Thread by @AkivaMCohen

Let's talk about the #Founders for a second, shall we? Yeah, this is sparked by Ben Shapiro's outrage that 39% of Black people would classify them as villains.

Me? I don't. The American system is a true blessing, and I'll talk about why. But that's also easy for me to say 1/19

And it's not beyond the realm of possibility that, because it's so easy, I'm actually wrong. At the end of the day, this is *at best* a close call. And there's nothing wrong with recognizing that. And everything wrong with failing to.

Start with the First Amendment. It's easy to focus on freedom of speech, and how much better off we are, here in America, than the rest of the world with its far weaker protections. Yeah, that means more hate speech, here. But it means more freedom on defamation and gov't control

In the end, that's a good trade off, IMO - and I say that as a member of a minority group that has suffered way too much hate.

But let's also talk about freedom of religion, and how truly revolutionary that was. As a Jew, that means so much to me

For close to 2,000 years prior to the founding, Jews were persecuted, across the globe, due to our religion. In Europe. In Russia. In the Muslim world. Not just by individuals, but by governments. By law.

We were murdered by agents of the state, expelled, kidnapped, forcibly converted, massacred. Jewish history is littered with the blood of religious murder. So the guaranty of freedom of religion written into the American Constitution? It's impossible to say how much that means

There's simply so much that's of benefit. The structure of our government, and its system of checks and balances - a system that would have served us better had our parties not betrayed it.

Most importantly, the shining ideals America claimed for itself, and has struggled to live up to ever since. Those ideals are incredibly important; without them, we'd never have corrected any of the hypocrisy, and we'd stand no chance of doing better.

But oh, that hypocrisy

Because at the same time that the Founders were guarantying the blessings of religious freedom for Jews, they were complicit, or active, or insistent on the destruction of freedom, rape, kidnapping and murder of thousands of Black people

Don't kid yourself: that's what it was. And even those Founders who opposed slavery eventually agreed to accommodate it in the Constitution as the cost of getting all those other blessings; they did the best they could.

On balance, personally, that's enough for me not to classify them as villains, particularly given societal mores and attitudes at the time.

BUT - that's also easy for me to say. Because, well, I'm not Black. My people weren't the sacrifice.

Spend some time thinking about how you might feel about the Founders if, instead of Black people being enslaved as the cost of everything else, it was Jewish people. Or Italians. Or Spaniards.

If it was you, and your people.

Would I be so ready to forgive, to excuse, to look at things "objectively" and call the balance positive, if it was "just" another 90 years of Jewish slavery that was the cost, rather than Black slavery & Native dispossession & murder?

I don't know. I kind of doubt it.

And I *think*, sitting here looking at it "objectively", dispassionately, that I'd be wrong not to. That the balance would still be positive, that the net good in the world would outweigh the net harm.

But is that the right way to look at that question at all?

In the end, I don't know. I'm not God; I'll leave such questions to Him.

Instead, thinking this through with y'all as I typed this out, I'll say this.

Were the Founders heroes? Yes. They helped bring a lot of good into the world, for which they should be honored.

Were they villains? Also, yes. They did all that on the backs of innocents - or at least, while sacrificing them. For which they should be reviled.

They were humans. Like all of us, they contain multitudes. Trying to flatten them into two dimensional caricatures, hero or villain, does a disservice to them, to us, and to our children.

We should leave the hagiography and canonization alone. Celebrate the things about the Founders that were good, and condemn (not excuse) the things about them that were evil. We owe that level of honesty to ourselves.

And Ben? It's without that - that honesty and recognition - that our country will never have the unity it needs.