Alas, a Blog

Glenn Reynolds writes the stupidest thing he’s ever written, even dumber than his Iraq War touchdown dance on his own 20-yard-line. It turns out, you see, that There Can Be Only One.

Am I talking of the Highlander? The Fifth Cylon? No, I’m talking out the one important black person that can exist for all of American history:

I feel a little sorry for Martin Luther King — his enormous accomplishments got less attention than they deserved because of the cult of Malcolm X, and now he’s being eclipsed by Barack Obama. Though I suppose he’d be perfectly okay with that.

Yeah, that Martin Luther Whatever guy, who’s ever heard anything about him? It’s not like the guy has a national holiday or anything.

Now, we can go on and on about the utter stupidity of Reynolds pretending that W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman are now totally unimportant thanks to Obama’s victory; indeed, we can go further and note how insane it is that Reynolds would think Du Bois, Douglas, King, Malcolm X, Tubman, and the several million other African-Americans who worked for equality through our nation’s long and bitter racial history would see Obama’s victory as anything other than a positive outcome of their work. And certainly, I think everyone, including Barack Obama, would view Martin Luther King, Jr., as one of the three or four most influential Americans of the twentieth century, and one of the ten most influential in our nation’s history. He got his holiday for a reason — not that Reynolds’ allies wanted him to.

But Reynolds’ world view is of a piece with the dribblings of Mark “The Human” Steyn, who just doesn’t like that his kid is learning about the darkies:

A few months back, my little boy came home from Second Grade and said to me, “Guess what we learned today?” I said: “Rosa Parks.” He said: “How did you know that?” I said: “Because it’s always Rosa Parks.” And, if you don’t learn it in the context of any broader historical narrative, it’s just a story about municipal transit seating arrangements.

Teaching only the warts is a terrible thing to do to young children. At its extreme it leads to those British Taliban captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan: Subjects of the Crown who’d been raised in English schools and taught only that the country to which they owed their nominal allegiance was the source of all the racism, oppression, colonialism, and imperialism in the world. Why be surprised that a proportion of the alumni of such a system would look elsewhere for their sense of identity?

But, even in its more benign form, warts-only education leaves a big hole where one’s cultural inheritance should be.

Wow. So much to unpack. First off, let me remind Mark that he’s a Canadian; whose cultural heritage are we talking about? But the hoser’s point would be dumb even if he could trace his roots back to the Mayflower.

My daughter, who’s in first grade, learned about Rosa Parks. She didn’t learn about Parks absent context; she learned that she defied a rule that said she couldn’t go where she wanted because of the color of her skin. When my daughter mentioned learning about Parks, I amplified the lesson, telling her how in some places in that time, the color of your skin dictated which schools you went to, which restaurants you could patronize, even what bathrooms you used. I told her that this was horribly wrong, and that American heroes like Parks stood up to that system, and that they made our country a better place.

This is, of course, what Steyn misses in this — Rosa Parks’ story is told precisely because it is heroic. Martin Luther King, Jr. is revered precisely because he was a national hero. We learn about our country’s sins — slavery, the genocide of native peoples, the long period where women were denied the vote — and we learn that even in the face of the worst our country could do, that ordinary Americans still stood up and fought for justice.

Our country has done great things. Among them are the great things we did to heal our own self-inflicted wounds. I’m grateful for all the men and women of all races who have worked to make ours what the founders called A More Perfect Union. Far from being beside the point, they are the point of this endeavor, the people who were empowered by the ideals of the Founding Fathers to speak out against our nation’s failings and by opposing, end them. That is the greatness of America, and it is a greatness that is belittled by ignoring it in favor of bland triumphalism.