Laura Ingalls Wilder is the latest (white) historical figure to be posthumously condemned and shunned for her “cultural insensitivity” and “racism.” On the show today I will explain why it is incredibly stupid, and pointless, and hypocritical, to judge historical people for their old fashioned ideas about race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| On my show a couple days ago, we discussed the effort that's been going on for quite some time now to erase our national history and to indict the heroic figures who built our civilization. | |
| And I pointed out that while the pioneers, explorers, conquerors, settlers, pilgrims, Founders were not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. | |
| They still accomplished great things, and many of them were great people, and so we should look to them, admire them, honor them, and yes, build statues to them and everything. | |
| And I also pointed out that while we hold these Western figures to this modern standard, we hold them to a modern standard, especially on racial issues, and we spit on their graves if they don't live up to it. | |
| While we do that, you don't find that in any other country. | |
| That's not going on in any other country or culture. | |
| It's only in the West. They're not doing the same thing with their own heritage and their own historic heroes and we don't expect them to. | |
| On the show, I went into extensive detail, just as an example, talking about how many Native American tribes and civilizations were unspeakably brutal, murderous, in some cases cannibalistic. | |
| They raped, enslaved, destroyed human sacrifices, so on and so forth. | |
| Yet nobody would ever tell a Native American not to be proud of their heritage. | |
| Nobody would tell them not to honor their historical heroes, their historical... | |
| Figures that only happens in the West. | |
| So I want to expand on that conversation now a little bit and talk about the real problem that arises when we start to do this. | |
| When we go back and we censor the past and we condemn our ancestors and the people who built this civilization, when we start doing that, a really big problem happens. | |
| When we make essentially a cartoon of the past, when we make caricatures of our historical figures, and we make them into these kind of villainous cartoons, there's a big problem. | |
| I want to talk about what that problem is. | |
| And as an example of this phenomenon and of the problem itself, let's talk about this situation with Laura Ingalls Wilder, who, of course, was a famous author in the mid-19th century, early 20th century. | |
| She wrote The Little House on the Prairie books. | |
| But now the American Library Association is dropping her name from a prestigious children's award that they've been giving out for, I don't know, 50 or 60 years. | |
| They've had her name on it. And they're taking her name off, and there's this process now of kind of banishing her from the children's literature space because of her culturally insensitive writings. | |
| So I want to read quickly a quote from Jim Neal, the president of the American Library Association. | |
| He's explaining this decision. | |
| He says, Wilder's books are a product of her life experiences and perspective as a settler in America's 1800s. | |
| Her works reflect dated cultural attitudes toward indigenous people and people of color that contradict modern acceptance, celebration, and understanding of diverse communities. | |
| Well, geez, that's surprising, isn't it? | |
| That somebody who was writing in 1905 would have a dated perspective on something. | |
| I mean, that's totally shocking, isn't it? | |
| And then if you're wondering, well, what are these horrible things that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote? | |
| There's a New York Times article that describes some of Wilder's offenses. | |
| I'll read a little bit of it. It says, A description of a minstrel show with five, | |
| quote, five black-faced men in raggedy-taggedy uniforms alongside a jolting illustration of the scene. | |
| Debbie Reese, a scholar whose writing and research focuses on portrayals of American Indians in children's literature, says there's this very subtle but very clear fear generated throughout the books. | |
| And she says it's not appropriate for young students, maybe for high schoolers, but not for young students. | |
| So, in other words, the characters in her books had attitudes that the people in that time and in that setting would have had. | |
| And that's a problem. | |
| You see, because we're not allowed to acknowledge that anymore. | |
| We have to hide our children from it in shame. | |
| We have to shield them from it. | |
| You think about all the things we don't bother shielding children from anymore. | |
| It's like you've got people, parents and particularly school administrators and teachers, who think there's nothing wrong with introducing children to the most depraved sexual ideas and sex acts imaginable at very young ages. | |
| But oh no, an unflattering portrayal of Native Americans in a children's book? | |
| Well, that, I mean, that is just no, we can't do that. | |
| So of course, all these books have to be gotten rid of and any person, well any white person we should say, who may have possessed such attitudes back in the day, must be posthumously exiled from polite society. | |
| That's what we're doing. | |
| And it's complete madness. | |
