Ep. 57 - Stop Trying To Erase The Past
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
163.96196
Summary
Laura Ingalls Wilder has been removed from the American Library Association s prestigious Children's Literature Award because of her culturally insensitive writings about Native Americans in her books. In this episode, I discuss the problem with censoring the past and vilifying our ancestors.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
On my show a couple of days ago, we discussed the effort to, that's been going on for quite
00:00:05.700
some time now, to erase our national history and to indict the heroic figures who built our
00:00:12.440
civilization. And I pointed out that while the pioneers, explorers, conquerors, settlers,
00:00:18.500
pilgrims, founders were not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, they still accomplished great
00:00:26.520
things. And many of them were great people. And so we should look to them, admire them, honor them,
00:00:32.720
and yes, build statues to them and everything. And I also pointed out that while we hold,
00:00:38.740
you know, these Western figures to this modern standard, we hold them to a modern standard,
00:00:46.780
especially on racial issues, and we spit on their graves if they don't live up to it.
00:00:52.900
While we do that, you don't find that in any other country, in any other culture. That's not going
00:00:59.740
on in any other country or culture. It's only in the West. They're not doing the same thing with
00:01:04.180
their own heritage and their own historic heroes, and we don't expect them to. So I went in on the
00:01:09.620
show, I went into extensive detail, just as an example, talking about how many Native American
00:01:15.500
tribes and civilizations were unspeakably brutal, murderous, in some cases cannibalistic. They
00:01:22.520
raped, enslaved, destroyed, you know, human sacrifices, so on and so forth. Yet nobody would
00:01:29.580
ever tell a Native American not to be proud of their heritage. Nobody would tell them not to honor
00:01:34.780
their historical heroes, their historical figures. That only happens in the West.
00:01:41.340
So I want to expand on that conversation now a little bit and talk about the real problem
00:01:48.720
that arises when we start to do this. When we go back and we censor the past and we condemn
00:01:56.820
our ancestors and the people who built this civilization, when we start doing that, a really
00:02:02.840
big problem happens. When we make essentially a cartoon of the past, when we make caricatures
00:02:09.020
of our historical figures, and we make them into these kind of villainous cartoons, there's a big
00:02:15.640
problem. I want to talk about what that problem is. And as an example of this phenomenon and of the
00:02:22.400
problem itself, let's talk about this situation with Laura Ingalls Wilder, who, of course, was a
00:02:28.040
famous author in the mid-19th century, early 20th century. She wrote The Little House on the Prairie
00:02:33.440
Books. But now, the American Library Association is dropping her name from a prestigious children's
00:02:40.640
award that they've been giving out for, I don't know, 50 or 60 years. They've had her name on it.
00:02:45.820
And they're taking her name off. And there's this process now of kind of banishing her from the
00:02:51.820
children's literature space because of her culturally insensitive writings. So I want to read quickly a
00:02:58.740
quote from Jim Neal, the president of the American Library Association. He's explaining this decision.
00:03:06.000
Wilder's books are a product of her life experiences and perspective as a settler in America's 1800s.
00:03:12.780
Her works reflect dated cultural attitudes toward indigenous people and people of color that
00:03:18.560
contradict modern acceptance, celebration, and understanding of diverse communities.
00:03:23.920
Well, geez, I mean, that's surprising, isn't it? That somebody who was writing in 1905 would have
00:03:32.120
a dated perspective on something. I mean, that's totally shocking, isn't it? And then if you're
00:03:37.400
wondering, well, what are these horrible things that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote? There's a New York
00:03:44.360
Times article that describes some of Wilder's offenses. I'll read a little bit of it. It says,
00:03:50.320
in the 1935 book Little House on the Prairie, for example, multiple characters espoused versions of
00:03:57.560
the view that, quote, the only good Indian was a dead Indian. In one scene, a character describes
00:04:03.160
Native Americans as wild animals, undeserving of the land they lived on. Little Town on the Prairie,
00:04:09.700
published in 1941, included a description of a minstrel show with, quote, five black-faced men
00:04:19.880
in raggedy-taggedy uniforms alongside a jolting illustration of the scene. Debbie Reese, a scholar
00:04:26.840
whose writing and research focuses on portrayals of American Indians in children's literature, says
00:04:32.080
there's this very subtle but very clear fear generated throughout the books. And she says it's
00:04:37.660
not appropriate for young students, maybe for high schoolers, but not for young students.
