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.
That’s not what education in Britain is like. Mark Steyn is blinded by ideology.
I love how one or two British-educated people who join terrorist groups are more significant to Steyn than the tens of thousands of British-educated people who join the British armed forces, or do other things to serve their country, even knowing that it was not and is not the most perfectly-behaved country it possibly could be.
(I guess you noticed this already, but this article was one of the five daily links on the front page of CIF today. Isn’t that two in the last week now? Awesome, anyway!)
I laugh at the fact that apparently the story of Rosa Parks is taught daily in schools… should make it fairly easy by senior year you’d think.
This is not one of your better posts. I clicked through to find that GL was getting a book about MLK in the mail. Once I knew that the rest of the post was clearly (to me) a stream of consciousness. I’m not sure what the two quotes have to do with eachother.
Oliver Willis got Reynolds in one word: Instacracker.
Reynolds’ perspective makes sense when you account for the fact that a good deal of people who are recipients of social privilege tend to quest for nothing more than personal gain. Even their participation in social justice is for the recognition they will get for what they do, so there is little understanding of someone who does something for the benefit of more than just themselves, of someone who knows that they may never see the end result of the work that they do, but they do it regardless because someone needs to lay the bricks so that the next generation can move forward a little further.
I would argue that some people can’t see any reason to be a visible activist besides the “glory,” which I would argue is a symptom of the tendency to white-wash history and try to show it without full context. If all you can remember of the civil rights movement is the “glory” that came with being MLK, then there are some serious gaps in your knowledge and understanding.
Agreed. And I expect that there are gaps in everyone’s knowledge and understanding.
None of use can remember everything. I sense the human mind is prone to remember ideas when packaged into simple, dramatic stories. So I can remember some facts about Rosa Parks. I’m sure I’ve forgotten many other facts about many other historical actors, and indeed I’ve probably forgotten facts about Parks that did not fit within the simple narratives that sticks in my brain.
(Ironically, one of the narratives that sticks in my brain is the idea that Parks was a long-term activist who was part of a carefully orchestrated effort to test segregation laws, but is often recalled as a poor, old, somewhat innocent woman with tired feet. Why do I recall this? Because it fits within the “human mind is prone to remember ideas packaged within a simple narrative” narratives I keep in my brain.)
Any effort to tell history is an exercise in editing, in choice. Yes, a triumphalist “cultural inheritance” history is a partial, biased history. A warts-only history is a partial, biased history. A history focused on heros — even when the heros include Parks — is a partial, biased history. ANY history will be a partial, biased history. It’s the nature of the beast.
Clicked through to the Mark Steyn blog and noticed that there are no comments enabled.
I’ve noticed this cowardly tendency more and more on right-wing blogs. Lileks never had them as I recall and I Gallop On has disabled them.
Hands over their ears, yelling “La la la”.
This is a very good point:
A conservative was complaining to me the other day about how much he disliked his high school course in Alabama history, which was all dull except for the civil rights movement, and the civil rights movement was depressing to learn because it was about how “white people are bad.” This really is how a lot of conservatives view the civil rights movement — not as the triumph of a multi-cultural team that included “white people” (with particular respect for the Jews who supported African Americans) over antiquated notions of racial superiority, but as an attack on the personal virtue of white Americans.
I find this very puzzling, because I can cheer on efforts by the scheduled castes in India to overcome caste prejudice without feeling like I, as a Velama (a “middle caste”), am somehow being attacked. Instead, I am proud that at least the educated elites at India’s founding declared caste discrimination to be unconstitutional, and endeavored through affirmative action to raise Dalits’ and tribals’ status (though I’m not sure this has been useful in ridding Hinduism and Hindus of caste bias).
Why don’t conservatives feel good about the moments in our history when Americans have stood up for what is right? Do they all just have a subconscious feeling that they would have been on the wrong side of those battles? Are they steeling us against the current recognition of the heroes of the sexual orientation equality movement, like Harvey Milk, where the conservatives of today know they will be on the wrong side of tomorrow’s history?
Of course, when we learned about Rosa Parks in school, it was all a big lie.
I (like everyone else I asked) learned that she was just a “regular person” who was tired and wasn’t going to take it anymore. In fact, she was an anti-segregation activist who has planned the action well in advance.
I don’t think the real story is any more or less “heroic” than the fake/ taught story, which is why I find the lie so egregious.
I’m not clear why it needs to be zero-sum. It’s not like there’s only room for one meaningful black name in our national psyche.
Rich B., definitely.