Thread by @LarryGlickman

This David Brooks column makes a number of unwarranted assertions and generalizations. /1
The Racial Reckoning Comes nyti.ms/31hssCa

First, it is just not accurate to say of the American Civil War, "Nobody wanted it, but it came." Southern "fire eaters" had long been eager to stoke a war. Those who ordered Confederate troops to fire upon American soldiers at Fort Sumter knew they were precipitating war. /2

To translate Lincoln's "And the war came" to "nobody wanted war" is to do violence to Lincoln's point and to badly misinterpret his Second Inaugural Address. /3

Note what he said, just before that famous line: "Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came." /4

Lincoln is telling us that white, Southern nationalists--enslavers and defenders of the right to extend the system of chattel slavery--MADE WAR, while Lincoln accepted it to keep the union together. /5

"And the war came," thus, is not meant to suggest a lack of human agency, but to describe the necessity for the Lincoln and the Union Army to accept that war had been declared and to act on that acceptance by defeating the enemy. /6

Brooks also draws a false dichotomy the "Ben Franklin narrative" and "narratives that put race at the center." As David Waldstreicher and many other historians have shown, the two narratives are one and the same. /7
us.macmillan.com/books/97808090…

This is from the publisher's description of RUNAWAY AMERICA: "Finding slavery at the center of Franklin's life, Waldstreicher proves it was likewise central to the Revolution, America's founding, and the very notion of freedom we associate with both." /8

In my view, the following sentences from Brooks' column are simply statements of fact, not what Brooks calls "an opposing narrative": "America began with a crime — stealing the land from Native Americans. It continued with an atrocity, slavery." /9

Others may disagree, but I am also uncomfortable that the way to think about the challenge of the American past is either with a "racial reckoning" or with "racial reconciliation." The structure of these terms suggests an equivalence among"races," each somehow culpable. /10

I am strongly influenced here by David W. Blight's book "Race and Reunion," which shows that those who promoted "racial reconciliation" after the Civil War often did so at the expense of justice. /11
hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…

The issue is how we face up to the ongoing legacy of white supremacy. I think it is not be hiving off and opposing that part of American history from the "unifying national story." 12/

Framing the reckoning with the history of white supremacy, as Brooks does here, as a matter of "shared guilt" or blaming "groups rather than individuals" is a mistake, a category error. /13

White supremacy was, above all, structural, a system of plunder that included unpaid labor, theft of property, redlining, housing, job, and educational discrimination and many other things. /14

As Ta-Nahesi Coates has written: "Indeed, were I forced to to offer one word to sum up black people's historical relationship to the American state, `theft' is the first that would come to mind." /15
theatlantic.com/international/…

I don't think that reckoning with this history should be a matter of "group accusation." Nor do I see why "illiberal things are likely to happen," if we reckon with this history honestly. /16

Framing white supremacy as something other than a "national sin" (as Brooks calls it) or "original sin" (which Brooks disclaims), or as a matter of individual or collective guilt might be a helpful way to avoid the binaries that trouble Brooks. /17

One final point: I know that is celebrating the anti-racism of his friend. But framing this as "conviction on racial matters" highlights the imprecision of "racial" language. After all, racists also have strong convictions on "racial matters." /18

Although I disagree with much of his analysis and proposed solutions, let me say that Brooks deserves credit for raising and wrestling with important and difficult issues, and for seeking resources to reckon with them. /19