00:04:42.060
So, in other words, the characters in her books had attitudes that the people in that time and in
00:04:53.100
that setting would have had. And that's a problem. You see, because we're not allowed to acknowledge
00:04:58.860
that anymore. We have to hide our children from it in shame. We have to shield them from it. You think
00:05:06.220
about all the things we don't bother shielding children from anymore? I mean, all the, it's like
00:05:10.680
you've got people, parents and particularly school administrators and teachers who think there's
00:05:17.580
nothing wrong with introducing children to the most depraved sexual ideas and sex acts imaginable
00:05:25.600
at very young ages. But, oh no, you know, an unflattering portrayal of Native Americans in a
00:05:32.080
children's book. Well, that, I mean, that is just, no, we can't do that. So, of course, all these books
00:05:37.580
have to be gotten rid of, and any person, well, any white person, we should say, who may have possessed
00:05:43.780
such attitudes back in the day must be posthumously exiled from polite society. That's what we're doing.
00:05:52.140
And it's complete madness. I mean, it is total madness to be doing this. And I'll explain why. First of all,
00:05:59.460
on the issue of historical racism, and I know this might be a little bit upsetting for people to hear,
00:06:05.760
because I'm going, yes, I'm going to make the case that for a, for a white settler in the 1800s,
00:06:13.540
or a pilgrim in the 1600s, or an explorer conquistador in the 1500s, for them to have racist
00:06:22.800
attitudes was not, that, that, those racist attitudes were not as bad as the racist attitudes
00:06:29.860
that you might find today. In other words, it is worse for you and I to be racist than it was for
00:06:36.960
them. Their, their, their moral guilt for their racism was, I think, severely mitigated by many
00:06:47.220
different circumstances. Because you, now, if you're watching this or listening to this right
00:06:52.600
now, and you're not racist, well then, I mean, good for you. Congratulations. If I had a cookie,
00:06:58.000
I would give it to you. I mean, you know, go get yourself a cookie for not being racist. Congrats.
00:07:02.920
You're, you're a wonderful person on the thumbs up on not being racist. Wonderful. Good for you.
00:07:08.600
Just, you should be so proud, but that's not an achievement. That is not a moral achievement on your part.
00:07:14.060
Being, for most of us, being racist was never even really like an option. We just, we grew up in a
00:07:20.720
world where, for, for a lot of us anyway, we grew up in an environment where it just never even came
00:07:25.920
up. It never even, I mean, it never even occurred to most. It never even occurred to me to, to be
00:07:30.300
racist. It just, it, I just, and, and if it ever did occur to anyone, you also grew up in a society
00:07:35.580
where racism is extremely socially unacceptable and it will be socially punished, maybe even legally
00:07:43.120
punished in some circumstances. So it was never really, never really occurred to anyone to be
00:07:48.780
racist. That's, that's not the world that we live in. So it means you, you deserve absolutely no credit
00:07:54.560
whatsoever for not being racist. That is just kind of a bare minimum thing in our society. So it doesn't
00:08:03.460
afford you the high moral position that you think it does. Okay. It doesn't give you the, the,
00:08:10.260
the position where you could stand up on your pedestal and look down on historical people and
00:08:16.680
say, well, tsk, tsk, tsk, look at those horrible people with their racist attitudes. I'm so much
00:08:22.140
better than them. No, it doesn't give you that. It doesn't give you that position because the fact is
00:08:29.180
this, almost everybody in the world up until about 1960 was racist by our definition of the term.
