Men on Horses

Readers of these weekly letters know that one of the topics that I find the most challenging is the question of whether or not people can reasonably be expected personally to rise up over the prevailing morality of their own day.

At least in retrospect, the question sometimes seems relatively inconsequential. Do I really need to feel guilty now, after all these years, for having enjoyed going to movies as a boy that depicted Indians as bloodthirsty savages bent mostly on killing innocent white people who merely wanted to farm their own homesteads in peace? Was the eight-year-old me supposed to have noted that the land on which the settlers wished so ardently to live in peace had mostly been stolen from the native peoples of North America? Or wondered if the religions of native Americans were in real life as silly-looking and -sounding as they were invariably depicted as being on the screen? Or why the Indians were almost invariably depicted as being unable to communicate other than in the kind of broken English in which the only first-person pronoun in use was “me” and all verbs were declined with the enclitic suffix “um”? Me wantum wampum!

I would like to write about two events that occurred last week and ask in their regard a similar set of questions.

The first is the announcement by the American Museum of Natural History that it is going to remove a statue of our twenty-sixth president, Theodore Roosevelt, on horseback that has been in place on Central Park West since 1940 and in which Roosevelt is flanked by an African man on one side and a Native American man on the other. And the other was the unsuccessful effort of demonstrators in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., to tear down a statue of Andrew Jackson, our seventh president. The comparison both does and doesn’t work, because their stories are somehow similar and dissimilar at the same time. In some ways, Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt were entirely different types who left behind entirely different legacies. But they also did have some important things in common. Both are generally remembered as “strong” presidents, as national leaders who got things done. Both were war heroes, Roosevelt actually having resigned his cushy Washington job as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to form the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment (known then and still as the “Rough Riders”) and then to fight personally as its leader in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898, and Andrew Jackson, of course, being remembered as the hero of the Battle of New Orleans that basically wrapped up the War of 1812 (or would have done so had the war not actually been over by the time the battle was joined) and conclusively ended any British effort to play a military role in North America. And both harbored extremely negative attitudes towards non-white people.

History has been relatively kind to both of them. Jackson’s face looks up at us daily from the twenty-dollar bill. Roosevelt seems only slightly the odd man out on Mount Rushmore, where he looks out across the Black Hills of South Dakota alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. So why then has their stock fallen so precipitously and so quickly? Is that loss of stature something to be applauded or regretted? Or, to ask the same question differently, are we being reasonable or unreasonable to base our opinion of men from one or two centuries in the past on whether or not they were able to step away from societal attitudes that they shared with countless other individuals of their day?

Let’s start with Jackson. That he was what modern Americans would call a racist goes almost without saying. He owned slaves personally, a fact so deeply embedded in his biography that the website of his plantation in Davidson County, Tennessee, called “The Hermitage,” presents visitors with a long, complicated apologia regarding the role Jackson’s slaves—by the time of his death, numbering about 150—played in the running of the place. (To take a look, click here.) And that detail frames the question I wish to ask in his regard. Of our first twelve presidents, only John Adams and John Quincy Adams never owned slaves. More to the point, perhaps, every single pre-Civil-War president of the United States who came from the South owned slaves. To people like ourselves to whom the idea of owning slaves is beyond abhorrent, it feels reasonable to ask how these people could possibly not have felt the same way. And yet…they appear not to have. And that list of slave-owning presidents includes the founders of our nation: George Washington (there were 317 slaves at Mount Vernon, 123 who were personally owned by Washington and emancipated upon his death and the rest part of his wife’s estate), Thomas Jefferson (who, after writing in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that he thought it self-evident “that all men are created equal,” wrote in his almost entirely forgotten 1787 book, Notes on the State of Virginia, that “the blacks…are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind”), and James Monroe, whose solution to the slavery issue involved shipping the slaves back to Africa, which is why to this day the capital of Liberia is called Monrovia.

