Would you believe me if I told you that Dinesh D'Souza's mentor at Dartmouth, in whose living room the right wing Dartmouth Review was founded, wrote a column in 1977 describing Roots as a racist attack on white people?
And when pressed on it, he doubled down a month later?
I've got a pretty low bar in terms of what I expect from conservatives writing on race in the 1970s, but even I was shocked by this. Jeffrey Hart was proud that people wrote him letters like this.
“Very frankly,” Ronald Reagan said of Roots, “I thought the bias of all the good people being one color and all the bad people being another was rather destructive.”
--Quoted in Reaganland, by Rick Perlstein
William F. Gordon of Indianapolis didn't know much about history, but he did know that he was sick and tired of hearing so much about slavery, about which he presumed he was supposed to feel guilty. Indianapolis Star, 20 December 1978.
Kudos to Mrs. Carol Adams who righteously schooled Mr. Gordon. "As for why whites should feel guilty about slavery, guilt is a feeling that comes from within usually when a person is ashamed of some act he has either participated in or condoned."
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.