I wrote at little about his earlier, but I’d like to add a couple of other thoughts regarding campus demands to rename buildings, statues, and the like commemorating individuals whose views on minorities and women have not stood well the test of time.
First, as I noted before, since none of us is without sin, requiring sinlessness for commemoration means no one will be commemorated. Yet even those who were terrible sinners in one area might be visionaries in another. So a Woodrow Wilson Civil Rights Center might be a bad idea, but not a Woodrow Wilson Center for Loopy Progressivism. Note, by the way, that the Left seems happy to name things after people who are actually convicted criminals, so long as the person is their convicted criminal: Consider the recent proposals to honor former D.C. mayor Marion Barry.
Second, one suspects, alas, that denigrating the Nation’s (and the West’s) founders — and thus the Nation (and the West) itself — is part of the long-term game here. If anyone who ever owned a slave or profited in any way from the slave trade or thought that a woman’s place is in the home is to be consigned to the memory hole, well, that’s it for a lot of our big names, isn’t it?
Nor do I doubt that there’s a powerful subtext here: “You should feel bad about yourself and your country because people of your color did bad things once upon a time to people of another color.” The idea is to intimidate and to shut people up, the better to advance the Left’s agenda. But this backward-looking message is not good for race relations, being all about blame, envy, and resentment, about feeding guilt and refusing to forgive.
Nor is a backward-looking focus a helpful one for young African Americans in particular. The following analogy might be apt. Suppose that an ante bellum Southerner criticized Yankees for having bad manners. He might well have been right. But, in hindsight, we would all agree that, bad manners or not, the Yankees (or, more precisely, the abolitionists) were right about slavery, and to focus on bad manners at a time when that abhorrent institution was alive and well showed, to put it charitably, a lack of perspective.
Or, to give a funnier example, recall the scene in the original movie version of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, where the Nazi playwright is bemoaning the fact that Churchill is more fondly remembered than Hitler, notwithstanding the fact that Hitler was a better dresser, a better dancer, and a better joke-teller. Well, maybe, but still ….
In 2016, for the Left to be focused on renaming buildings and removing statues — when 71 percent of African Americans are being born out of wedlock, and that is the real obstacle to black progress — shows a similar lack of perspective. To live well and prosper, the focus must be on seizing opportunities in the present and preparing for the future, not obsessing over wrongs in the past.
Emory Protestors Admit “Mismatch” Problem – As Harvey Klehr says in his good discussion of the recent pro–Donald Trump sidewalk chalkings at Emory University:
Citing the fact that “not all Black students are adequately prepared for the rigor of Emory University” and that a number are “unprepared for the academic rigor of Emory’s pre-professional academic track,” the students demanded special tutoring programs and facilities for minority students. Instead of asking whether Emory’s affirmative action policies on admission and financial aid were leading to the admission of students who struggled to succeed in a very competitive environment, the administration responded by pledging to create task forces and hold conversations to address the demands.
Tragedy:Farce :: 1968:2016 – I’m starting to read comparisons of 2016 to 1968, given the sorry state of the world in general and American politics in particular. But I must say that, if this is an example of history repeating itself, perhaps it’s also an example of the first time being tragedy and the second time being farce.
Consider, for example, race relations. In 1968 the Justice Department was putting an end to Jim Crow, but in 2016 the feds are telling us that the problem is overaggressive traffic ticketing. On the world stage, ISIS is surely a threat to the United States, but compared to the Soviet Union? Plus, there’s no draft and no hippies.
And consider our politicians. Can Donald Trump match George Wallace’s credentials in the bigotry department? He cannot. Is Ted Cruz as tricky as Dick Nixon? Don’t be silly. Is Hillary Clinton scarier than Hubert Humphrey? Okay, I’ll give you that one.
Flint, Race, and the New York Times – Last week there was a front-page, above-the-fold headline (hard copy) in the New York Times: “Report on Flint Cites ‘Injustice’: Race Is Said to Play a Role in Inaction.” And it’s true that the Flint Water Advisory Task Force report that is the subject of the article makes that claim (see pages 54-55). But no evidence is cited in the report for the proposition that race played a role in any of the lamentable actions or inactions involved — none. The closest it comes is a footnote to a Huffington Post (!) article, but that article also contains no such evidence. The reasoning is that something bad happened here, and the people involved were black, and so therefore what happened must have happened because the people involved were black. To deny this is, I suspect, likewise proof of racism.
Addendum: The next day, an editorial in the Times (“The Racism at the Heart of Flint’s Crisis”) repeated and sharpened the charge, but naturally also failed to produce any evidence.