So Andrew Jackson, born in 1767, was a child of his time. He grew up in a slave-owning culture. He was taught from childhood on that black people exist to serve white masters, that the whole point of there being different races in the first place is to make it easily discernible, even to children, who is meant to serve whom. His almost unimaginably cruel policy towards native Americans is part of that ideational complex too: by personally leading the charge to buy up Indian lands in the Southeast and then by pushing through Congress the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that led directly to the forced uprooting of countless thousands of Native Americans and their forced participation on death marches to lands in today’s Oklahoma, Jackson was simply putting into deed his strongly-held opinion that whatever impediment affects adversely the ability of white people to flourish on whatever land they choose to settle is by definition something to be fought against and, if possible, removed.

So that’s Andrew Jackson.  But what of Theodore Roosevelt, whose statue is going to be removed from Central Park West as soon as the Natural History Museum can find a suitable new home for it?

Roosevelt was a different kind of racist, not one consumed by visceral hatred for non-white people but rather one possessed of the quasi-scientific conviction that people of color are simply inferior to white people and that there is nothing wrong in society reflecting that fact. In 1914, for example, Roosevelt came out in favor forcibly sterilizing criminals and mentally-challenged individuals to keep them negatively from influencing future gene pools, writing at one point that  “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind,” and that “someday, we will realize that the prime duty…of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world, and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.” And who were the citizens of the wrong type? Could they have been the black people whom Roosevelt once characterized as “ape-like naked savages”? This was the same man, after all, who characterized white people as “the forward race” and who warned that they would be committing “race suicide” if they failed to out-reproduce the less advanced races of the world.

So it’s the same issue here as with Jackson. Eugenics was a thing in Roosevelt’s day. The notion that the Nordic, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon peoples are genetically superior to other groups within the family of mankind was believed by many to be a simple, scientifically verifiable truth. Well-respected institutions like the Carnegie Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the National League of Women Voters at one point in their history all supported the concept of eugenics as a rational basis for public policy. Famous people were involved as well—people like Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood), Alexander Graham Bell, and Luther Burbank. So Theodore Roosevelt was simply signing onto what was widely perceived, not as prejudice or bigotry, but as science.

And so we come to the same question yet again. Should T.R. be held responsible for having believed in something that has in our day been totally debunked, but which in his was considered a branch of legitimate scientific inquiry? Should Andrew Jackson be condemned today for being a southerner of the 18^th and early 19^th centuries whose beliefs were fully in sync with the rest of the world from which he came? Should people be blamed for believing things that everybody in their day “just” knows? (Saying yes, of course, means that you are prepared to be similarly judged by your descendants in, say, the 22^nd or 23^rd centuries. Just saying!)

In terms of the “statues issue” that has surfaced in our own day, I recommend here a middle course. We can and should lionize the rare few who somehow managed to understand the error of their contemporaries’ attitudes and beliefs—the abolitionists, for example, who were Andrew Jackson’s contemporaries but who nonetheless had the insight and the courage to recognize a great evil when they saw it. On the other hand, I don’t know how reasonable it is to expect people to look past what their own experts tell them categorically to be true, what everybody believes to be true. Still, understanding people to be children of their day does not mean we have to erect statues to their glory in our public parks or honor their memory on our twenty-dollar bills. What do have to do is to own up to the fact that some of our past leaders were individuals who embraced beliefs that seem not only obnoxious to us because the mood of the public has shifted, but which seem deeply and essentially immoral. Those beliefs too are part of their legacy and need to be openly rejected and condemned at the same time we take national note of the good those same individuals accomplished.

Common Sense

Thomas Paine’s claim to be acclaimed as “the father of the American Revolution” rests in no small part on the 49-page pamphlet Common Sense he published on January 10, 1776, as the War of Independence entered its second year. It was a huge success—when its press run is considered in proportion to the population at the time, Common Sense remains the best-selling American book ever—and was not only read quietly by people in the privacy of their homes but was actually declaimed aloud in taverns and in public gathering spots as a way of martialing public support for the effort to gain independence for the thirteen colonies. I read it first in high school and still remember imagining myself as an eighteenth-century high school student being moved to embrace the insurgency because of Paine’s bold, persuasive argumentation. (I was that kind of eleventh grader.)

