The Woke See No Evil—and Nothing but Evil Behind the paradox lies a superstition about history that may explain their viciousness and violence. By Chilton Williamson Jr.
It is impossible to read Mark Twain in the 21st century without being aware, each time one encounters it, of the single most unspeakable word in the English language today; a word that in Twain’s time was as common as mud and therefore completely unremarkable on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. The issue concerning the appropriateness of designating “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” in their original and unexpurgated state as assigned reading in English classes in the public schools has troubled teachers and administrators since at least the 1990s.
I am not concerned here with the question of whether the bowdlerization of these texts is defensible, a moral imperative, or an offense against literature—New South published a sanitized edition of the two books in 2011—but rather with the paradoxical character of postmodern political correctness. That character was exposed, also in 2011, when the Virginia Department of Education adopted a textbook, “Our Virginia: Past and Present” by Joy Masoff, which contained the claim that “thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two under the command of Stonewall Jackson.” That prompted anger and indignation on the left and an advisory to teachers from the department to ignore the passage.
Yet it is a historically confirmed fact that many Southern blacks, freemen as well as slaves, fought on the side of the Confederacy, as attested to by the historian William Freehling and documented by Harvard’s Prof. John Stauffer in an essay for TheRoot.com. Even so, many Civil War historians continue to deny it for ideological reasons.
The dispute over the existence of black Confederate soldiers is a clear instance of how radical progressives, in their war on America, have been pursuing two contradictory aims at once. First, they have worked tirelessly to expose what they view as the fundamentally and indelibly racist character of America from its inception. Thus the central purpose of the “1619 Project,” conceived by Nikole Hannah-Jones and subsequently developed by the New York Times magazine: to rewrite, edit and otherwise “correct” the history of the American Republic. Second, they have sought to sanitize America’s cultural achievements and thereby satisfy the moral demands of the present time, all for the good of future generations.
No one has noticed, or at any rate pointed out, the basic contradictoriness of exposing, emphasizing, and displaying our national sins on the one hand, while on the other trying to obliterate every trace of them from historical record.
The illogic of the program is part of the political left’s historical confusion with regard to propaganda, which is about spreading fantasies while condemning realities. Leftists have worked since the French Revolution to expose the evil history of the Western world, even as they have attempted to impose a blackout on it. That contradiction has been a perennial source of insecurity for revolutionaries, who have—perhaps unconsciously—sensed that their program is ultimately self-defeating. It may be a partial explanation for the viciousness and violence with which they have imposed it when and where they have been able to do so.
It is vital to add, however, that radicals in the mold of Ms. Hannah-Jones do not wish to black out all of history, only part of it—the larger, dominant part. They wish to summon up the other parts—the most violent, horrific and uncommon ones—to condemn the rest. They do not, for example, wish to depict the past in a way that suggests racism was an accepted and unremarked commonplace of life, as it appears in Twain’s novels and in historical accounts of black slaves fighting alongside whites in the Civil War. If the evil of racism was once commonplace (so their reasoning goes), it may be endemic to the human condition and thus not eradicable by revolutionary means. The banality of evil is really an aspect of the banality of human history—a fact utopians can never accept.
Radicals since the French Enlightenment know no greater enemy than what they call “superstition.” Yet this squeamishness in the face of historical fact suggests a superstition of their own. It is the illusion that to preserve history and historical consciousness is to resurrect the past in the present and so perpetuate it across an endless future.
Theirs is not so simple an error as to imagine that allowing the “n-word” to stand in modern editions of literary masterpieces—“Huckleberry Finn,” “Heart of Darkness,” “Black Mischief”—is to encourage racial prejudice today. Their mistake doesn’t arise from bad social psychology but from bad metaphysics. It is to attribute some magical quality to the past that would permit reactionary magicians to conjure it back and reestablish it in all its dark wickedness in our own time. To suppose such a thing is to ascribe to history a still more powerful authority even than right-wing reactionaries do.
Mr. Williamson was editor of Chronicles magazine and a senior editor at National Review.
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