Standing in line for an ice cream cone on Wells Street the other day, I watched two young black men, who had been chatting amicably through a car window, begin to play wrestle. They were laughing, and it made me smile. Not so for a young white woman standing nearby, who turned even whiter and, with a look of abject terror on her face, scurried off with her cone. She glanced over her shoulder the entire time, at least until she was down the block and across the street and, frankly, I had lost interest.
As a lifelong democrat and generally decent albeit flawed human, I am all about equality. I believe in our current reckonings, most of which were accelerated by the horrifying elevation of a misogynistic, racist, all-around abominable person to the highest office in the land. In the world, technically, before our fall from grace.
I am not black, and cannot pretend to know what it feels like to walk in a black person's shoes. I cannot say, with certainty, that I would not have been tempted to scurry years ago, when my enlightenment may not have been in as advanced a stage as it is today. Five years from now, I may wonder whether I would have even noticed the men chatting on Wells Street, had they been white.
I am a woman, and though, as a young attorney, I was called "honey" by a judge and even endured an occasional unwanted ass pat, I have never experienced the sort of vile and traumatic invasion of livelihood or personhood for which others seek -- and deserve -- an accounting. I am Jewish, but have never been a personal target of anti-Semitism. Though some Jews of a generation before mine found it difficult to buy a German car, I am inclined to forgive for the sins of the fathers, assuming lessons have been learned. When JFK protected black students entering the University of Alabama, he asked why a black man should have fewer rights than a white man. It did not occur to him, then, that the theory should apply to people of all genders, but that certainly does not undermine his legacy.
So here we are, drowning in misguided notions of unattained ideals and unattainable purity. The well-intentioned @MeToo movement was immediately endangered by politically motivated false equivalencies. Exhibit A -- Al Franken. The long overdue @Blacklivesmatter movement was endangered by the carelessly worded "defund the police" slogan, hijacked by the usual suspects to suggest that we liberals are fighting for a lawless new world. Now, some are giving those same bad actors another gift, suggesting we topple monuments to founding fathers and cease to honor past leaders who lived long before civil rights legislation was even a thing.
The time to honor the slave-owning founders of our imperfect union is past, wrote Lucian K. Truscott IV in an Op-Ed in the New York Times. Mr. Truscott is black, a great-grandson of a great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, whom he owned.
As a child, Mr. Truscott spent much time at Monticello, Jefferson's ancestral home; he and his brother viewed it as their family playground, and was told he would be buried there, as his ancestors -- black and white -- have been. Now, with statues of brutal confederate leaders being removed from public spaces, Mr. Truscott advocates that Monticello is monument enough, that the Jefferson Memorial in D.C. be taken down, replaced with a memorial to Harriet Tubman. He went on to explain: It’s a shrine to a man who famously wrote that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence that founded this nation — and yet never did much to make those words come true.
Slave owning. Founders. Imperfect union. All men are created equal. Thomas Jefferson's slave-owning past has long been acknowledged. So have his accomplishments. I am not a historian, but this much I know: Jefferson was ahead of his time, an advocate for religious freedom and a loud and effective voice against tyranny. He was ahead of his time and a product of his time. He could not have imagined that "all men" would one day come to mean "all men and women, no matter their color, no matter their sexual orientation." Blacks were viewed as not fully human long after Jefferson died, and we have not yet come close to achieving full equality for all, no matter how far we think we have progressed. Our imperfect union continues to evolve, and remains far from perfect.
Mr. Truscott, I get what you're saying, and I would love to see a monument to Harriet Tubman -- and countless other heroes and heroines -- standing prominently in our nation's capital. But we need to keep our eye on the prize, which is, right now, our collective soul. Which means honoring the visionaries of our past who have, in their inherently flawed human way, moved us forward. Which means getting rid of the forces of evil now in power, who seek to push us back. Creating a purity test, either for those who live now or those who lived long ago, does not serve us well.