Paine packs a lot into relatively few pages, but his main argument is that sometimes you have to step aside from fossilized allegiance to past attitudes, timidity regarding the possible consequences of enlightened action, and the inertia that results when people choose to mimic their own past behavior rather than to act as thoughtful, self-directed individuals. He concedes, for example, that it is natural and normal for people to feel a deep sense of allegiance to the individuals that legally govern them. But when those individuals—he was writing unambiguously about the British—when those individuals themselves behave in a way that belies their commitment to the wellbeing of the governed, then common sense dictates that that allegiance be set aside and a finer, nobler, and more enlightened path forward into the future be taken. Similarly, he notes, it is natural to feel that one’s own nation’s armed forces are in place to protect and make secure the citizenry. But when that army is used not to buttress the natural rights of the citizenry to thrive in their own places and to make them safe, but to force them to submit to unfair, unprincipled, and unjust laws imposed upon them from without, then common sense dictates that that natural inclination to think of one’s own army as being on one’s own side needs itself to be set aside and replaced with a set of emotions more related to reality.

It’s a stirring read and one of the truly essential works for any who would understand our nation’s founders and the mindset of the American people (or rather, the future American people) on the eve of revolution. If you haven’t read it, click here for a very legible, clearly laid-out online version. I mention Common Sense today, however, not specifically because of its role in our nation’s history, but because I wish to apply its chief argument to our current reality by asserting, in Paine’s style, that sometimes you really do need to set aside your priorly held beliefs and assumptions and choose instead to look out at the world through the lens of self-generated common sense.

This week’s Supreme Court decision regarding the legal meaning of the text in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that referenced discrimination imposed on the discriminated-against party “because of sex” is a good example of how this notion of this could and should work. It goes without saying that the framers of the act were thinking more about gender-based discrimination than the kind that turns on the discriminated-against party’s sexual orientation. And Justice Gorsuch conceded that too, going so far as to address that particular point in his majority opinion and to concede that the act’s framers would probably not have anticipated the extension of their law to cover discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Nonetheless, he wrote—and this is key—that “the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands.” That, I think, is common-sense thinking at its most basic level.

And, indeed, the counterargument as set forth in Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent (in which he was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas) was based precisely on the repudiation of Justice Gorsuch’s argument and argued instead that the fact that the act’s framers almost definitely did not mean to outlaw anti-gay discrimination makes it somewhere between spurious and wholly illegitimate for the Court retroactively to assign that meaning to their words. None of the principal players is alive today, so we can’t ask if they would approve of extending their legislation to protect the rights of gay citizens. Nor, obviously, can we travel back to 1964 to pose that question to legislators then all among the living. But—and this is the real point—we also cannot invite them to 2020 to see what has become of the world that they inhabited more than half a century ago and then either to revise or not revise their original intent. And so we are left with no real option other than to rely on common sense to tell us how best to approach the issue at hand and whether or not it makes sense to apply Title VII in the way the Supreme Court did earlier this week. And that is why I—who also doubt that the framers of the 1964 act were specifically thinking about anti-gay discrimination when they referenced discrimination “because of sex” in the text of the Act—think the Court’s decision was reasonable and just.

This notion—that the way to deal with the legal heritage of bygone centuries is to apply common sense to the laws under consideration and then to focus not on what the individuals responsible for their original formulation meant in their day but on what we conclude they would have meant if they were present to observe our world and to legislate in its regard—this notion is not only familiar and logical to me, but serves as perhaps the most basic single principle of Jewish law.

Outsiders are sometimes amazed that, for all the Torah is venerated endlessly as the word of God, we specifically do not make legal decisions based solely on the laws presented therein. We do not, for example, sanction any number of things that Scripture endorses as reasonable features of societal living. Slavery itself would be the best example. But there are also many others, including the notion of executing disobedient adult children, that were simply and universally set aside because the moral universe in which they were conceived is simply not the one in which Jewish people today live. The Torah talks about the specific way in which a virile soldier can force an attractive female prison-of-war into his bed, but there is not a single authority anywhere in the Jewish world—with no exceptions of any sort—who would dream of countenancing that kind of behavior today.

