I picked up a copy of The Crimson White Monday, turned to the opinions section, and was absolutely dumbfounded upon reading the letter to the editor entitled “History is history – and news should be objective.”
I highly suggest that the author of that article go back and read “Confederate History Month Not Necessary,” and “Alabama in of Need of Change.” I don’t mean to toot my own horn by suggesting someone should read articles I’ve written, but I think Caitlin Clark would find these things I have written particularly interesting as she and her ideologies are mentioned throughout both of those articles.
To say that these men weren’t bad men is beyond insensitive. It is repugnant to say that racism was ever okay. This is a situation in which the zeitgeist is irrelevant. Just because racism was an integral part of the culture doesn’t make it okay. Good Lord, when will the slaughtering of a race ever be viewed as okay?
It will never be. Never. If anyone is confused as to what I mean when I mention the slaughtering of a race, I mean exactly what the KKK did. I mean exactly what the white supremacist organization that these “esteemed men” belonged to did.
But no, we shouldn’t judge men in history by today’s standards. That’s not fair. We shouldn’t ever be critical of history, I suppose. We should just turn a blind eye to yesterday’s evils and atrocities and not worry about them because it’s not right to say something we did yesterday wasn’t good enough by today’s standards. That’s the message I got.
How would we ever progress if we weren’t critical of history, if we always accepted what was and what is? We wouldn’t.
Most people don’t seem to care that we don’t progress. Saying that ending the mass murdering and enslavement of black people was a good thing is unacceptable; that means that someone critically looked at what was wrong and tried to fix it.
So should slavery still be in place? Should women still not have the right to vote? Should homosexuality still be labeled as a mental illness? If all of those things were okay then, why aren’t they okay now? They should be by this logic. Not only is the argument for accepting history as history and being non-critical of it egregiously offensive, it just doesn’t make any sense.
The bottom line is that racism was, is, and never will be okay. If we care at all about righting the wrongs committed in the past as well as the ones going on right now, we will be critical of history. We have to be.
Devon Morrisette is a junior majoring in interdisciplinary studies.
