how the maniacs are, and he will sigh and tell his latest hilarious/scary tale of the ignorance as truth paradigm that most kids in high school seem to be aiming for these days.

His latest one involved his trying to help a 12th grade girl who was doing a report on slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation. The girl was blabbering on to her friend about how awful slavery was, the conditions slaves had to live in, etc.

My friend mentioned that she would probably want to get some information on Lincoln’s role in the Emancipation Proclamation, since he was the one with the major push behind it.

The girl stopped, turned to my friend and said, in that typical high school tone which brooks no disagreement and declares that " I’m 17 years old and I know everything and you know nothing" that “I hate Lincoln because he was a racist.”
There was a long pause, then my friend said, "Really? Name me two people in the 19th century who weren’t racist."

Needless to say, Ms. Know-it-all had no coherent answer for that one.

The mind boggles at the idiocy of these high school children. And the worst part is that they won’t get the correct information when they go off to college, and even if they do, they won’t accept it.

‘ey, Blinkin’!

Did you just say “Abe Lincoln”?

Please tell me he doesn’t work at Kennedy.

It’s certainly not exactly drilled into their heads that even those who were against slavery at the time still thought blacks were inferior. I didn’t learn that until I was years out of school, and I was a straight-A student.

I think Lincoln was ambivalent about slavery. He said something like, “If I could save the Union by freeing all of the slaves, I would do it. If I could save the Union by freeing none of the slaves, I’d do that. If I could save the Union by freeing some of the slaves and letting others alone, I’d do that.” I think that he issued the Emancipation Proclamation not for altruistic anti-slavery feelings, but because it would be a good way of ensuring Britain would not ally with the Confederacy.

Incidentally, the EP freed the slaves in the states that were in rebellion against the United States; so slaves in the two(?) Union slaves states were not affected.

Don’t you just love it when people apply 20th century values to situations in 19th century issues?

That’s not to say I believe in moral relativism, but good GOD! Things were fucking different!

I agree, Guin. To me, racism is holding to a belief about race in the face of overwhelming and widespread information to the contrary.

No- Lincoln was very anti-slavery personally, but he would compromise on that if it meant preserving the Union. And I agree with him on that.

This is the danger of what I call “presentism”- judging those in the past by the standards of today. Damn few before the 20th century were NOT what today we might call “racists” to some extent. Since almost no women were allowed to vote, our heroes before the 2oth century were then almost all “sexists”, and since few would even consider giving 18yo the vote until the later 3/4 of the 20th Century, we could call all those before that “ageists”. :rolleyes:

But the worm will turn. A century or three from now, when chimps (whoa, excuse ME- racist term there, I meant “Bonobos” of course :smiley: ) and dolphins have the vote, WE will all be the “racists”. :smiley:

Another problem is excessive liberalism & PCness in our classrooms. I read my freinds child’s HS economics textbook. It said “The cause of inflation is the taking of excessive profits by greedy shareholders”. Not “A” cause, (the wage-price spiral isn’t even mentioned). THE only cause. :rolleyes:

So she said Lincoln was a racist. He was, wasn’t he? How was she actually wrong?

Lincoln held some views that would be downright odious if held up to the light of day, but most of us choose to bury that dirty laundry alongside the Kennedy family’s mob ties and Henry Ford’s rampant antisemitism. So what if he was in the majority with his views? Does it make them any less wrong? Of course not.

So tell me again how outraged I’m supposed to feel about that young woman’s statement.

Exactly, Guin. It is remarkable how common these Zeitgeist errors are. I believe that in the future, presuming that civilization becomes more rather than less enlightened, present practices such as conscription and taxation will be viewed as barbaric.

As outraged as the 24th century person will feel about attitudes of a 21st century Derleth.

Derleth, I think the issue Payton’s Servant is presenting is not that the girl was wrong, but rather that she appeared not to want to consider anything Lincoln did because he was a racist. If we ignored everything everyone who sinned did history class would be a lot easier.

Let’s try to sort this out before we get too far into the “Lincoln was/not a racist" thing. Few people thought that Black people were regular people in the mid-19th century. By the same token, few people thought that immigrant Irish were any better, or immigrant Germans or Norwegians for that matter. That does not mean that there was not a substantial enlightened opinion that held that chattel slavery was a positive evil that needed to be ended one way or another. As a corollary to that there was a substantial enlightened opinion that once slavery was ended something had to be done to “lift” Black people from their previous suppressed and depraved condition. Lincoln clearly shared that opinion.

Lincoln however was faced with a present problem with the secession of the Southern States which was not going to be solved with solemn pronouncements about the evil of slavery. The immediate problem was the preservation of the federal union. Lincoln had telegraphed his eventual emancipation policy in the “House Divided” speech during the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. He would work to abolish slavery as a means of eliminating the controversy that was tearing the country apart. What Lincoln would have done beyond ending slavery we can never know because he was killed before any post-war policies could be implemented. Because of the aborted “40 acres and a mule” program in the Carolinas we can guess, but that plan ran into stiff political opposition and was abandon early in the Johnson administration.