All of the above derive from a world so totally different from our own that applying them to modern society would result, not in the sanctification of God’s name, but in its profanation. But, of course, the question is not whether any of the above is true, but what specific criterion we are to use as we review ancient law and determine what to jettison and what to retain, what to insist remain incumbent upon us and what blithely (or not blithely) to allow to fall into timely desuetude.

The ancient sages who labored away at the science of Jewish law in the study halls of old imagined themselves being guided by the spirit of the living God. But, of course, none of those great rabbis actually was a prophet in the technical (or any) sense—and what they meant was that they perceived the common sense—the amalgam of realism, insight, intelligence, and moral bearing—they brought to the issues before them for adjudication, that common sense itself was the mode in which God speaks today to people willing to listen and eager to live lives in sync with divine values. And so they proceeded to legislate laws in apparent contravention of the plain meaning of Scripture as well as laws that developed Scriptural ideas in directions that seem unrelated to the plain sense of the original biblical text.

Common sense is what is called for in any number of contexts today. Extending federal anti-discrimination protection to a class of people that regularly experiences workplace and non-workplace discrimination is only to use common sense to amplify the clear sense of an older piece of legislation. (Invoking the “because of sex” clause in the Civil Rights Act to argue against the right of shopping mall owners to maintain separate restrooms for men and women, on the other hand, seems to me to fly in the face of common sense.) Working to guarantee that the nation’s police forces function in a way that generates trust among all segments of society rather than resentment, let alone outrage, is also just common sense. (Dismantling police forces without a clear sense of how to maintain order and safety in the nation’s streets in their absence, on the other hand, is an example of acting contrary to common sense.) Renaming army bases and schools named in honor of individuals who led armies into war with the specific aim of defeating and dismantling the republic seems like common sense to me. (But considering Theodore Roosevelt in the same category as Jefferson Davis seems to fly in the face of common sense. Woodrow Wilson [click here], on the other hand, not so much.)

COVID-Era Diary, Week Thirteen

It really does occasionally happen that the inner world and the outer one meet unexpectedly in the context of a book, or even a movie or a television show, that you undertook on a whim to read or to watch but which then turns out almost amazingly able to serve as a bridge between your inner self and events going on in the outside world. I suppose everybody has had experiences like that, at least now and then! (And I speak as someone who actually was in the middle of Barbara Tuchman’s 1985 The Zimmerman Telegram—a book about how our nation entered the First World War based on the fantasy-notion that Germany and Mexico were planning a joint invasion of the United States mainland—as our nation embarked in the post-9/11 months on a war in Iraq based on the fantasy-notion regarding Saddam Hussein’s vast stores of weapons of mass destruction.) And now that weird coincidence of book and front-page has revisited me as I’ve been reading daily about the massive demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the same time I’ve been immersed in Mark Twain’s 1884 novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Widely acclaimed as one of the greatest American novels, Huckleberry Finn is about a lot of different things. At the heart of the story, however, is the relationship between Huck, a free white lad in antebellum Missouri, and Jim, an enslaved adult. (Jim’s age is not made explicit in the book, but he is a married man with children—so clearly far older than fourteen-year-old Huck.) They are, to say the least, an unlikely pair. They don’t always get along. They are clearly living in parallel universes, the kind that allow them to open their eyes in the same direction at the same time and still see entirely different things. And yet they are depicted as each other’s true intimate, as two people bound to each other by ties of friendship so deep that they themselves are unable to stand back far enough fully to understand the role they play in each other’s lives.

That their relationship is at the core of the book is obvious, the precisely way to characterize it, however, dramatically less so. Some authors have seen their bond as essentially erotic, which is to say homoerotic. (The great proponent of this point of view was Leslie Fiedler, notably in his 1948 essay, “Come Back to the Raft, A’gin, Huck Honey!”). Others have convincingly written about Jim and Huck as father and son. (Click here for an especially convincing exposition of this line of interpretation by Heather M. Shrum.) And still others, legion in their own right, have taken Huck and Jim to represent white and black America in all the complicatedness of their intertwined and un-unravelable past and present.

