Your Morning Du Bois
For Tuesday, May 6th, 2024
Week 113 of our regular morning feature here at Friedman of the Plains Worldwide in which we highlight the great words and works of great men and women, as well as those who are insufferable, delusional, and even fictional.
This Week W.E.B. Du Bois
“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?” — Black Reconstruction in America
This should be inscribed above the door of the Library of Congress. There seems to be agreement on one end of the spectrum that Americans are too weak and emotional to be told the harrowing truth about what our ancestors did to produce the current world. That's why they want to equate Nathan Bedford Forrest's courage with that of John Brown. One terrorized the weak, and the other gave his life to place the conversation more firmly on the table. Down deep, I think that most of us would rather see the past as seamless and both sides slightly at fault, but then we need to distort to explain the present, how my neighborhood is all white in part due to red-lining that probably no longer appears anywhere in textbooks.
I can't be the only one in these here parts to marvel at the irony of Germany confronting its less-than-savory past with fortitude and the United States confronting its less-than-savory past with cowardice. We may have come forth as a country out of the Age of Enlightenment, but we've rarely shown any sense of enlightenment in 249 years.