Anger is like darkness: The more there is, the less you can see.
This is a good reason why angry people shouldn’t helm social-change movements and, to the point here, why they shouldn’t devise school history curricula.
A good example of such a person might be one complaining about “legislation that seeks to shield white children from facing the facts of white supremacy — mandating that a ‘person should not be instructed that he or she must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions, in which he or she played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race.’”
The above is, of course, not hypothetical, but was written by a social activist and Guardian columnist — an apparently very angry man — named Steve Phillips.
Phillips complained in the title of a Monday article that we “get 28 days for Black history in the US — but every month is White History Month.”
Yet what the columnist considers history is interesting. He speaks of the 1619 Project as if it’s gospel, when it has been exposed as propaganda, and then writes “that all of US history has to be rethought” — our own Year Zero, basically.
What’s currently raising the writer’s hackles, though — along with those of leftists from Haight-Ashbury to Greenwich Village — is a Sunshine State politician casting a dark cloud over their agenda. That would be Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, whose anti-anti-American legislation Phillips complained about above. Eliminating “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” does, after all, rob Phillips and his comrades of virtually every arrow in their quiver.
DeSantis “is merely following the well-worn path of prior champions of white racial grievance, such as the 1960s segregationist and [Democratic] Alabama governor George Wallace…,” Phillips opines. “Wallace most clearly discovered and articulated the political power of white racial resentment when he told a journalist: ‘I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes — and I couldn’t make them listen. Then I began talking about [N-word] — and they stomped the floor.’”
The irony is that Phillips ’n’ friends can’t stop talking about the W-word, which they love using as a modifier to describe a host of related fantastical concepts thus: white privilege, white supremacy, white norms, white fragility. That’s how they get their audience (and mobs) to stomp the floor; in 2020, they stomped around via 600-plus riots to the tune of billions in damage and dozens dead.
But Phillips has a challenge for us. If “we really want to teach the truth,” he writes, “we should confront the fact that every month is White History Month and we should have a national debate about … that.”
Now, when leftists ask for a “debate” or Conversation™, usually they mean they’ll preach and you stay silent and nod approvingly. But if we’re really to have a debate, then one side cannot expect to define the suppositions both sides will operate by; i.e., it’s a “fact that every month is White History Month.” (Emphasis added.)
Black actor Morgan Freeman certainly doesn’t agree. Calling Black History Month “ridiculous” in 2005, he asked 60 Minutes interviewer Mike Wallace rhetorically, “Which month is White History Month? Come on, tell me” — clearly implying there’s no such thing.
“I don’t want a Black History Month,” Freeman later added. “Black history is American history.” White history is, too.
Note, however, what Phillips cites as white history. He mentions only two things: 1939’s Gone With the Wind, which, he points out, is the all-time highest-grossing film (adjusted for inflation); and that, of the 100 statues in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda (each state is allowed two), there are “19 statues, busts and paintings of Confederates.”
So it’s all race, all the time. That’s obsession. Never mind that according to the 2007 book White Cargo approximately 300,000 Caucasians were brought to America and used as slaves. Yet neither some whites’ enslavement nor others’ slaver status defines white history.
And history, do note, is simply “What happened” — not what some academic or activist wishes had happened. It should be merit-based, too: If you did something notable and “make the cut,” you’re in the book.
As to this, the world’s Phillipses may complain that white faces dominate history. Those faces are there for good reason, though.
We are of Western culture, which transformed the world and dates back approximately 3,200 years to ancient Greece (to a time, mind you, when our modern concept of race was unknown). And for virtually all this history the West was relatively homogeneous racially — what we today call “white.” So the fact that most of the great figures gracing our history books are white isn’t called unjust discrimination — it’s called statistical probability.
The racialists would like history compiled by quota, but this is like hiring pilots by quota (which I just wrote about): You can crash our system.
Of course, some may ask, as Mike Wallace did of Morgan Freeman, without a focus on black history, “how are we going to get rid of racism?” The actor’s reflexive answer was:
“Stop talking about it.”
That’s a good start. You don’t eliminate a negative by fixating obsessively on the negative, but by focusing on the positive that negates it. So just as lust is mitigated by cultivating chastity, “racism” (a sub-category of wrath) is diminished by cultivating love, charity, and forgiveness.
Unfortunately, we won’t generally get this remedy from the kind of people passionate enough to helm social-change movements. For theirs is that fiery and fearsome passion that blinds — and kills.
