{"id":5655,"date":"2008-11-27T03:34:32","date_gmt":"2008-11-27T10:54:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=5655"},"modified":"2008-11-27T03:34:32","modified_gmt":"2008-11-27T10:54:20","slug":"the-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=5655","title":{"rendered":"The One"},"content":{"rendered":"

Glenn Reynolds writes the stupidest thing he\u2019s ever written, even dumber than his Iraq War touchdown dance on his own 20-yard-line<\/a>. It turns out, you see, that There Can Be Only One.<\/p>\n

Am I talking of the Highlander? The Fifth Cylon? No, I\u2019m talking out the one important black person that can exist for all of American history<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I feel a little sorry for Martin Luther King \u2014 his enormous accomplishments got less attention than they deserved because of the cult of Malcolm X, and now he\u2019s being eclipsed by Barack Obama. Though I suppose he\u2019d be perfectly okay with that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, that Martin Luther Whatever guy, who\u2019s ever heard anything about him? It\u2019s not like the guy has a national holiday or anything.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s long and bitter racial history would see Obama\u2019s victory\u00a0as 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\u2019s history. He got his holiday for a reason \u2014 not that Reynolds\u2019 allies wanted him to.<\/p>\n

But Reynolds\u2019 world view is of a piece with the dribblings of Mark \u201cThe Human\u201d Steyn, who just doesn\u2019t like that his kid is learning about the darkies<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A few months back, my little boy came home from Second Grade and said to me, \u201cGuess what we learned today?\u201d I said: \u201cRosa Parks.\u201d He said: \u201cHow did you know that?\u201d I said: \u201cBecause it\u2019s always Rosa Parks.\u201d And, if you don\u2019t learn it in the context of any broader historical narrative, it\u2019s just a story about municipal transit seating arrangements.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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?<\/p>\n

But, even in its more benign form, warts-only education leaves a big hole where one\u2019s cultural inheritance should be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wow. So much to unpack. First off, let me remind Mark that he\u2019s a Canadian<\/a>; whose cultural heritage are we talking about? But the hoser\u2019s point\u00a0would\u00a0be dumb even if he could trace his roots back to the Mayflower<\/em>.<\/p>\n

My daughter, who\u2019s in first grade, learned about Rosa Parks. She didn\u2019t learn about Parks absent context; she learned that she defied a rule that said she couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

This is, of course, what Steyn misses in this \u2014 Rosa Parks\u2019 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\u2019s sins \u2014 slavery, the genocide of native peoples, the long period where women were denied the vote \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Our country has done great things. Among them are the great things we did to heal our own self-inflicted wounds. I\u2019m 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Glenn Reynolds writes the stupidest thing he\u2019s 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-race-racism-and-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}