As ever, I wear my own eyeglasses when I read. And it was in that mode that I found myself thinking of Huckleberry Finn as a kind of moral coming-of-age tale that has at its core a question I have written about many times in this space: the question of just how reasonable it is to expect people to transcend the moral givens of their day and to see clearly things that everybody else in the world sees entirely differently. Fiedler took note of the theme of nudity in the book—Jim and Huck are regularly depicted as taking their clothes off to sun themselves in the nude or to swim naked in the Mississippi—Fiedler saw in that a hint of their essential gayness. And I agree that their nakedness is a key point—but to me it suggests an entirely different way into the book, one that takes Huck and Jim as the American version of Adam and Eve.

The first couple too are depicted as romping around the garden unclothed until they finally eat of the fruit of the Tree of Moral Discernment and, suddenly aware of their nakedness, become ashamed and try to cover themselves up with kilts fashioned of fig leaves. That is a key moment in the saga too—because it reminds us that Adam and Eve were not created as babies, but as grown-ups possessed of the psyches and concomitant moral bearing of children. But then they do grow up. And, tragic though the story may be from one vantage point, theirs is also a story of positive and desirable growth. They get dressed. They figure out sex. Yes, being kicked out of paradise is depicted as punishment for the sin of eating the forbidden fruit. But it leads, not to agony, but to adulthood, to growth, to responsibility. If they want to eat, they’re going to have to grow their own food. If they want to have shelter, they’re going to have to figure out how to build at least some rudimentary kind of roofed structure.  And if they want the human race to endure, they’re going to have to figure out how to raise a family on their own. And that actually is what happens: the line in the Torah right after the one about their exile from Eden notes that, in the wake of their suddenly being thrust into adulthood, “Adam knew his wife Eve and she conceived and eventually gave birth to their first son, to Cain.” And with that the games were on!

Huck too grows in the course of the story, and particularly in terms of his ability to see Jim not as a slave and not as a black Untermensch, but as a human being, as a friend, as (and this is key) as an equal. What’s interesting is that Huck is not depicted as disliking Jim even in the beginning of the book. Just the opposite is the case, in fact. But he is depicted as a child of his era and his place: in one place, he actually expresses surprise that black people can love their spouses and their children with the same level of commitment and passion that white people bring to those relationships. And when Huck learns that Jim is actually running away and trying to reach Illinois, the nearest non-slave state in which he could live as a free person, Huck is—at first—horrified that Jim is planning to commit what in pre-Civil-War Missouri was a serious crime.

But Huck grows in the course of the book. The turning point is the one mentioned above when he realizes the depth of emotion of which Jim is capable. And he slowly comes to see in his friend not just “Miss Watson’s big Negro” (and “Negro” is not the word he uses), but another human being. At one point, he perceives it to be his moral obligation to inform Miss Watson, who owns Jim (or rather owned him and whose will has already freed him, although Huck doesn’t know this yet)—to inform her that he knows where Jim is and can return him to his mistress. And then there is this moment of moral clarity in which he understands that the definition of morality has to do not with conforming to popularly-held attitudes but by resisting them. And so, holding his letter to Miss Watson in his hand, he steps over the line to adulthood: “I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’—and tore it up.” And with that, Huckleberry Finn becomes an adult.

I first read Huckleberry Finn when I was a teenager. It wasn’t taught in high school back then because the racial politics of the day made it unimaginable that a book the used the n-word more or less on every page be presented to schoolchildren in a positive light. (It probably still isn’t in most place.) Of course, that ban only made me more interested in reading the book, which I did. I don’t think I understood it fully back then, although I remember liking it very much. But I understand it now, and reading it in light of the events of these last weeks has been remarkable.