| I mean it is total madness to be doing this. | |
| And I'll explain why. First of all, on the issue of historical racism, and I know this might be a little bit upsetting for people to hear, because yes, I'm going to make the case that for a white settler in the 1800s, | |
| or a pilgrim in the 1600s, or an explorer conquistador in the 1500s, for them to have racist attitudes Those racist attitudes were not as bad as the racist attitudes that you might find today. | |
| In other words, it is worse for you and I to be racist than it was for them. | |
| Their moral guilt for their racism was, I think, severely mitigated by many different circumstances. | |
| Because you, now, if you're watching this or listening to this right now, and you're not racist, well then, I mean, good for you. | |
| Congratulations. If I had a cookie, I would give it to you. | |
| I mean, you know, go get yourself a cookie for not being racist. | |
| Congrats. You're a wonderful person. | |
| Thumbs up on not being racist. | |
| Wonderful. Good for you. | |
| Just, you should be so proud. | |
| But that's not an achievement. | |
| That is not a moral achievement on your part. | |
| For most of us, being racist was never even really like an option. | |
| We grew up in a world where, for a lot of us anyway, we grew up in an environment where it just never even came up. | |
| I mean, it never even occurred to me to be racist. | |
| And if it ever did occur to anyone, you also grew up in a society where racism is extremely socially unacceptable and it will be socially punished, maybe even legally punished in some circumstances. | |
| So it never really occurred to anyone to be racist. | |
| That's not the world that we live in. | |
| So it means you deserve absolutely no credit whatsoever for not being racist. | |
| That is just kind of a bare minimum thing in our society. | |
| So, it doesn't afford you the high moral position that you think it does. | |
| It doesn't give you the position where you can stand up on your pedestal and look down on historical people and say, well, tsk, tsk, tsk. | |
| Look at those horrible people with their racist attitudes. | |
| I'm so much better than them. | |
| No, it doesn't give you that. | |
| It doesn't give you that position. | |
| Because the fact is this. | |
| Almost everybody in the world, up until about 1960, was racist by our definition of the term. | |
| Almost everyone! | |
| I mean, they were all racist! | |
| The idea of universal racial equality is very new. | |
| It is uniquely modern. | |
| It is uniquely Western. | |
| Even now, today, currently, there are many places in the world where that does not exist. | |
| There are many places in the world where racism is still mainstream, and most of those places are non-Western places. | |
| Racism was and still is incredibly common in some non-Western, non-white cultures. | |
| But let's look at this historically. | |
| Prior to the mid-20th century, racism was largely a given for most people across the world, across the races. | |
| I mean, if you think for a minute that this was unique to white people, then you really are just an incredible fool. | |
| And I don't mean that as an insult. I just mean that you really are a fool. | |
| I mean, some people are fools. And you'd be a fool. | |
| A complete, total fool who's never read a book in your life if you actually think that. | |
| No, this is not just a white person. | |
| Even the people that we credit with being reformers and progressives when it comes to racial issues, even they... | |
| If you were to take those people and pluck them from their home in the 19th century or the 18th century, whatever, if you were to take them and then put them into 2018, they would be slobbering backwards, insane bigots by our standards today. | |
| Abraham Lincoln is credited with freeing the slaves. | |
| Well, you know what? He was also an avowed racist. | |
| He's on the record saying he doesn't believe that blacks and whites are equal. | |
| He doesn't want to see social and political, social or political equality. | |
| In fact, what he wanted to do is he wanted to ship all the slaves back to Africa. | |
| Now, if you were to take that position, and Abraham Lincoln is admired by almost everyone as being this, you know, someone who believed in equality and so forth. | |
| But if you were to take Abraham Lincoln, I don't think we'd be celebrating him anymore, would we? Then even Abraham Lincoln, but he was also an anti-Semite. | |
| Famously, Grant issued an order expelling all the Jews from the areas that he controlled in western Tennessee. | |
| And again, he's looked at as a figure of, you know, a basically progressive figure when it comes to race. | |
| And as someone who helped to liberate the slaves. | |
| But this is how ingrained this kind of bigotry was. | |
| That doesn't make it okay, but it does put it into context. | |
| We have to see it in the context of the time. | |
| And so, no, if everybody in the world is racist, and that's just how you looked at the world, does that make racism okay? | |
| No, it doesn't. Does it severely mitigate your personal moral guilt for being racist? | |
| Absolutely it does. | |
| I mean, is it really so shocking? | |
| Think about it. Today, you know, we have a very global perspective of the world today. | |
| We look at the world as a world. | |
| We see, and we, you know, there is no race but the human race and so 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 things. | |
