I want to preface this by saying that there are a lot of writings I admire of yours, and I appreciate when you do add something to the conversation but your exploration of Georgia (where I worked for the Democratic side for 8 weeks).

I can appreciate the gray area you might be going for but I don’t think it comes across that way. It sounds like you’re simply trying to cancel long-dead figures to get us riled up about the present. The question isn’t that people had slaves back in the day. We already knew that. As I’ll argue below, there’s somewhat of an overabundance of writing, film, documentaries, and television shows designed to keep us emotionally moved about past sins.

Your first paragraph tries to nail George Washington for having teeth made from slaves, but that's equivalent to trying to cancel anyone in this day for not using free-trade coffee or buying clothes from Nike. Mentioning that he went after a slave is somewhat burying the lede from his larger views on slavery and the fact that he freed his slaves upon his death.

But the larger point: Isn’t over-focusing on the past and under-focusing on the present, not particularly being honest with us either? Even if it’s not untruthful, it comes off as a tiresome fear-mongering that opens the door for someone like Tim Scott to catch our attention when he introduces a different narrative of how Black lives have improved since he was a child.

Slavery happened as did an unimaginable genocide of Native Americans. There’s no reason to suggest that, outside of a small band of reactionaries in red states, that slavery is not being taught in schools. If you want to see rewriting of propoganda in action, look to the Soviet Union. Slavery is, in no way, a secret. Understanding reconstruction, fruitless abolitionist causes, the flaws of the Declaration of Independence and the Consutition in addressing slavery, the consequences of slavery is part of the standard American test book. It is required for the AP US History test and all state standardized tests as far as I know. If there’s a reason I didn’t learn more about slavery in school, it’s because there are only so many days in the year and so many subjects to learn.

There’s a difference between teaching slavery and attempting to a) constantly overload us with emotional guilt that something bad happened in the past, suggest that b) our whole nation is defined by slavery.

On the former, we now have added an extra holiday to the calendar to ponder slavery (while adding zero national holidays for any other racial minority), we have blurred the lines between racism and critical thought, we now have a total of 26 separate full-time positions at Georgetown University to create diversity, we attempted to put forth the 1619 curriculum which fell under peer review and attempted to ostracize professors who opposed it, nearly every major media outlet has added diversity quotas to their staffs, and we have released an overwhelming number of movies addressing past Black pain:

In a five- year period alone, we had: Mudbound, Birth of a Naton, Free State of Jones, Fences, Hidden Figures, Get On Up, Marshall, Blackkklansman, Green Book, If Beale Street Could Talk, Blind Spotting, 13th, I Am Not Your Negro, Harriett, Clemency, Judas and the Black Messiah, Seberg, Detroit, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and United States vs Billie Holliday. On TV, there’s Insecure, Dear White People, Atlanta, The Chi, Small Axe, Bridgerton, Lovecraft Country, Blackish, and Mixedish. Shows are lambasted just for not having a Black character (as if it’s now a requirement even if it’s not period appropriate); if a Black character is misused; if a mixed-race character is voiced by a White actor, if a White director tells the story, etc. We are also not allowed to even treat people who fought for the South with the dignity of soldiers who followed orders and died in a war (memorializing them with statues might be overkill, I agree).

I am not saying any of this is wrong or right, but it’s hard to suggest that the Black community is now voiceless and can’t shape its own narrative.

So while I agree that it’s absolutely reasonable to go after the racists in the South and to protect your tribe, it feels like a straw manning to go after the rest of us.

There’s a group in the middle who’s a little tired of the overemphasis of race and gender in explaining all the problems in this country. Who are a little tired of reading the 10,000th article about how bad Blacks used to have it. We’d prefer to see a more responsible accounting of the present (and that’s not to say there aren’t definite disadvantages) without linking the connection to the present.