An Excerpt from “What Is it that Really Angers Leftists About Robert E. Lee? Part 1″
The complete article is available here.
Our culture and the prevailing cultural narrative leave their mark on us far more than we realize. Much of this influence — probably most of it — is under the radar. It’s very easy for us to look at an issue that divided people in the past and imagine we would have made “right” decision, even though we can’t even begin to understand all the contrary influences we would have faced had we actually lived during that time and in that culture. Princeton Professor Robert P. George illustrated this vividly in July of 2020 in a series of tweets that went viral. He essentially gave his students a quiz.
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- 1/ I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.
- 2/ Of course, this is nonsense. Only the tiniest fraction of them, or any of us, would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves. Most of them—and us—would have gone along. Many would have supported the slave system and happily benefited from it.
- 3/ So I respond by saying that I will credit their claims if they can show evidence of the following: that in leading their lives today they have stood up for the rights of unpopular victims of injustice whose very humanity is denied, and where they have done so knowing:
- 4/ (1) that it would make them unpopular with their peers, (2) that they would be loathed and ridiculed by powerful, influential individuals and institutions in our society; (3) that they would be abandoned by many of their friends, (4) that they would be called nasty names and
- 5/ (5) that they would risk being denied valuable professional opportunities as a result of their moral witness. In short, my challenge is to show where they have at risk to themselves and their futures stood up for a cause that is unpopular in elite sectors of our culture today.
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How would you have performed on Dr. George’s pop test?
Excerpted from “What Is it that Really Angers Leftists About Robert E. Lee? Part 1″ and available here. Text accompanying Dr. George’s series of tweets copyright © 2021 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All rights reserved.
Dr. George’s series of tweets also is cited in this Word Foundations article.