| And that's correct. That's the correct way to see things. | |
| We also have an understanding of biology and science. | |
| We have an understanding that historical people didn't have. | |
| And we also have a perspective that they didn't have. | |
| They didn't have a global perspective. | |
| They didn't think of the world as the globe. | |
| They thought of the world as the area where they live. | |
| They thought of the world as their civilization, their culture. | |
| So, you know, an ancient Roman who would have said that Rome controls the entire world, well, it never controlled anywhere close to the entire world, but that's how they would have seen it. | |
| Like, that's the world. This is your civilization. | |
| It's the world. So for them, and again, that's not how white people saw it. | |
| It's how everybody saw it. | |
| So for them to come upon a new race or a new world, to stumble upon a new civilization, Well, for that process, that clashing of civilizations, that would be akin to modern people traveling to another planet and encountering an alien species. | |
| It's comparable with that. | |
| So when white pioneers met Indians, you can't compare that to you going to the supermarket and being in line with someone of a different race. | |
| That's not what it was like. | |
| For them, it was like, for both, both sides, Indians, whites, it was more comparable to encountering a whole new species, a whole new, it's like these people came from a different planet. | |
| That's what both of them were thinking. | |
| And you know what? If that were to happen, and one of these days we do stumble upon some other race on another planet, which won't ever happen, but if it did, and we saw that, you know, they're like us in some ways, but they're also very different in others, and then we saw that perhaps they engaged in practices that are, | |
| to us, horrifying and incomprehensible and brutal and savage, Which, you know, some of the pioneers and settlers and conquerors, they would have seen, that's how they would have seen human sacrifices and scalping and cannibalism. | |
| But if we were to encounter that with this, you know, with this hypothetical alien race, you know, they look a lot like us, but they're also profoundly different in how they look. | |
| They're very different in how they act, how they speak, their customs and everything. | |
| If that were to happen for us, there would be a very real debate among us about whether or not these creatures are equal to us. | |
| That would not be a given under any circumstance. | |
| When the astronauts came back from Planet X and they met the aliens, they told us about them, it would not be a given among all of us that, oh yeah, well, they're just like us. | |
| There would be a real debate about the moral standing of this alien species. | |
| And if we were to come to the conclusion that they're not like us, we may come to the conclusion that, oh, they're like animals. | |
| Or we may come to the conclusion that, oh, they're actually like gods because they're technologically advanced. | |
| We would be wrong in those conclusions. | |
| But they're not crazy, irrational conclusions. | |
| They're kind of understandable conclusions because of our lack of information. | |
| Because we've encountered this mind-boggling new race of creatures, and we know nothing about them. | |
| So we're coming to us, we form assumptions. | |
| Those assumptions might be wrong. | |
| But considering our lack of information, they're also kind of understandable. | |
| So for people in history, white, black, brown, all races, for them when they met, that's what it was like. | |
| It was like encountering an alien from outer space. | |
| It was not immediately obvious to these people, to them, that the other people were equal. | |
| And you can sit there and you can say, well, that's unacceptable. | |
| They should have known better. | |
| But that's the key. Known. | |
| They didn't know. They were ignorant. | |
| They didn't have all the information. | |
| You have all the information. | |
| And you live in a society where racism is totally unacceptable. | |
| They don't have the information. | |
| And they live in a society where it's just a given. | |
| And you know what? Even though we have all the information and we have all the science, we still get this wrong, don't we? | |
| We still, even now, we still make the same mistake. | |
| Because half of the people who are shocked at Laura Ingalls Wilder for having unflattering views of Native Americans, half of those people would look at unborn human beings and say, well, they're not really people. | |
| And they have no excuse. | |
| They have all the information. | |
| They have the scientific enlightenment. | |
| And they're still making the same mistake. | |
| That they condemn Laura Ingalls Wilder for, or they condemn the pilgrims for. | |
| Well, guess what? The pilgrims had an excuse. | |
| You don't. | |
| Second thing, the other really big problem with this attitude of erasing our past and turning historical figures into cartoon villains and refusing to look at their sins in proper perspective, the other problem is that we lose the opportunity to learn from the past and to learn from these people. | |
| And I don't mean, well, learn from the past or you're doomed to repeat it. | |
| I don't mean that, that's not what I'm talking about. | |