Like most of my readers, I’m sure, I was raised to have the greatest respect for the police in general and particularly for the individual policemen with whom I occasionally came into contact. And it is also true that I haven’t ever met a police officer who wasn’t courteous and friendly towards me. Like most of us, I have always been more than prepared to wave away any report of untoward activity on some specific officer’s part as the function of the obligation with which police officers are regularly faced to make split-second decisions that cannot wait for a period of prolonged moral rumination to conclude before action has to be taken. And, of course, I was raised watching dozens of television shows that featured police officers as heroes willing to put themselves in harm’s way regularly for the sake of making the public safe and secure.

I still think that the vast majority of police officers behave morally and bravely in the course of their careers. But I too have grown in these last weeks as I have found myself face to face not with one or two, but with too many examples of untoward police behavior towards black citizens for even someone as favorably pre-disposed to the police as myself simply to wave away as the random bad acts of a few bad apples. Clearly, we have a problem. And that problem needs to find a solution.

In the last few weeks, any number of possible reforms have been put forward. I don’t feel able, at least not yet, to determine which are realistic and which, unworkable or unfeasible. The idea of defunding or dismantling police departments, for example, would require that a clear alternative program to make secure and safe the citizenry be ready to be set in place instantly. But even less dramatic solutions are going to require an enormous amount of pre-planning, not to mention the willing buy-in of the actual men and women who serve in our nation’s police departments. What is clear to me now, however, is that there is a serious problem here that needs to be addressed and resolved. That that will happen eventually now seems clear to me as well. The nation’s sociologists, criminologists, police chiefs, and politicians will all have opinions about how best to address the issue once the daily demonstrations die down and, as our nation re-opens, people go back to work. But I just don’t see us returning to business as usual even after the George Floyd incident itself fades into history. I sense our nation at a real turning point…and one that will lead us to the creation of a finer and more just society. Huck grew up! And can and shall we all.

COVID-Diary, Week Twelve

And now, this! We, who have all been discussing how our nation can come back from the one-two punch of a horrific pandemic that has already taken more lives than the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined (and which is quickly approaching the number of American deaths in the First World War) and a level of unemployment and economic upheaval unlike anything we have had to deal with since the Great Depression—now we are also obliged to deal with unrest in our nation’s streets that threatens to overwhelm not only our best efforts to respond thoughtfully and efficiently to the COVID-crisis through social distancing and the various other methods we have adopted to cope with the spread of the virus, but even the basic level of security we have come to expect in the nation’s streets and public gathering spots. And there is no particular reason to expect things to calm down any time soon. Nonetheless, to focus solely on the unrest and to ignore the underlying reasons that have brought so many protesters into the street would be a serious error of judgment. Nor am I being especially innovative here: any doctor will tell you that the only real way to cure a patient is to eradicate the disease, not merely to palliate its symptoms!

Even so, the urge to focus on the symptoms rather than on the disease is strong in many Americans. And, admittedly, it would be easy to wave away the nation-wide reaction to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis as an exaggerated response to a problem already solved by framing it as a story about four citizens deemed responsible for the death of a fifth who were then summarily fired from their jobs, arrested, and indicted. Indeed, when framed as a story about some bad men who collectively did a bad thing and got caught on camera doing it, it does sound like an almost ordinary event in the life of the nation. After all, aren’t people arrested daily and charged with various sorts of crimes? But a different picture entirely emerges if we shade in some relevant details and then retell the tale so that it becomes the story, not of some random criminal who got caught doing a bad thing, but of a fully-armed white police officer who, acting in the presence of—and apparently with tacit consent of—three fellow officers, exerted so much force subduing a black man that the man actually died as a result even despite the latter’s unambiguous and repeated statements that he was in serious physical distress. Telling the story that way reframes it as part of a larger pattern of police behavior towards members of the black community and makes it as much about the administration of justice itself as about racism or prejudice. And that is why it would be such a huge error of judgment just to wave the incident away as a bad thing that happened to some poor guy and for which four bad apples in a bag of otherwise good apples will surely pay the big price. It certainly doesn’t appear to seem that way to black people! Nor should it to anyone.

