From the Monticello official
website
Grievance = by definition: a
feeling of having been treated unfairly; a reason for complaining or being
unhappy with a situation; a statement in which you say you are unhappy or not
satisfied with something.
We are amuck in the age of
grievances, grievances of gargantuan proportions that cut vast swaths across
times, places and peoples, grievances of tiny magnitude, registered these days
under the heading, “micro-aggressions.” The grievance mongers lie in ambush
everywhere. Grievances multiply to open
up coveted space in today’s “Pantheon
of Victimhood”. Installation
in the Pantheon as a certified victim means you get to wear a permanent moral
halo and remain immune from criticism of any sort. You possess the “superior virtue of the oppressed”, as the
philosopher Bertrand Russell put it. New York Times columnist David Brooks recently
concluded his review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, Between
the World and Me, an anti-white diatribe by an angry black man by asking himself if he, “as
a white man has the moral
standing to question any part of it?” (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/white-america-dons-the-shroud-of-guilt/article25971483/). The answer to this
absurd question is painfully obvious: David, quit writing reviews or anything
else. Join a monastery. Devote yourself to good works for the poor. Of course, you have no “moral standing”. Not because you are a white man, but because you have
completely surrendered whatever slim capacity you once may have had to grasp
basic facts, reason and think straight. This is the same David Brooks, by the
way, who after interviewing then Presidential candidate, Barack Obama back in
those halcyon days of “Hope and Change” wrote: “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting
on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased
pant … and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very
good president.” (http://hotair.com/archives/2009/08/31/the-obligatory-david-brooks-really-impressed-with-obamas-pants-post/)
And
I’m
thinking, (a) do we ever want to hear from this New York Times deep thinker again and (b) if we did, why would we
take him seriously?
White guilt, like that displayed by
groveling idiot-intellectuals like Brooks, gives an enormous boost of
legitimacy to the blustering maestros in the thriving grievance industry,
experts in the practice of the art of moral blackmail. (See my blog, The Left: Masters of Extortion)
(http://fosterspeak.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-left-masters-of-extortion.html) These guys you provoke at your own peril! They are
“professionals” fermenting in the juices of resentment, always in a permanent
high dudgeon, always wanting to remind you of how insensitive you are. They are
the self-selected representatives of the burgeoning legions of the righteously aggrieved.
They give “voice” to their feelings of being treated unfairly and their
unhappiness with the raw deals that are the standard fare in America for anyone
who is not a white male. They now maintain vast inventories of “micro-aggressions”,
invent new ones, and make lots of demands, non-negotiable ones.
Consider the ruminations of Desiree
H. Melton, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame of Maryland University
specializing in critical race theory and feminist philosophy, a fully
credentialed grievance professional. She does not disappoint.
A recent tour of Monticello aroused her
critical race theory ire which then led to the appearance of “Monticello’s
Whitewashed Version of History” in the Washington Post listed as an opinion piece. That
the Washington Post would
publish such a mindless piece of bilious, self-righteous posturing masquerading
as serious thinking is evidence that for our intellectually elite gatekeepers
of opinion white guilt trumps any standard of dispassionate reflection and
critical insight that might be applied to the “conversations on race” they keep
insisting that we have. No connection
with reality is required (David Brooks, case in point). Equally depressing is that Ms. Melton gets
paid to transmit her tendentious, resentment-laden drivel to young college
students.
For Ms. Melton, the Monticello
tour was painful from the beginning as she complains that the other, “mostly white folks” on the
tour were insufficiently somber. “To my surprise, I was not
saddened by the experience. I did, however, get angry. I was angry at the utter
lack of reverence and solemnity.” Anger for grievance mongers is always the
first reflex. You see, the critical race theorists of the world, like Ms.
Melton, cannot comprehend why everyone else around them does not vibrate as
they do with the same exquisite sense of moral outrage that comes from
ruminating every waking moment on how awful it is to be a black person in
America. “Reverence and solemnity among its
white visitors were missing from Monticello because it did not demand it of
them.” It
is not clear that there is an “it” behind Monticello that can make these sorts
of “demands”. Aren’t reverence and solemnity supposed to come from within?
Perhaps the tour guides at Monticello are supposed to replicate the sessions of
quivering, angry, uncensored, unmasking of America’s fake, whitewashed heroes that
the students in her in her 101 classes at Notre Dame are subjected to. No
pedestal can remain occupied. ”Why,”
she asks, “does Monticello allow visitors
to tour the house and then skip over its related slave sites? Why? – well,
maybe because visitors to historic sites might have their own priorities,
interests and perspectives that don’t quite match up with those of the angry
professor. Maybe it is because the visitors
to Monticello are not (yet) political
prisoners to be perp walked through the grounds, reeducated and forced to confess
(Chinese, Cultural Revolution style) that American history is nothing other
than the ugly story of racism and the subjugation and exploitation of black
people.
Ms. Melton’s is
in a great wrath over Monticello’s supposed whitewashing of Jefferson’s slaver
ownership. Did she even bother to look at the official Monticello website which
gives ample considerable attention to the many aspects of slavery at Monticello?
(http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery)
Included are a number of online exhibitions such as:
Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at
Monticello; Slavery
at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty; Getting Word: African American Families of
Monticello Also,
on the website there were a number of articles relating to the reality of
slavery at Monticello, Jefferson
and Slavery and Jefferson
and Sally Hemings. What
is lacking? Reality,
it seems, makes no impression on this professor-visitor. She seems determined
to enjoy her anger and bitterness. Grievance
professionals are about grievances – facts do not matter.
The problem Ms.
Melton opines is that white people just don’t want to face the truth. “If white people cannot accept the awful
truth that one of the nation’s cherished founders held people as property, and
that slavery was indeed horrific, why would they acknowledge the covert ways in
which blacks are still oppressed?”
.
This is
clearly a trick, “if-then” question. Let’s respond by turning it back around
with a different “if-then” question. So:
IF black critical race theory
professors are unable to grasp some simple obvious facts (a) that it makes
absolutely no sense to talk about what truths white people as a single,
collective race accept or do not accept because there are none, (b) that most
white people do know and accept the
fact that Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, (c) that most white people as
well as all other people would strongly aver that slavery is horrific (d) that the ancestors of many white Americans today,
those particularly in the immigrant waves of the late 19th and early
20th centuries – Italians, Greeks, Jews from the Russian pale, etc.
– had nothing to do with American slavery, many of whom were serfs and peons
back where they came from, (e) that slave trading and ownership were not solely
practiced by white people, (f) that white Christian abolitionists in England
and America were primarily responsible for ending slavery in the western world,
THEN
should critical race theorists, like Ms. Melton attempt to acquire a basic
grasp of logic and critical thinking, study more history, work at becoming a
little less censorious and self-righteous or perhaps, just find a more productive
line of work?
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