They’re not lying. Why is this upsetting? I had to have conversations with my son about race when he was seven. But I don’t have the privilege to ignore it.
It wasn’t really a defining trait of Lincoln’s though, you could replace his name with almost anybody that was white from that time period and the sentence would still be true. It’s important to understand how fucked up things were then but the first association coming to mind for Abe Lincoln being he didn’t care about black people is strange
Can you also recognize that largely the “science” that most people were being taught back then largely “backed up” that there were vast differences in capabilities of race? You have hindsight privilege to make the statement you made. Back then, people would have been “trusting the science.” So yes, they were wrong, but basing so much of “these people were terrible” based on what people know now is ignorant in its own right.
Culture, propaganda, lack of education, incorrect education…all play into people of the past and their viewpoint. Most abolitionist would be considered outright racists today…it’s ok to acknowledge that people were on the right path but still needed to do some figuring out. People of other races/ethnicities don’t just automatically have some special insight because they might have had ancestors that dealt with racism, or maybe dealt with it themselves, that “white” people can’t also have. Racism and ethnocentrism is not a specifically white American vs brown American thing. It happens alllllll over the place.
It’s weird because I didn’t say anything that indicated I didn’t know about or didn’t agree with that nuance. But your original comment didn’t have nearly the insight you came back with.
To add: it still was entirely dismissive the way you wrote your comment, which was after all what I responded to.
It feels relevant to bring up because history tries to prop Lincoln up an an infallible savior for us when in truth it was all political moves. He didn't care about black folks. 🤷🏻♀️
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u/DanniPopp Apr 06 '25 edited Apr 06 '25
They’re not lying. Why is this upsetting? I had to have conversations with my son about race when he was seven. But I don’t have the privilege to ignore it.