I think a child who brought up such a concern would be displaying very sophisticated perception and analytical skills and I would reward it.
We shouldn’t be judging historical figures “from within their own historical context.” That’s moral relativism. There were people in Lincoln’s own time who knew that Lincoln’s position on the matter was immoral. If nothing else, the black people whom he considered less than his own children knew that he was wrong.
Not sure where you got that idea. That fact is in many, many history textbooks.
Asserting that I wrote something that I did not accomplishes what exactly?
Yeah? However, that’s not what this subversive movement is about. It’s about establishing the premise that violating the standards of today is such an egregious sin that the memory, imagery, name, and ultimately work of those in the past is invalid. The Constitution? Flawed slave document!!! Age of enlightenment ideals on liberty? White supremacy! The whole goal is to erode fundamental concepts of individual freedom and replace it with some form of collective guilt and punishment.
Conservatives: “Cadence Owens was right. We shouldn’t idolize Eric Garner or Trayvon Martin as symbols of the black community because they were criminals - Garner was selling cigarettes and Martin tweeted mean things and got in trouble at school.”
Also conservatives: “well sure, our Founding Fathers enslaved human beings, beat them nearly to death, and forced them to work their lives away for the benefits of others. But we must consider them as products of their time!”
Not to mention that the pedestal that the majority of Americans place the Founding Fathers on is far larger and more ornate than any supposed pedestal black victims of police violence get.
But hey, it’s us who are destroying history by looking at who the Fathers actually were rather than a mythological caricature.
There is a widespread movement, led by the right, to remove information from textbooks that reflect badly on the reputation of the United States or its “Founding Fathers.”
Many, but not all. Slavery is glossed over in much of the South. Until 2018 Texas taught that slavery did not cause the Civil War, and whatever the standards are, many teachers still refuse to teach this basic fact.
Erm… no it isn’t. The goal is to ensure that everyone has access to individual freedoms, not just people who look like you.
No it isn’t. It’s to ensure that different groups have different privileges in order to try to force equality of outcome. So, poisoning the concept of individual freedom and liberty as nothing more than a tool of whiteness and white supremacy is key to that goal.
You are incorrect about that, sorry.
I’m not sure what you look like but I doubt we are clones. What freedom do I have that you do not?
None, because I’m white, white looking, my accent is thin enough that people don’t know I’m foreign unless I tell them, and my name is pretty white too.
But for example, when I applied to my current position, I didn’t have to worry about my western name raising any red flags, unlike Black and Asian Americans:
visit Washington’s house, they don’t deny he had slaves. They have a lot about slaves and they have the slave quarters open to visit.
That is problematic. But how does removing Abraham Lincoln’s name off a school or defacing a monument fix that?
For one, if when we talk about Washington or Lincoln we don’t brush their racism under the rug, but instead tackle it head on, acknowledge it, and then discuss the merits of the good things they did for our country from a historical perspective while also understanding their shortcomings, we just might raise a generation of Americans who understand that Racism is a problem, understand that even if you have no hate in your heart certain assumptions might get baked into your perception by the surrounding culture and that this is still an issue and poisons our society, and therefore be more conscious when making decisions going forwards. That generation of Americans, when they are the ones making hiring decisions, might do better.
In fact, I think it’s pretty damn likely they would. While anecdotes are not data, there is only one thought process I can ever fully understand, and that is my own. And my experience was that coming to understand these things definitely had led me to behave in a less racist way. That perception lines up with what I’ve read others say, as well as the limited number of studies on the matter. So I think it is pretty likely.
What’s sophisticated about it? It’s lazy ‘one-size-fits-all’ thinking which utterly fails to take into account the fact that people are products of their environment.
Not really. Moral relativism, as philosophers use the term, refers to the belief that the morality of an action is relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of the people performing that action. In other words, a true moral relativist, writing in the 21st Century, would argue that George Washington’s ownership and treatment of slaves was not objectively wrong, because slavery was an accepted part of 18th century society.
This is very different from merely judging people like Washington or Lincoln from within their own historical context. There’s a world of difference between saying, as I would, that Washington’s ownership of slaves was immoral, but that the man was merely a product of his time, and saying that Washington’s ownership of slaves was morally neutral and we’ve no right to an opinion on the matter.
Similarly, Lincoln’s views on race are, by our standards, undeniably retrograde, but they were far more progressive than pretty much everyone else around him. The fact that he was ahead of the curve on matters of race shows that he was an enlightened thinker, even if his views weren’t as enlightened as ours.
Yes, there were people in Lincoln’s time who were even more ahead of the curve than he was. That doesn’t change the fact that he was considerably more progressive than the society in which he was raised. And, unlike other 18th century abolitionists, Lincoln actually ended slavery. So he has that going for him.
Actually there was very little split-ticket voting between Biden and congress.
And The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein estimates that Biden carried about 223 House districts — almost exactly the same as the 222-224 seats Democrats will hold in the next Congress.2
I agree. I don’t have any problems with that. I disagree that removing all vestiges of folks from the public sphere and making it taboo to demonstrate an appreciation of historical times and places is the way to do it.
I agree with you. But because of this, we shouldn’t look at what Lincoln or the Founding Fathers say and treat it as sacred. When we evaluate a right - say, the second amendment - the fact that the founding fathers said so is no argument at all. We can look at the arguments they made, and see if they still make sense; but the fact that they came to a given conclusion should have no bearing on what we do today.
By that same token, if Lincoln’s ideas on race are flawed today, then putting his name on a school has certain implications.
In a history class, we can and absolutely should learn about Lincoln and his views, both the good and the bad. And we can and absolutely should debate how his views have aged, and what environment Lincoln was living in and how it shaped his beliefs. No one is advocating erasing Lincoln from history, or no longer making him the hero of historical movies (though if the movie pretends Lincoln did not hold those views that’s a problem too). I wouldn’t even say we shouldn’t have statues of him, because he did keep the union together, and that’s something to honor (as opposed to Confederate monuments, who honor people who absolutely don’t deserve it).
But when you put Lincoln’s name on something, especially something where race is already such a big issue like public education, his views on race DO matter. I don’t know whether that means Lincoln’s name shouldn’t be on any schools, but I do know that when people who are affected by this speak up about it, I’m going to listen and think it over, not automatically disparage them and scream about political correctness run amuck.
No, he didn’t.
We could probably dig something bad up on Jonas Bronck if we looked hard enough.
Biden on defund the police