What's Wrong with Cancel Culture Anyhow?

 "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, ... infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

Why on earth would someone fight to keep racist books on children's bookshelves? Doesn't this act make that person a racist by extension? Have you seen Dr Seuss's racist images? Have you read how Ma from Little House talked about Native Americans? Have you watched Peter Pan singing about why Native Americans have red skin?

For that matter, why would someone fight to keep statues of Southern generals in place? Don't you know they were fighting for the right to keep slaves? Why would someone fight to keep a slave owner's name on a street sign? The questions could and do go on.

To our modern eyes and ears, anyone who would fight for these things is out of their mind. It doesn't make sense. If you have read this far, then I have your attention, and you're probably wondering which way I intend to go from here. I invite you to keep reading, but only if you have not lost the ability to be empathetic, to view something from another's viewpoint.

I'm going to attempt to explain to you why a sane, non-racist person would actually fight to keep these seeming atrocities. I'm going to make an assumption here, and I know that is dangerous. I'm going to assume that your first assumption is that this person would be a racist unwittingly, that they have closet racist thoughts that they hide even from themselves. You might say, "Look at their actions. Don't actions speak louder than words?"

Obviously, I cannot speak for every person that fits the scenario above, but I can speak for the majority of them. From what I've seen, their actions are not racially motivated. Rather, their actions are motivated by a desire for a full and complete education and a longing for freedom.

That may not make sense to you, so let me explain what I mean. Let's start by restating the quote from the beginning of my article. Santayana has been misquoted several times, but the gist is always the same. If you don't know your history, you are doomed to repeat it. To put this another way, to pretend that certain pieces of history never happened will ensure that that history will happen again. 

For several years now, the mantra of the progressives has been this: "When you know better, you do better." So let me ask you, better than what? Better than whom? Have you tried to Google pictures of Dr Seuss's racist drawings? You cannot find them without an awful lot of digging. They have been erased from the internet. We claim that we know better than Dr Seuss. But how do we actually know that we know better than Dr Seuss, if we can't see his works to compare ourselves to?

For centuries, mothers were torn from their infants; children were snatched from their families; kings were ripped from their thrones. Each of them was shoved in shackles into a coffin sized space and left there for months. Many of them were not even released to use the bathroom. In fact, if you were released from your bonds for a few moments, it was probably so that you could be raped or abused in some other way. If they survived this heinous ordeal, they found themselves in a foreign country, alone and away from their family, and a slave for the remainder of their lives. There was no hope of release, and even less hope of ever finding their way back home. When this evil and humiliating practice finally was ended, these released slaves found themselves amongst people who mistrusted and hated them. People thought of them as no better than apes, and that is how they were often depicted in drawings.

Oh wait, what drawings?

Those drawings that have been pulled from the shelves of our libraries don't exist anymore. That particular reference point to our unimaginable history has now been lost. That opportunity for conversation with my child no longer exists.

In the early times of our country, people greedy for land forced the Native Americans off of their own soil. They did this through deception, war, and outright murder. Nursing mothers, old men, toddlers just beginning to walk - all of them were forced from their homes. They were either killed on the spot, or were forced to march across the country, many of them dying along the way. They were not seen as human, but as savages who deserved no better. They were seen as dangerous animals who would turn on you and kill you in an instant, and this is often depicted in the literature of the time.

Oh wait, what literature?

I can no longer pull Little House on the Prairie from the shelf at the library and read these passages to my children. I cannot explain to them how Ma had a blind spot. I can no longer show them how the average person of that day viewed Native Americans. 

Who doesn't love Ma? She was an amazing woman! She was one of the pioneers of our country. She had grit, perseverance in hardship, and bravery in the face of impossible circumstances. She was a loving wife, and a tender mother. And yet, she thought these terrible things about other human beings. How can this be? 

I can tell you, this is a great topic for conversation with children. They need to understand their history. They need to understand that brave and wonderful people could also have dark places in their heart. Even good people can be misled. Even sweet and wonderful mothers can be more informed by the culture around them than by the Truth.