00:08:39.960
Almost everyone. I mean, they were all racist. The idea of universal racial equality is very new. It is
00:08:49.060
uniquely modern. It is uniquely Western. Even now today, currently, there are many places in the world
00:08:57.080
where that does not exist. There are many places in the world where racism is still mainstream. And most of
00:09:02.340
those places are non-Western places. Racism was and still is incredibly common in some non-Western, non-white
00:09:11.020
cultures. But let's look at this historically. Prior to the mid-20th century, racism was largely a given for
00:09:20.780
most people across the world, across the races. I mean, if you think for a minute that this was unique
00:09:28.200
to white people, then you really are just an incredible fool. And I don't mean that as an
00:09:34.120
insult. I just mean that you really are. I mean, some people are fools and you'd be a fool, a complete
00:09:37.900
total fool who's never read a book in your life if you actually think that. No, this was not just a
00:09:42.900
white person. Even the people that we credit with being reformers and progressives when it comes to
00:09:48.540
racial issues. Even they would be, if you were to take those people and pluck them from their home
00:09:55.480
in, you know, the 19th century or the 18th century, whatever, if you were to take them and then put
00:10:01.140
them into 2018, they would be slobbering backwards, insane bigots by our standards today. Abraham Lincoln
00:10:08.520
is credited with freeing the slaves. Well, you know what? He also, he was also an avowed racist. He's on
00:10:15.580
the record saying he doesn't believe that blacks and whites are equal. He doesn't want to see social
00:10:20.120
and political, social or political equality. In fact, what he wanted to do is he wanted to ship
00:10:25.180
all the slaves back to Africa. Now, if you were to take that position and Abraham Lincoln is admired by
00:10:31.700
almost everyone as being this, you know, someone who believed in equality and so forth. But if you
00:10:38.640
were to take Abraham Lincoln and put him in 2018 and have him run a campaign on the, on the, in his,
00:10:46.660
one of his campaign platforms is, well, white and black people aren't, aren't equal. Let's ship all the
00:10:50.960
black people back to Africa. Well, that, no, I don't think it would be as, I don't think we'd be
00:10:55.680
celebrating him anymore, would we? By the way, Grant, General Grant was probably less racist than even
00:11:03.060
Abraham Lincoln, but he was also a, an anti-Semite. Famously, Grant issued an order expelling all the
00:11:11.000
Jews from, from the areas that he controlled in Western Tennessee. And again, he's looked at as a
00:11:17.400
figure of, you know, a basically progressive figure when it comes to race and as someone who helped to
00:11:23.540
liberate the slaves. But this is how ingrained this kind of bigotry was. That doesn't make it okay,
00:11:32.180
but it does put it into context. We have to see it in the context of the time. And so, no,
00:11:40.280
if everybody in the world is racist, and that's just how you looked at the world,
00:11:44.580
does that make racism okay? No, it doesn't. Does it severely mitigate your personal moral guilt for
00:11:52.460
being racist? Absolutely it does. I mean, is it really so shocking? Think about it today. You know,
00:12:00.240
we look at the, we have a very, we have a very global perspective of the world today. We look at
00:12:05.460
the world as a world. We see, and we, you know, the, there is no race, but the human race and so
00:12:11.780
forth. I mean, we're all one species. We're all one race and it's all one world. And that's how we see
00:12:17.100
things. And that's correct. That's the correct way to see things. We also have an understanding of
00:12:22.760
biology and science. We have an understanding that historical people didn't have. And we also have
00:12:30.480
a perspective that they didn't have. They didn't have a global perspective. They didn't think of
00:12:38.340
the world as the globe. They thought of the world as the area where they live. They thought of the
00:12:44.340
world as their civilization, their culture. So, you know, an ancient Roman who would have said that
00:12:51.620
Rome controls the entire world. Well, it never controlled anywhere close to the entire world,
00:12:57.060
but that's how they would have seen it. Like, that's the world. This is your civilization. It's
00:13:01.240
the world. So for them, and again, that's not a white, it's not how white people saw it. It's how
00:13:06.040
everybody saw it. So for them to come upon a new race or a new world, to stumble upon a new civilization,
00:13:16.100
well, for that process, that clashing of civilizations, that would be akin to modern people
00:13:23.760
traveling to another planet and encountering an alien species. It's comparable with that.
00:13:32.500
So when white pioneers met Indians, you can't compare that to you going to the supermarket and
00:13:39.980
being in line with someone of a different race. Okay, that's not what it was like. For them,
00:13:44.660
it was like for both, both sides, Indians, whites, it was more comparable to encountering a whole new
00:13:50.840
species, a whole new, it's like these people came from a different planet. That's what both of them
00:13:55.720
were thinking. And you know what? If that were to happen, and one of these days we do stumble upon
00:14:01.540
some other race on another planet, which won't ever happen, but if it did, and we saw that, you know,
00:14:06.960
they're like us in some ways, but they're also very different in others. And then we saw that perhaps
00:14:12.880
they engaged in practices that are to us horrifying and incomprehensible and brutal and savage,
00:14:21.680
which, you know, some of the pioneers and settlers and conquerors, they would have seen,
00:14:27.060
that's how they would have seen human sacrifices and scalping and cannibalism. But if we were to
00:14:31.840
encounter that with this, you know, with this hypothetical alien race, so again, you know,
00:14:35.360
they look a lot like us, but not, but they're also profoundly different in how they look.
