Morning reading: Heroics over heroes
Adam on how to get along for those who want to get along…
Jamelle Bouie interviewed University of South Carolina historian Woody Holton for the New York Times. The podcast and transcript were published yesterday. Holton makes a compelling case for how US citizens could get past their divisions about the history of the country:
I am happy to say that George Washington did some really heroic things. It was not so heroic to hold those more than 300 people as slaves right up until his death. And his policy was that they wouldn’t be freed until Martha died, and Martha was smart enough to be paranoid. These people are a heartbeat away from freedom, and that’s my heartbeat. And so she went ahead and freed them. But there’s a Washington to be proud of and a Washington to be less proud of.
And so, this is a very hard thing to do. We’ve got to let go of the heroes and replace them with heroics. That is, to see that the same person can do something heroic on Monday and be an enslaver or a town destroyer. That was his nickname among the Indians — call me town destroyer. It’s the same guy that we admire for preventing the coup and for leading his army across the Delaware on Christmas night, 1776.
And is that so hard? Does anybody have any perfect friends? Most of us are some of this and some of that. And I think we are more likely to unify around the founding if we admit the feet of clay, as well as the virtuous aspects. And I think one way to do that is to focus on people’s heroics rather than insisting on heroes.
This reminded me of a point Ta-Nehisi Coates made on the same show back in July. When I heard this, I stopped in my tracks to write it in my notebook:
Who amongst us gets to belong to a family where we feel everybody in that family has always been noble at all points in time. Who amongst us gets to honestly strip ourselves naked and look at our own biography and feel like we were always noble and we were always right? There’s a kind of humanness, a kind of grace I would even argue, that can be found if you can submit yourself to the notion that you’re not required to be perfect, you’re not required to be the good guy in the story. That in fact to try to do that is in many ways a rejection of your own humanity.
