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My father always cautions that a little bit of education is far worse than none at all. A lamentable take going around since #NotreDame burned is the pseudo-woke mishmash of ressentiment that boils down to: screw this "white" cathedral because slavery/colonialism/racism, etc. 1/ 
Construction of ND began in the 1100s, centuries before colonization or the transatlantic slave trade. The people who built it did not conceive of themselves as “white” or even “European” or any of the terms we use today. They were not even “French” as we use the term now 2/
It’s a tragedy when black churches + mosques are bombed, burned or vandalized, but of course the world pays more attention to an 800-year-old architectural masterpiece in the heart of a city everyone visits! That's not white supremacy, and nonwhites who love Paris aren't dupes 3/
This ressentiment and blinding obsession with reading history through an ultra-contemporary lens is poisonous. How are we going to build the multiethnic/multicultural/pluralistic societies we need on the basis of such petty divisiveness? We really all need to do better. /fin
(When I saw one comment in there with lots of likes saying Notre Dame is just a symbol of white heteronormativity, I don't know, are we actually living in a cruel simulation or what?)