00:14:38.940
They're very different in how they act, how they speak, their customs and everything. If that were
00:14:44.100
to happen for us, there would be a very real debate among us about whether or not these creatures are
00:14:51.460
equal to us. That would not be a given under any circumstance. When the astronauts came back from
00:14:58.380
planet X and they met the aliens, they told us about them, it would not be a given among all of us
00:15:04.340
that, oh yeah, well, they're just like us. There would be a real debate about the moral standing
00:15:09.520
of this alien species. And if we were to come to the conclusion that they're, you know, they're not
00:15:15.900
like us, they're, we may come to the conclusion that, oh, they're like animals. Or we may come to
00:15:20.520
the conclusion that, oh, they're actually like gods because they're technologically advanced.
00:15:25.500
We'd probably be, we would be wrong in those conclusions, but they're not crazy, irrational
00:15:31.440
conclusions. They're kind of understandable conclusions because of our lack of information.
00:15:38.120
Because we've encountered this mind boggling new race of creatures and we know nothing about them.
00:15:46.960
So we're coming to us, we, we, we form assumptions. Those assumptions might be wrong,
00:15:52.440
but considering our lack of information, they're also kind of understandable. So for people in history,
00:15:59.220
white, black, brown, all races, for them, when they met, that's what it was like. It was like
00:16:04.400
encountering an alien from outer space. It was not immediately obvious to these people, to them,
00:16:12.780
that the other people were equal. And you can sit there and you could say, well, that's unacceptable.
00:16:17.560
They should have known better. But that's the key. Known. They didn't know. They were ignorant.
00:16:23.940
They didn't have all the information. You have all the information. And you live in a society where
00:16:32.200
racism is totally unacceptable. They don't have the information. And they live in a society where
00:16:39.100
it's just a given. And you know what? Even though we have all the information and we have all the
00:16:45.400
science, we still get this wrong, don't we? We still, even now, we still make the same mistake
00:16:54.000
because half of the people who are shocked at Laura Ingalls Wilder for having unflattering views
00:16:58.800
of Native Americans, half of those people would look at unborn human beings and say, well, they're not
00:17:04.480
really people. And they have no excuse. They have all the information. They have the scientific
00:17:09.420
enlightenment. And they're still making the same mistake that they condemn Laura Ingalls Wilder for,
00:17:16.800
or they've condemned the pilgrims for. Well, guess what? The pilgrims had an excuse. You don't.
00:17:21.980
Second thing, the other really big problem with this attitude of erasing our past and turning
00:17:27.900
historical figures into cartoon villains and refusing to look at their sins in proper perspective,
00:17:33.220
the other problem is that we lose the opportunity to learn from the past and to learn from these
00:17:40.140
people. And I don't mean, well, learn from the past or you're doomed to repeat it. I don't mean
00:17:44.940
that. That's not what I'm talking about. You know, I don't really like that. I've never liked that
00:17:48.320
phrase, honestly, because it carries with it an implicit bias against the past. It assumes that,
00:17:56.560
number one, the only lessons we can learn from the past are negative lessons. And number two,
00:18:01.120
the worst thing that could ever happen is that we end up being like our ancestors were. I don't agree
00:18:08.080
with that. I think there are positive lessons to learn from the past. And I think that in a lot of
00:18:12.940
ways, we would be served very well if we were more like our ancestors. Not when it comes to racism,
00:18:18.840
but when it comes to many other things. You know, it's kind of like saying, well, learn from your
00:18:23.260
parents or you're doomed to be just like them, which, yeah, if your parents are bad, if you have bad,
00:18:29.100
awful parents, then that's good advice. Because if your parents are awful, then the only lessons
00:18:34.600
they ever taught you are negative lessons. And really the worst thing that could ever happen to
00:18:38.240
you is that you end up being like them. But the past doesn't need to be a bad parent. The past can
00:18:45.020
also be a good parent. And you know, if a man has a good father, then the advice you give him is
00:18:51.640
learn from your dad, or you won't turn out to be the same kind of man. So there were a lot of good
00:18:59.060
men and good women in the past, a lot of heroes. And we would do well to look at their positives
00:19:06.920
so that we can emulate them and hopefully turn out to be like them, or at least mostly like them,
00:19:13.580
minus things like racism. That's not to say that we should idolize the past. We shouldn't do that
00:19:18.220
either. But I don't think there's not much of a temptation these days to idolize the past.
