Erasing History Is Not The Virtue They Think It Is
I love Lisa Simeone, one of my colleagues in standing up for individual rights (against the TSA).
She emailed me about a comment she left in the NYT and allowed me to post the comment and our email exchange.
Lisa's email to me:
-----Original Message-----
From: Lisa Simeone
To: Amy Alkon
Sent: Thu, Dec 30, 2021 6:29 am
Subject: Fw: Your Comment on I'm Invited to a Destination Wedding at a Plantation. What Do I Do?Amy, thought you would appreciate. I'm getting slaughtered by the wokerati in the comments section -- ha ha! (Of course I have the guts to write under my own name, unlike all these virtue-signaling wankers excoriating me, most of them erecting straw man arguments and putting words in my mouth, to boot.)
Even so, my comment has risen to the #1 Top Reader Pick, by a mile. Ha! Take that, insufferable, sanctimonious, faux-liberal twits!
What have any of these people actually done to advance the cause of racial justice?? My money says nothing. All they do is pontificate -- anonymously -- on websites and act holier-than-thou. I've put my ass on the line and paid a heavy price for it, personally and professionally:
My reply:
I love the hell out of you -- for what you wrote and for always standing up for sanity (along with individual rights).I, too, always write comments under my own real name. Because you are besieged by many human fleas does not make them any less fleas.
LOVE that it's now the top comment.
And you're completely right about the "doing" part.
My favorite is when people call me "racist" for not parroting the trendy neo-racism of the moment. Meanwhile, though I'm on book hiatus a bit longer, I volunteer as a mediator -- doing free dispute resolution for mostly black and Latino clients.
I spend hours and hours and hours working to see they have "access to justice" -- meaningful resolution for their grievances -- that does not require them to have the money and emotional fortitude to take someone to court.
Yes, of course, it's raging bigotry that motivates me to do this work.
Every square foot of every single populated area on earth has been violently taken from the original inhabitants.
Great Britain had legal slavery up until 1820 and everything built and mined in that country before that was to a large extent built with slave labor. No one has clean hands here, white, black, Asian, nobody.
We are all the decendents of slaves and slavers. The percentage of each does not make you either guilty or morally superior.
Isab at December 30, 2021 9:25 PM
Thanks, Amy.
Here's another comment the NYT won't print -- not my words but those of a celebrated black author. I've submitted it 3 times so far, to no avail:
“There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.”
-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as reported by the NYT in June 2021
Apparently she isn't woke enough for them either.
Lisa Simeone at December 31, 2021 5:03 AM
It's not what we've done that matters, it's what we say we've done, and what we say we're going to do.
A paraphrase of something Scott Adams put into one of his more serious works. The original was attached to politicians, but it seems applicable in a more general sense.
I R A Darth Aggie at December 31, 2021 8:13 AM
I'll second Isab's comment about all land on earth having been taken from its original inhabitants (though his comment about almost everything in Britain having been built with slave labor is HIGHLY questionable).
Of course, in the minds of the most ideological greens, even the "original human inhabitants" of anyplace were just an evil, parasitic invasive species. Obviously, mass suicide is the only moral response to these unforgivable human sins.
Gene at December 31, 2021 12:11 PM
Human history is a big horror show. If it wasn't an invasion or civil war it was the black death or a famine. We are so blessed to live in the present but the radical left seems determined to return us to a savage state. Thomas Sowell points out that if you personally could not prevent a crime, then you can't be responsible for it. Holding all white people responsible for slavery (which northerners fought and died for--1 death for every 6 slaves freed) is itself a crime. Are we to hold all black people to blame for the black slavers in Africa or for the murders by black gangs? That would be the logic of retroactive guilt.
cc at December 31, 2021 1:04 PM
It's a legit question. I mean, look at Ghislaine Maxwell. She attended Chelsea Clinton's wedding and whammo!
Big trouble. Be careful about where you show up.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at December 31, 2021 1:52 PM
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