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Frank Barefield| Holland

In a March 5 column (Why are we trying to forget our nations racist past?) I argued that racism has been a part of us since Europeans first settled the Americas and denial of this history or suppression of current theories about it is dishonest. However, human affairs are seldom clear-cut, black and white affairs, and honesty also requires that we not over-attribute to racism the motives for individual behavior or the shape that our institutional structures take.

Sometimes racist motives are obvious as when Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was killed by three white men and racial prejudice was explicit in messages they had posted on the Internet. One post expressed a wish to shoot Black people described as monkeys and another that someone should drive a car into a group of Black Lives Matter demonstrators. A line from Bob Dylans ballad, The Death of Emmitt Till, still rings true 65 years after Tills murder: The reason that they killed him there, and Im sure it aint no lie / Cause he was born a black skinned boy, he was born to die.

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But motives are not always so obvious and claims about motives can look like fishing expeditions that bait a hook, throw it into the river, and call anything pulled out a fish. Sportscaster Jim Kaat, during an October baseball game. praised the skill of a player from Cuba and added that his team would benefit from a 40-acre field full of players like him. A minor media storm followed, claiming the 40-acre metaphor was an insulting reference to the unkept post-civil war promise to give 40 acres and a mule to every freed salve. However, the expression back or north or whatever forty is a common colloquialism in rural America that apparently originated in 1832 when 40-acres was set as the standard tract for selling government land as an incentive for settlers to move west, not after 1865 when land promised to former slaves was instead returned to the white, pre-Civil War owners.

Childrens author Dr. Seuss has been criticized for promulgating racist prejudices: the Grinch spreads antisemitism because stealing Christmas presents is similar to Medieval stereotype of the Christian-hating Jew and The Cat in the Hat portrays Black people as blackface minstrel stereotypes who are sources of entertainment not deserving of basic respect due to everyone. The trouble with this analysis is that seeing these characters as metaphors for racial stereotypes requires that the reader assume the characters are symbols and then interpret them as modern metaphors for historical events about which few children would have any knowledge.

Carol Anderson, author of "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America," professor of history at Emory University, provides a more serious example. During a June 2, 2021, NPR interview about her book she said that James Madison, to get support for the Constitution, added the second amendment to mollify the concerns coming out of Virginia and the anti-Federalists, that they would still have full control over their state militias and those militias were used in order to quell slave revolts.

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Her website says this book shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America. Her claim is true but incomplete. Like most important events, the structure of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights was influenced by multiple factors. Putting down rebellions, slave and otherwise (e.g., Shays Rebellion) was one concern. Citizen militias also provided security from external threats to the new union while avoiding the establishment of a professional army under federal control which states feared. Keeping Black people in their place is a major part of our past, but the history of the Second Amendment is too complex to reduce it to the one issue of race.

Efforts across the country to suppress the discussion of race and fishing expeditions to find racist motives where only the thinnest connection can be made are equally misguided. The Buffalo Springfield song, For What Its Worth, seem to apply today as much as they did during the culture wars of the 1960s: Theres battle lines being drawn / And nobodys right if everybodys wrong.

Even those with whom we have basic disagreements are not likely to be wrong about everything, but both ends of the political spectrum seem more interested in painting the world the way they want it to be rather than making efforts to see the world as it is. False narratives, whether supporting liberal or conservative causes, provide a poor foundation for forming the more perfect union promised to us by our Constitution.

Frank Barefield is a resident of Holland.

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My Take: Both ends of the political spectrum are failing us - HollandSentinel.com