One thing about having conservative friends: They sure do peddle a lot of ignorant nonsense. I shouldn’t complain. It inspires me to write something, though I’ve been down this block before. Still, it’s a subject worth revisiting.
On Monday, on the Juneteenth federal holiday, my friend sent me this tweet:
Friendly reminder that #Juneteenth only exists because white Union soldiers had to go to Galveston, TX (two and a half years AFTER Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation) to ENFORCE freedom for slaves because democrat slave owners wouldn’t have freed them otherwise.
Here’s a friendly reminder: “Democrat” is not an adjective; it’s a noun. The correct word is “Democratic,” and it is capitalized. Most adjectives and nouns referring to the ideas, actions, documents and members of specific political parties, movements and groups are capitalized.
Rush Limbaugh popularized this grammatical blunder to suggest that Democrats are undemocratic. Conservatives should stop it. The attempt to score political points makes you sound more ignorant than you already are.
To no surprise, the author of the tweet describes himself as a member of the MAGA faithful and claims to be the founder of some right-wingnut YouTube channel. Great. Yet another platform to hawk his ignorance. He adds the aphorism, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Well, ain’t that deep, and said by no countryman of any country ever in the history of countries. EVER!
And though he adds that his “opinions are my own,” the sad part is that plenty of people are stupid enough to think that anything he says is factual.
Well, here’s a friendly admonishment, buddy: Your historical account is crap. At best, it’s inaccurate. Worse, it’s flat-out wrong. Worst of all, it reinforces the sort of ignorance that conservatives might as well patent into a cottage industry. It’s also the sort of ignorance that ultimately undermines a democratic society.
Let’s start with the holiday. Juneteenth honors the 1865 emancipation of about 250,000 slaves in Galveston, Texas, who had been unaware of the Emancipation Proclamation that President Abraham Lincoln had signed two years earlier, declaring freedom for all slaves.
Gen. Gordon Granger, who was white, led Union troops to the Galveston harbor on June 17, 1865. Those troops included more than 10,000 Black soldiers of the U.S. Colored Troops, as they were called then.
Two days later, Granger issued what is known as General Order No. 3, notifying the people of Texas that all slaves were free, declaring “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.” That is what Juneteenth celebrates.
If you believe in our nation’s founding principles, if you respect the contributions of Lincoln, considered by many to be our nation’s greatest president, then you would agree that Juneteenth is not just African American history, it is American history.
As an aside, it’s ironic that Lincoln, so instrumental in pursuing “absolute equality,” no longer has his own holiday. I have always been puzzled by combining his and George Washington’s birthdays into a single holiday.
Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021. But the holiday, now behind us until next year, is not my primary focus here.
How many times have we heard a conservative disparage Democrats by pointing out that they were the party of slave owners and that Republicans were the party of freedom?
Like many of today’s Republicans with a limited grasp of history, our tweet author doesn’t get it. Or maybe he gets it too well. By describing the slave owners in Texas as Democrats who “wouldn’t have freed them otherwise,” he’s taking a cheap shot at the Democrats of today.
He mistakes the name for ideology. What he misses, or what he intentionally refuses to explain, is that the Democrats of that era were the conservatives of that era. The Republicans of that era were the liberals.
Democrats in the South continued to harbor these racist tendencies that grew out of the Civil War South until the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, steered the Civil Rights Act into law. Longtime Democrats who were always conservatives inevitably switched parties and became Republicans, something exploited by Richard Nixon when he ran for president in 1968, what political scientists refer to as the Southern Strategy. Party philosophy didn’t change; only the name did. You’re going to tell me you’ll be a different person after you legally change your name?
It’s the ideology that matters, and that has never changed. Conservatives were always of the ideology that fought to keep slavery, and while many conservatives today are not racists, if you are a racist, you are likely conservative in your ideology and Republican in your party allegiance. Liberals were always abolitionists, opposed to slavery and for the Civil War Amendments, the 13th, 14th and 15th. Liberals are not perfect and never were, but in the broadest sense, the only prejudice they harbor is prejudice toward ignorance and liars. Especially the manipulative liars whose only purpose is to continue fostering ignorance.
Variants of the “history repeats itself” theme are as common as debates about its attribution. “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” Irish statesman Edmund Burke is often misquoted as having said that. British statesman Winston Churchill also is often miscredited with writing, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Spanish philosopher George Santayana is actually responsible for the famous saying “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” having written it in the closing section of “The Life of Reason.”
Sadly, today’s Republican lawmakers are trying to whitewash American history and reality itself by censuring Advanced Placement courses, banning books or rewriting high school and middle school studies to create a history they like rather than a history that is. The most recent effort is occurring in Idaho, which is introducing a new curriculum for students starting this fall.
In a news release, Gov. Brad Little described the program as “a picture of America that aligns with our Idaho values of embracing patriotism and a sense of pride about the success of our great country and it teaches American history in a fair and factual way.”
That’s a lot of words for whitewashing. Stuff like this is why the only thing I worry about from Idaho is potatoes.
How did this come about? Lawmakers traveling the state during the 2022 election season said they heard from voters concerned that an anti-American ideology they felt they were seeing nationally might make it into Idaho classrooms. They were unhappy with American history “not being portrayed in a respectful way.”