My grandmother was one such person. She was raised before the depression on a plantation in Virginia. She was godly, a prayer warrior. She intensely loved her family and prayed for them daily. She was generous at heart and gave freely to anyone who needed help. She loved Jesus, and it showed in almost every aspect of her life. I stay almost, because she also had a blind spot. She thought people of other skin colors were lesser. That they should not intermarry with white folks. That anyone who wasn't white was not truly American. On one hand, she did not hate people of other races, in fact she was often very kind to them. However, she had truly bought into the idea of her generation that we should be separate but equal. She and I had many conversations, and her position was indefensible, but she never changed her mind. (I assume that her mind has now been changed, as she is in heaven with her Creator.)

A few years ago I read a biography of John Newton, the author of "Amazing Grace." For years, he was the captain of a slave ship. He was a very average Englishman of his time, who happened to make his career as a sailor. He says that, at the time, he thought no more about transporting human beings in the hold of his ship than he would have thought of taking a shipment of animals. He had truly bought into the pervasive thinking of his time, that people of other skin color were not fully human. He even admits to raping some of the African women. Even after he became a professing christian, he continued in this villainy. These ideals were so ingrained in him through his culture that it took years of being a Christian for him to be able to recognize that what he was doing was wrong. During the time that he ran his slave ship, the rest of his life seemed normal. Family life, Church attendance, Bible study and prayer. Thankfully, the Holy Spirit was faithful in revealing to him his sin, the sin that everyone around him denied was a sin. Eventually, he came to understand the depth of his own depravity and repented. We can sing his song with pride today because we can see the work God did in his life.

But his biography was incredibly helpful for me to understand how deeply culture had impacted the thinking of the people of his time. His later action of becoming an abolitionist went against the grain of the vast majority of the people around him. This culture of heinous racism was such an incredible blind spot to almost everyone of that age.

Understanding John Newton and his culture is also helpful when looking at General Robert E Lee and other Southern Generals. This man was a devoted Christian, with a deep and abiding relationship with God. He was devoted to his wife and family, and the letters he wrote to them are filled with truth and beauty. They are filled with his trust and belief in God. In doing my research, I learned that, in accordance with his father-in-law's wishes, Lee released all of the slaves in his wife's inherited estate. He also wrote, “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country." He saw slavery as evil. From what I can find in my studies, Lee was not alone among other Southern generals in his opinions. 

So why did they fight for the South, for the political system that wanted to keep slavery legal? The detailed answer to that is a topic for another blog. The short answer is this: there was more to the Civil War than slavery. General Lee fought to keep our country as it was founded to be, a Republic and not a Democracy. One of the stated rights in our Constitution is that states have the right to secede from the Union. It was incredibly important to our founding fathers that their descendants would have the right to escape tyranny. While I admire Lincoln in many ways for his desire to free the slaves, and for his willingness to do something about it, he broke the law clearly stated inthe Constitution when he declared that the southern states did not have the right to secede. Every other civilized country in the world eliminated the practice of slavery without a civil war, without the loss of more than a half million lives. 

It would seem that General Lee supported the freeing of slaves, although that has been denied by some. However, he was not willing to lose the freedoms afforded to him in the Constitution in order to make that happen. These generals probably thought there was a better way to effect change that by (what they saw as) destroying our Constitution.

What does this have to do with Dr Seuss's books being pulled from shelves? It has everything to do with it. We are being denied the freedom to see history for ourselves. We are being told what to think, why to think it, and what to do to others who disagree. We are told that anyone who has ever disagreed with us in any age of the world is automatically unworthy of our time and attention. We have to pretend that they never even existed at all.

We also have to ascent to the fact that the entire culture that had these blind spots was evil. There was nothing good or redeeming in what they did, said, or wrote.

Instead of being allowed to do the research on our own, to look at history from every viewpoint, we aren't even allowed to look at it at all. It is erased. It has been canceled.

I ask you this. What is the blind spot of our age? Are we truly arrogant enough to believe that we have arrived at the pinnacle of enlightenment? Is there nothing that we wink at that will some day be seen as evil? Will our children pretend that we never existed because something that we don't even see has been deemed as evil? How long before the culture turns against you and wants to cancel your opinions?

As these books are pulled from the shelves, these opportunities to talk about the sticky issues of our past are being lost to me as a mother. And they are opportunities that have been lost to us as a culture and as a country. If we pretend these things never happened, then what do we have to compare ourselves to? What do we know "better" than? Who do we do "better" than? 

We have canceled them all. We've thrown out the baby with the bath water. It is as if they never existed, and we are all the poorer for it.