ATL Bear said:
Robert Wilson said:
We can dress this up all we want, but the primary result of this exercise will be to pull people and events out of the stream of history and to judge people and their actions 150-200 years out of the context in which they lived and in which those actions took place. There is absolutely no way to make that fair nor reasonable.
People don't want an honest discussion or evaluation of history. They want to pick a point in time, establish a horizon and comparative using modern standards of application. This isn't about reconciliation or progression. This is about power, plain and simple.
That's true of some people -- I tend to think of the cancel culture types. But that's far from all.
Speaking generally (not specifically about Baylor), I simply want to see all of our history acknowledged, warts and all. An honest discussion and evaluation, as you say.
I also know that many parts of our history -- they tend to be parts that we're not especially proud of -- never seem to get taught to schoolchildren or even publicly discussed.
We put up historical markers on the site of where some early school or pioneer trading post once was but won't officially mark the site of the old slave market. Every county square in my state has a monument to its Confederate veterans or war dead -- and I have no problem with that -- but there's no public monument anywhere to the 20,000 Black men from the state who joined the Union Army and fought and died for their own freedom. If taking down Confederate statues today is cancelling, you might say that much of our history got pre-cancelled generations earlier.
And not all of this phenomenon concerns our racial history. Sometimes it's just the parts that we don't think put us in the best light. For example, in a HS class what you're likely to learn about the War of 1812 is the Battle of New Orleans (our only clear victory, which was irrelevant to the resolution of the war), the siege of Fort McHenry, and maybe the burning of Washington. Even a college class isn't likely to cover our multiple failed attempts to invade Canada during that war, although you might learn about our naval victories on the Great Lakes. Only because of Dr. Armitstead at BU did we learn about the "Bladensburg Races" -- how our poorly trained militia panicked when they saw the rockets' red glare (basically just flares), ran for their lives in fear and left the capital undefended.