There is a new piece over at The Bitter Southerner, On Flannery O'Connor and Race: A Response to Paul Elie, and it sparked these thoughts in me when I read it.
Flannery O'Connor was a product of her time and place, as are we all. It's a fair piece about a complicated writer who certainly doesn't deserve to be simply vilified and dismissed because she had some racist ideas. Every writer of fiction [including myself] risks being criticized for our prejudices. (Every human has prejudices, and to pretend otherwise is naive.) It's impossible to write fiction without exposing our soft underbellies, opening ourselves up to criticism or even ridicule. Our prejudices always come through. What we (I am speaking about all literate humans) must not do is to silence voices we simply don't like or agree with, because then we will have struck a deal with the devil.
I wanted to expand on that a bit.
I understand why protestors want to take down statues that glorify the Lost Cause which includes a south where slavery flourishes. However, I was dismayed to see a news article recently about statue topplers in Missouri going after Thomas Jefferson. I applaud the University of Missouri for not taking down Jefferson's statue. [LINK]
Jefferson was a product of his time and place. He wrote "all men are created equal." Not "all people" -- which would have included women. He owned slaves. He was also a critic of slavery and freed some of his slaves. This page on the Monticello website explains his positions carefully. Most historians accept that he fathered children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings. Did he rape Sally Hemmings or was it a love story? Nobody knows. She was the half sister of his deceased wife. Did he love his children by her? Nobody knows, but the fact they were freed after his death says something. He was neither all good or all bad. He was complex.
My comparison of O'Connor and Jefferson is deliberate. We can write millions of words about great writers, artists and politicians who had prejudices we find abhorrent. That doesn't mean it's fair to dismiss or villify them.
However, I totally understand the removal of statues of Andrew Jackson, a man who put some of my Cherokee ancestors on the Trail of Tears. I am puzzled as to why historians debate whether or not it was genocide.
However, if we start looking at every president and judging them we will have to take down almost every single statue and memorial. FDR refused to allow Jews who were fleeing the Nazi regime to enter the United States. He also cheated on his wife with several mistresses. However, if he had not been elected we might not have won World War II, and we might all be living under a Nazi regime, even now.
President Lyndon Johnson championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. "The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, is considered one of the crowning legislative achievements of the civil rights movement."
Yet LBJ was no saint. He also cheated on his wife and it could be argued he was a serial womanizer. He also was a racist. Johnson escalated the Vietnam War and a lot of Americans died as a result.
We have raised the current generation in a world where Hollywood heavily influenced them, and Hollywood makes zillions of dollars on a simple idea: there are heroes and villains. You are either for us or against us.
The Good Guys vs. The Bad Guys.
Many millennials do not read. They cannot think critically and debate fairly. Everything is either black or white. It's much easier to live that way, to hold views like that, to go out and topple statues or hurl stones.
The problem is that if we allow their immaturity and judgement to win, we will lose so much that is valuable. We will lose writers like Flannery O'Connor. We will ignore all the extraordinary accomplishments of Thomas Jefferson, FDR, and LBJ. We will, as a society, drive underground people who express opinions or prejudices we don't like, as they did during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
America was founded on the idea of freedom. Freedom can be ugly and messy. It's still worth fighting for. Heroes are never perfect. They can hold ideas that are, to our eyes, vile, but we must refuse to allow a simplistic Good Guy/Bad Guy mindset to prevail.