It is all too easy to condemn Lincoln, a mid-19th century progressive, because he did not have a mid-20th century view of the world. As has often been observed, times change, hind sight is perfect and old prejudices die hard.

Well, that and the strategic benefits of causing chaos behind Confederate lines, in virtue of…

Really, Lincoln gets waaaaaaaaay too much credit for ending slavery. He’s easy enough to give all the credit to in a simplified high school history textbook, so they do it. So everybody learns about the one good thing he did, “freeing the slaves”, singlehandedly of course :rolleyes: , and for power-hungry reasons. You never hear about the litany of crappy things he did, the suppression of civil liberties under his reign. The guy issues one self-serving proclamation for strategic military reasons, and suddenly he’s above criticism.

Was he a racist? He probably was definitely a racial separatist. Nobody before the war thought it was a good idea for blacks and whites to live side-by-side. Since they weren’t about to steal land from white people to give to the ex-slaves, they had to know they’d be creating a class of people that would be severely disadvantaged to begin their free existences. And they had to know that attitudes in the South for the next 100 years would be “I used to own you, now I’m supposed to treat you like an equal?” That’s why nobody, Lincoln included, proposed what actually did end up happening, simply freeing the slaves and saying “that’s that.” They wanted to move the slaves back to Africa, or steal some land from Indians and give the ex-slaves chunks of land out west somewhere. Either way, it’s fair to say that even the most staunch abolitionists were probably separatists. The movement was driven largely by the idea that slavery as an institution was damaging to society, not by any sort of sympathy with the slaves themselves.

I don’t hate Lincoln, but I certaintly understand where this young woman is coming from. When I first learned that the great forefathers of the US were vehemently racist, it made me feel like I couldn’t love this country quite as hard as I had before. Or at least I felt like I couldn’t buy all the mythology of its foundations they cram down children’s throats nowadays. It also made me less likely to political figures of the past. People tend to deify Washington and Jefferson and excuse all of their faults. Why can’t people hate Jefferson just as much as people hate Dubya?

She may be wrong for judging Lincoln by today’s standards, but it’s completely understandable. Besides, she’s young…not even in college. She still hasn’t separated “racist” from “evil” (a concept that I still have a hard time grappling with). I say give her a freakin break.

Finally, I’d just like to say that just as it’s wrong to judge the ancients by modern-day standards, it’s also wrong to automatically cite “the olden days” as an excuse for ignorance and hatred. I mean, where do we draw the line? When do the times of it’s-not-appropriate-to-judge-folks begin? Twenty years ago? Fifty years ago? A hundred years ago? When in history do racists stop being alright dudes and become ignorant assholes?

There is a part of me that understands that people thought differently in different times. And yet I don’t understand how a moral person could believe that two human beings, created by the same God, were not equal.

No, he works at Blair, and he’s retiring in June.

If Lincoln was (by some magical means) alive today and held the same views that he had back in 1862, then yes, he would be considered a racist.

But back in 1862, his views were considered to be mainstream, if not a bit radical, compared with the attitudes and views held by most of the South.

Lincoln did a lot more then just free the slaves; he preserved the Union, and helped bring about a change in how the United States was referred to. Prior to the Civil War, people said, “The United States are…” After the Civil War, people said, “The United States is…”

Because they were a product of their times, and didn’t know to think differently?

Hey-I hear you-I definitely do NOT think of Lincoln as a God-far from it!

However, while I do not believe in moral relativism, I do believe in moral context-in other words, what was the situation, and how does it explain what happened? It may not excuse it, but it explains it.

Look at me-I’m a complet Romanov buff, but I’ll be the first to admit that Nicholas II was an anti-semite and a racist. However, during the time that he lived, that was what was acceptable.

In Lincoln’s case, he was considered enlightened for his time, and really, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Look how far we’ve come!

I think monstro nailed it when she said that we tend to deify our Founding Fathers and such. Then we learn that they too, have feet of clay, and then we’re so disappointed. We need to look at it from all sides-what was good about them, and what was not.

Was Lincoln a racist? I think, for most historians, the answer will be both yes AND no. Yes, he most certainly was, when all is said and done, but in his time, he was not. He was WRONG, but he was a product of his time.

What are we defining as racism?

Did Lincoln, following the pronouncements of scientists and philosophers, accept that the white man had achieved some natural superiority in nature at the top of a hierarchy of “racial” types? Probably. Did he harbor any feelings or beliefs that this entitled whites to subjugate peoples of other races? I have never seen any evidence of that. He did display a certain amount of paternalism that had a racist background, but he also argued that blacks should be treated fairly before the law and that slavery was an abomination.

It is, in some ways, like finding the statements of a person in 1940 who remarked about the debased nature homosexuality without urging any violence against or condemnation of homosexuals and condemning that peerson, when even the psychological community would continue to define homosexuality as an illness for another 30 years.

I would never be upset that a high school kid perceived Lincoln as racist. It is a legitimate (if simplistic) inference one may draw from various statements that he made (particularly if they are presented out of context as such statements often are). I would, however, draw the conclusion that a kid who exclaimed “I hate Lincoln because he was a racist.” was suffering from a rather poor education ih history–as most kids in the U.S. suffer in one way or another.