Are, like the Righteous Gentiles of the Civil Rights Movement, pretty much non-existent.
 |
| Something missing here |
You know who the Righteous Gentiles are. They are those non-Jews who risked, and at times lost, their lives trying to rescue Jewish victims from the clutches of the Nazis. Throughout the world in Jewish circles, they are held in the highest esteem. There are memorials, tributes and celebrations of them across the board. For the Jewish community, especially the survivors of the Holocaust, they were always seen as the heroes they were.
I notice, however, that in our modern Civil Rights era, there are no 'Righteous Gentiles'. There are no white people who ever seemed to contribute to the aid of black Americans. Tributes for civil rights activists are almost always centered on African Americans. Any mention at all about anyone non-black American is glossed over.
Something about that bothers me. Like Juneteenth. The attempt, of course, is to eventually push this to replace July 4th. That wouldn't be a problem if it was celebrating what it was: Basically the government did good by sending Union troops down to Texas to enforce the liberation of the remaining slaves. But that's not how it's portrayed. Like the Google image above, apparently the black Americans of the day magically freed themselves and that's why we celebrate.
Some years ago, I watched on our streaming service a documentary about the making of the movie Harriet. Obviously it was about Harriet Tubman, apparently focusing on her work within the Underground Railroad. Now to be clear, I never saw the movie and perhaps the movie itself is no problem. But if the documentary was to be believed, you'd never know white people had anything to do with the Underground Railroad. To watch the documentary, the only role white people played were those whites hunting down runaway slaves or betraying them.
That's a big problem I have with the civil rights movement today. Something doesn't go down well when I notice that there is a purposeful attempt to ignore, downplay or deny any positive roles played by white people in the history of our country where the fight for civil rights is concerned. When I see things like that, I imagine we aren't supposed to be educated about these events. Rather they are to be exploited for other, unmentioned, agendas.
BTW, an excellent example is this NPR piece. Under the photo, it mentions the arrival of the Union Troops on June 19. That is it. Nothing else in the piece alludes to the actual event or who was involved. In fact, it seems to go out of its way to explain why Juneteenth is not at all a celebration of the actual historical event which led to Juneteenth:
"We are not celebrating the history of Juneteenth. We are celebrating the symbolism of Juneteenth," said Leslie Wilson, professor of history at Montclair State University in New Jersey.
Because to do so would necessitate celebrating the individuals involved, and goodness knows we can't have that. Or as this piece in McPaper makes clear: White people have no business being included on images for Juneteenth, which isn't only about black people.
Heh. If it wasn't based on racism and the desire to destroy Christian Western civilization and its virtues of liberty, equality, and life, it would be funny. Everyone runs about screaming 'it ain't about black people' and then they turn about and insist it's for black people. That's literally where we are as a country. They can say opposing things in the same breath and it's true or you're a racist.
“"Juneteenth GVL would like to apologize to the community for the presence of non-black faces on two flags representing Juneteenth. We acknowledge this mistake having been made and will correct the error quickly.”
Ironically, this kind of thing can only happen by white enablers.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. Usually older whites with decidedly gray hair. I just had a long - and I mean long - discussion with Deacon Greydanus who seemed to have no problem with the story. Apparently black Americans offended at the wrong skin color promoting a holiday of unity is perfectly natural.
DeleteI wonder if it’s a desperate attempt to connect to the vaunted “Civil Rights” era. They are too young to have marched but wish they had a piece of the glory pie. This kind of thing gives them all the feels with none of the sacrifice or risk.
Delete(Tom NewPoster)
DeleteIt was "vaunted" because it was the completion of a long chain of events that began decades earlier, e.g. when Truman integrated the Armed Forces. Brown v. Board of Education was settled in the 1950s. The 1964 Civil Rights Acts was a seal, not a start. Yes, some people (black and white) gave their lives and the feds had to use some muscle, but that really didn't involve a lot of people.
The Juneteenthers might rightly complain of some older accounts in school texts that praised the white abolitionists in a manner that suggested blacks were passive recipients of moral largesse and denied agency, although even those gave usually good accounts of Douglas, Tubman and Truth (but none in my day mentioned blacks in the Union Army). A rebalanced history will include all truths, not simply replace one unbalanced set with another unbalanced set.
Years ago I read an article about that. How young people, having nothing else in life (religion, country, family being from bygone days), must save the world. But most of the hard fighting has come and gone. Women dragged off in chains for wanting to vote, blacks attacked with hoses and guns and sticks, gays beaten and imprisoned. Young people today? Even when they riot the cops who try to stop them are the bad guys. How do you be the hero when the supervillains are gone? You begin inventing new supervillains - at least in your own mind.
DeleteTom, by the time I came along, focus was already turning on those minority groups that were underrepresented. I collect old history textbooks, and it's not hard to see the radical difference in how these issues were addressed in books from the 50s, 40s and even early 30s (my oldest). Yet it was so different. First, American were still far from believing America could not be a WASP nation. The presence of a particular cultural or religious or ethnic default was to be disbanded. Therefore, they thought nothing more of focusing on the heroism of the WASPs as Chinese do in China, or Japanese, or Iranians, and thus and such. Plus, until the 60s and 70s, the African slave trade itself was still legal in some countries. It was easy for us to pat ourselves on our backs over what we did, when what we had stopped doing was still being done in the world. This isn't to say we can always do better telling the old story, but like you rightly say, it does no good to replace one unbalanced version with a new unbalanced version.
DeleteThis is sometimes my issue with the "flee as far as you can from sin" paradigm. Because it starts reasonable enough: "we must admit the faults of white people" but before too long begins to morph into insanity until now you must NEVER admit anything good done by white people. And we can already start to see what follows after that - don't ever not say anything bad about them. Either direction reduces the humanity of the target.
ReplyDelete