00:19:21.840
There's much more of a temptation to idolize the present and the future, and to assume that whatever
00:19:26.300
is now must be better. And whatever happens tomorrow must be better still. Now that's an idol,
00:19:32.120
that is making an idol of the present and future. And I would submit that that's even worse in some
00:19:38.180
ways than ancestor worship. But I'm not talking about ancestor worship. I'm talking about looking at
00:19:43.080
our ancestors in context, in perspective, and accepting that there were great men and women
00:19:49.080
in the past, even if they had flaws, even if they were racist, there were still great men and women,
00:19:55.280
and we could learn quite a bit from them. We could learn positive lessons from them if we would look at
00:20:02.040
them and stop turning them into cartoons and say, oh, they were just all racist, so they were terrible,
00:20:06.760
and that's all they were. I mean, we're taking these complex people who did incredible things,
00:20:11.360
and we're boiling everything down to, oh, they were racist, not understanding that by that logic,
00:20:17.860
we have just dismissed everybody in history. Not just them, but everybody. If on that basis,
00:20:25.880
we can dismiss an entire person from the past, then we're dismissing basically everybody.
00:20:31.000
The Little House on the Prairie is a perfect example, because you could look at those books,
00:20:35.500
or a child could especially, and you could learn quite a bit about family values, hard work,
00:20:40.580
responsibility, self-sacrifice, yet we throw all those lessons away. We dump them down the drain,
00:20:47.140
because a child may also learn that people of that time had unflattering views about other races,
00:20:52.600
and I find that very foolish, because we're getting rid of all the positive lessons because of one bad
00:20:58.960
thing. And there, I mean, take a figure like someone I personally admire, Stonewall Jackson. He was a man of
00:21:05.380
incredible integrity, an intensely religious man, dedicated to his wife, to God, to his men.
00:21:12.280
He was a brilliant military commander, I think the best in the Civil War, one of the best in American
00:21:16.840
history, one of the best in Western history. And we could look to him, and we could learn quite a bit.
00:21:22.860
We could learn positive lessons from him. This country would be a better place if there were more
00:21:28.720
men like Stonewall Jackson in it. But there won't be, because we take Stonewall Jackson, we tear down
00:21:34.720
his statues, we look with contempt upon him, we make him into this ridiculous stereotype of a racist
00:21:41.560
Southerner, and all the positives that he could teach us, we just throw away. We just toss them
00:21:47.880
into garbage because of the racial issue, everything else. But also, we take that, that's what he becomes,
00:21:54.060
everything else, throw it in the incinerator. And we do this with almost every white historical figure.
00:22:00.760
We drain the value, the educational value, out of every historical figure, every era, every event,
00:22:08.420
by making them into easy villains. We lose the whole point of the history book when we erase everything
00:22:17.400
in the history book, and we replace it with sketches and crayon, which is essentially what we've done.
00:22:22.440
And most people now and most children are being raised to have this cartoonish, drawn-in-crayon
00:22:31.320
perspective or view of guys like Stonewall Jackson or Laura Ingalls Wilder, or she wasn't a guy,
00:22:38.580
but you know what I'm saying, to have this sketched-in-crayon view of these historical figures.
00:22:44.700
And so we are cheating ourselves out of the opportunity to learn, and we're cheating them
00:22:52.920
out of the legacy that they have earned through the kind of people that they were and the achievement,
00:22:59.780
the things that they accomplished. And I think it's a terrible mistake. Well, I'm on vacation for the
00:23:04.040
next week, so have a good week, everybody, and I'll talk to you in a little while. Godspeed.