| You know, I don't really like that. | |
| I've never liked that phrase, honestly, because it carries with it an implicit bias against the past. | |
| It assumes that, number one, the only lessons we can learn from the past are negative lessons, and number two, that the worst thing that could ever happen is that we end up being like our ancestors were. | |
| I don't agree with that. | |
| I think there are positive lessons to learn from the past, and I think that in a lot of ways, we would be served very well if we were more like our ancestors. | |
| Not when it comes to racism, but when it comes to many other things. | |
| You know, it's kind of like saying, well, learn from your parents or you're doomed to be just like them. | |
| Which, yeah, if your parents are bad, if you have bad, awful parents, then that's good advice. | |
| Because if your parents are awful, then the only lessons they ever taught you are negative lessons. | |
| And really the worst thing that could ever happen to you is that you end up being like them. | |
| But the past doesn't need to be a bad parent. | |
| The past can also be a good parent. | |
| And you know, if a man has a good father, then the advice you give him is, learn from your dad, or you won't turn out to be the same kind of man. | |
| So there were a lot of good men and good women in the past, a lot of heroes. | |
| And we would do well To look at their positives so that we can emulate them and hopefully turn out to be like them, or at least mostly like them, minus things like racism. | |
| That's not to say that we should idolize the past. | |
| We shouldn't do that either, but I don't think there's not much of a temptation these days to idolize the past. | |
| There's much more of a temptation to idolize the present and the future and to assume that whatever is now must be better and whatever happens tomorrow must be better still. | |
| Now, that is making an idol of the present and future, and I would submit that that's even worse in some ways than ancestor worship, but I'm not talking about ancestor worship. | |
| I'm talking about looking at our ancestors in context, in perspective, and accepting that there were great men and women in the past, even if they had flaws, even if they were racist, there were still great men and women, and we could learn quite a bit from them. | |
| We could learn positive lessons from them if we would look at them and stop turning them into cartoons and say, oh, they were just all racist, so they were terrible, and that's all they were. | |
| I mean, we're taking these complex people who did incredible things and we're boiling everything down to, oh, they were racist, not understanding that by that logic we have just dismissed everybody in history. | |
| Not just them, but everybody. | |
| If on that basis we can dismiss an entire person from the past, then we're dismissing basically everybody. | |
| The Little House on the Prairie is a perfect example, because you could look at those books, or a child could especially, and you could learn quite a bit about family values, hard work, responsibility, self-sacrifice, yet we throw all those lessons away, we dump them down the drain, because a child may also learn that people of that time had unflattering views about other races. | |
| And I find that very foolish, because we're getting rid of all the positive lessons because of one bad thing. | |
| I mean, take a figure like someone I personally admire, Stonewall Jackson. | |
| He was a man of incredible integrity, an intensely religious man, dedicated to his wife, to God, to his men. | |
| He was a brilliant military commander, I think the best in the Civil War, one of the best in American history, one of the best in Western history. | |
| And we could look to him and we could learn quite a bit. | |
| We could learn positive lessons from him. | |
| This country would be a better place if there were more men like Stonewall Jackson in it. | |
| But there won't be. | |
| Because we take Stonewall Jackson, we tear down his statues, we look with contempt upon him, we make him into this ridiculous stereotype of a racist southerner, and all the positives that he could teach us, we just throw away. | |
| We just toss them into garbage because of the racial issue, everything else. | |
| So we take that, that's what he becomes, everything else, throw it in the incinerator. | |
| And we do this with almost every white historical figure. | |
| We drain the value, the educational value, out of every historical figure, every era, every event, by making them into easy villains. | |
| We lose the whole point of the history book when we erase everything in the history book and we replace it with sketches and crayon, which is essentially what we've done. | |
| And most people now and most children are being raised to have this cartoonish Drawn in crayon perspective or view of guys like Stonewall Jackson or Laura Ingalls Wilder, or she wasn't a guy, but you know what I'm saying, to have this sketched in crayon view of these historical figures. | |
| And so we are cheating ourselves out of the opportunity to learn. | |
| And we're cheating them out of the legacy that they have earned through the kind of people that they were and the achievement, the things that they accomplished. | |
| And I think it's a terrible mistake. | |
| Well, I'm on vacation for the next week, so have a good week, everybody, and I'll talk to you in a little while. |