I found myself recently having a respectful exchange of ideas with someone who expressed concerns about “cancel culture”. If you’re not a Fox News regular, then you might not recognize that as their mock-concern talking point in response to the removal of confederate statues. Not only do I detest the hypocritical resistance to our nation’s long overdue struggle to reckon with systemic racism, but I also refuse to swallow it, coddle it, ignore it, or compromise with it. Iron sharpens iron by rubbing against it – irritating it. It’s the same way pearls are formed. It’s the same way that our nation will finally find that more perfect union. By having the courage to engage in the marketplace of ideas even when it’s irritating. So, I don’t mind being the sandpaper if it polishes the collective psyche.
My friend told me about his grandfather. A white man raised in a different era who may have harbored his own personal prejudices but never hurt or hindered anyone. He said he was a good man and he didn’t consider him a “racist”.
I told him about my mother. She was the product of a generation who lived prior to the Civil Rights Movement – and as a result of that sometimes she detested white people. I thought she was going to disown me when I brought home a white boyfriend! But I also remember that years earlier, when she somehow became acquainted with a family of white people living in the woods in a trailer with no running water, no electricity, and very little food. She, a struggling divorced mom with four children, immediately, without a second thought, began helping them – bringing them food, trying to get them a heater and a pump. I learned from seeing the entire arc of her life that she loved people and she loved the Lord – but she was a product of an era that she struggled to heal from. I knew the whole woman, which is always more complex than isolated words or actions.
He expressed that he wasn’t ready to tear down statutes of Jefferson and Washington. My response was that the movement I’m aware of was about confederate statues not toppling statues of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Despite their shortcomings, they were fathers of the nation and helped to push the country forward. But like my mom and his grandfather, they were complex beings – a combo platter of conflicting ideas and emotions. Some of Thomas Jefferson’s writings actually chronicle his struggle with slavery. I love this one and think of it often…
“Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!” (Notes on the State of Virginia)
He understood that what he was doing was wrong, that God would judge him, yet he still chose to be a slaveholder…? He wrote “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence and led the nation while engaging in a lurid decades-long affair with (rape of?) the slave girl, Sally Hemmings. While publicly declaring Blacks inferior, he posthumously emancipated his and Hemmings’ children (Black people according to the “one-drop” rule of his day) allowing them to live in freedom among whites.
Clearly, he was a deeply flawed and conflicted human. But like a lot of folks (then and now) his own self-interest won out over his conscience. Where it comes to him and other founding fathers, we should seek to find the Truth that exists between “cancel culture” and the centuries of “white-washing” that America has indulged in – making whites the blameless conquering heroes and saviors of every story. We can start by acknowledging and understanding the entire arc of the founding fathers’ lives. We could view and teach our children to view them and every other historical figure in their entirety and in context. Doing that with brutal honesty could be extremely beneficial in understanding that the word “racist” describes actions, laws, culture, and ideas more aptly than it does people. Racist is no one’s fixed identity – racist is what someone does not who they are. An adjective – not a noun.
Jefferson is a perfect case study. His writings give us a window into his soul where we can see the cognitive dissonance of being steeped in a culture that tempts you with the privileges of “whiteness” at the cost of dehumanizing your fellow man. It reminds me of Christ being tempted by Satan in the wilderness – “Just fall down and worship me and I’ll give you the world and all its glory!” He offered Jesus the glory of the cross without the blood. Slavery offered whites wealth without the work. White supremacy offers whites the privilege of supremacy without the truth of it. In his own words, you can see that the injustice – the lie haunted him. Unlike Christ, he didn’t have the moral fortitude to deny “the world and all its glory”.
Just like Jesus in the wilderness, you can accept the world and all its glory, or you can possess your soul, One or the other…not both. A lot of people try to compromise. But this is a zero-sum game and it’s not between blacks and whites as most think. It’s between whites and their souls – their humanity. The more you compromise the less of your soul you possess until you are so soul-less that you can shoot down a black jogger because he refuses to bow to your fake supremacy; or devise legislation that disenfranchises Blacks from the political process, stripping them of power “with surgical precision”; or kneel on a black man’s neck until he dies with your hands casually planted in your pockets as if you’re waiting for the number five bus.
Honestly looking at Jefferson shows us that systemic racism is less often about beliefs and more often about self-interest that has become hard-wired into our institutions by folks who choice by choice, compromise by compromise, day by day choose “the world and all its glory”. That is the hard truth of our history and our heritage. Acknowledging that is the only compromise I’m willing to broker with the cries of “cancel culture”. It blows up America’s shameless “white-washing” of history and makes room for black and brown and red and olive-colored stories and heroes and legends. It makes room for Truth.
Examining our American “culture” through a lens of Truth also reveals the lack of complexity in men whose greatest accomplishment was starting a civil war that decimated 20% of southern white males in order to maintain their perceived right to enslave, rape, brutalize and dehumanize fellow human beings. They had already lost their humanity and their souls.
Such men do not merit statutes.