Respectful? How about honest? How about an honest rendering of our history? Is that too much to ask?
Apparently it is. An honest rendition of history “hurts my feelings.” Once again, the true snowflakes in our society are these wimpy conservatives. They love to talk tough but constantly prove they’re a bunch of pansies. As Jack Nicholson’s character said in “A Few Good Men”: “You can’t handle the truth.”
Beyond that, how idiotic is it to give credence to people with no professional background in education, let alone an honest grasp of history, the power to determine how we’re going to educate our children?
All nations have had their share of awkward and regrettable moments in history. Honorable nations accept and acknowledge their past, including the less flattering parts, so they may learn from their mistakes. However, Idaho seems to be avoiding this practice by replacing history with propaganda to mask its fear of the truth.
Are the people offended (or just annoyed) by the idea of a Juneteenth holiday analogous to those who might oppose observing Holocaust Remembrance Day?
In Germany, each of the 16 federal states set their own curricula, but they are uniform in their teaching of the Holocaust. It is mandatory in history and civics classes and typically gets covered in literature and religion lessons. It can even turn up in biology, art and music classes. At some point, most schoolchildren will visit a concentration camp. In Germany, understanding that history is seen as necessary to prevent such horrors from happening again.
But if we applied the mindset of your typical conservative American snowflake to that curriculum, imagine the outrage. Parents would revolt, screaming at school board meetings that such a visit would be inappropriate. They’d cry to lawmakers running for reelection that it was anti-American and not portraying American history in a “respectful way.” It’s too negative! It makes our country look bad! It hurts my feelings! And, of course, spineless lawmakers would cave and force educators to change the curriculum.
So, is blissful ignorance a better path?
A 2018 survey found that 1 in 20 Europeans had never heard of the Holocaust. A third said they knew “little or nothing” about it. One-quarter of millennials in France said they had not heard of it. More than half of Austrians didn’t know that the Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. In the United States, a similar survey found that two-thirds of millennials did not know what Auschwitz was.
Can you imagine a survey 75 years hence finding two-thirds of Americans unable to explain 9/11? We made many mistakes before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Would it have been better to ignore those mistakes, pretend they didn’t happen, risk missing warning signs and suffer another attack?
But we have done so regarding slavery’s place in American history. Our failure to acknowledge it has played a significant role in formulating American public policy. Juneteenth is a microcosm of that failure. For two years, slave owners failed ― more likely refused ― to acknowledge the dictates of the Emancipation Proclamation, thus maintaining the defunct policy of legal slavery.
Ohio State University history professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries writes:
When slavery ended, white Southerners carried the mindsets of enslavers with them into the post-emancipation period, creating new exploitative labor arrangements such as sharecropping, new disenfranchisement mechanisms including literacy tests, and new discriminatory social systems, namely Jim Crow. It took African Americans more than a century to eliminate these legal barriers to equality, but that has not been enough to erase race-based disparities in every aspect of American life, from education and employment to wealth and well-being. Public policies tend to treat this racial inequality as a product of poor personal decision-making, rather than acknowledging it as the result of racialized systems and structures that restrict choice and limit opportunity. Understanding American slavery is vital to understanding racial inequality today.
Why should we consider it anti-American to acknowledge that our Founding Fathers were also slave owners? Our acknowledgment presents an opportunity to ponder the complexities, moral dilemmas and contradictions of men who crafted the Bill of Rights, a document that by its very nature condemns the lifestyles of its crafters.
What compromises did the delegates of the Several States have to make to establish and enshrine the 10 Amendments in the Bill of Rights, not only to each other but also to themselves?
We complain, rightly, that today’s lawmakers behave hypocritically. They couldn’t hold a candle to the Framers, yet the behavior of those Founding Fathers, steeped in the writings of Greek philosophers and Enlightenment thinkers, could just as readily be called into question. Imagine asking James Madison, “Dude, you practically wrote the Bill of Rights; how could you also be the same guy who owned slaves?”
“The point is not to teach American history as a chronicle of shame and oppression,” writes Yale University history professor David Blight, but “to tell American history as a story of real human beings, of power, of vast economic and geographical expansion, of great achievements as well as great dispossession, of human brutality and human reform. The point is also not to merely seek the story of what we are not, but of what we are.”
And often, who we are is who we were, but acknowledging who we were, both the good and the bad, allows us the chance to be better at who we are and who we can be.
History is complicated, just as people are complicated. And rarely do either fit neatly into the comfortable pigeonholes some of us create for ourselves. The ugly parts of our history may sound anti-American to the thin-skinned among us, but our insistent fondness for a sanitized history will lead us to continue the mores of our past or repeat the mistakes of the past, be it the crafting of bad public policy or bad public (and private) behavior.
This is far more than just the misnomer of what Democrats and Republicans represented in our nation’s Civil War era. It’s about everything the United States has been but may not become ― that more perfect union ― if we fail to humbly acknowledge our nation’s past failures. To create a narrative in which those failures are ignored and/or never existed is to assure stagnation. Or even worse, regression. That is what comes to mind when I see the kind of ignorance one sees in the aforementioned tweet.
Santayana argued that we cannot progress in this life unless we remember what we’ve learned from the past. After all, change isn’t the same thing as progress.
The conservative snowflakes in red states may claim to love America, but they sure seem to hate the truth.