Sometimes you really do have to step back to see the big picture. And, indeed, by rejecting the “narrow prism” approach, the nation has made the incident’s aftermath into as much a part of the story as the incident itself. Derek Chauvin, the police officer now indicted of second-degree murder in the death of George Floyd, has been fired. The three other officers present when George Floyd died have also been fired and charged with abetting his murder. Like all arrested individuals, they have the right to be defended ably in court. And they have the right to be presumed innocent until found guilty. All that is as it should be. But to feel the matter behind us because of those four arrests is to miss the point almost entirely because the unrest that has now spread to more than 140 American cities is not really—or at least not solely—about George Floyd, who more the match in this story than the fuse: the explosive materials already existed and the fuse was in place. But someone had to ignite that fuse…and that is the role that George Floyd posthumously played.

As I write this, there has been more than a week of unrest. There have been wholly peaceful protests. But there has also been violence, and not only in Minneapolis but also in almost every major American city including Washington and New York. There has been looting as well. But denouncing looters as thugs and thieves is one thing and using our natural inclination to condemn that kind of criminal behavior as an excuse not to ask why the incident triggered such a dramatic outpouring of passion on the part of so many Americans, black and white, in the first place would be a grave error of judgment.

For most white Americans, racism feels like a thing of the past, a feature of the Reconstruction era in the 19^th century that lingered on in American life until the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s—and particularly the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968—finally solved the problem permanently. I doubt many black Americans would find that sentence even remotely cogent. And it is that sense that racism remains a guiding force in American life—and, at that, a pernicious influence that consistently subjects black citizens to a level of demeaning, degrading treatment at the hands of the authorities that white citizens mostly prefer to know nothing of—that sense that racism is anything but  a thing of the past is the fuel that has fed the fires that have raged across the land since the Floyd murder just a week ago.

There is no excuse for looting or putting people’s lives at risk by fomenting riotous behavior, nor should or could there be. But white Americans would do better to ask themselves where this rage born of a sense of powerlessness in the face of prejudice is coming from. To justify looking away from the problem that is motivating so many thousands of people to take to the streets and demand justice by choosing instead to focus on the criminal behavior that has led to the destruction of property is seriously to miss the point. Yet that has been the approach of the current administration—to focus solely on the excesses, to threaten to unleash the full force of American military might to restore order, and to attempt to bully demonstrators into staying home lest they find themselves in harm’s way when the shooting begins—and it is not a productive one by any means. Nor is it morally justifiable.

Looking at all this through my own personal eyeglasses, it’s impossible for me not to imagine what the fate of millions upon millions could have been in Europe had the citizenry taken to the streets when the Nazis first made it clear that they intended to deny Jewish citizens any possibility of being treated fairly or justly by the police or the justice system. In the German federal election of 1932, the Nazis won a little over 37% of the popular vote. That means that a little under 63% of voters voted against them, representing tens of millions of citizens. All were opposed to Nazism! And all of them, at least at first, had the capacity to speak out loudly and forcefully. What would have happened if millions had taken to the streets in 1933 to protest and to insist that justice prevail, that prejudice directed against innocents be eradicated, that the government behave responsibly and fairly towards all of the nation’s citizens? Could they have altered the course of history by demanding justice for all?

Like all “what-if” questions, this one too has no answer. But one plausible scenario features the Nazi leadership, including the Führer himself, responding to endless, massive unrest in the streets by accepting that they were weakening, not strengthening, the ties that bound the nation together by behaving disgracefully towards innocents based on their faith, their race, or their ethnicity. Hitler was a viscious racist and anti-Semite. So were his henchmen in the Nazi leadership. But they all obviously felt that by promulgating anti-Jewish laws they would increase, not decrease, the level of support they were going to need to accomplish their other goals. But what if millions in the streets told them otherwise? We’ll never know, of course, how they might have responded because those theoretical millions did not take to the streets to protest injustice, to insist on equity and fairness for all, or to repudiate racism and anti-Semitism as cancerous growths that had the power eventually to destroy the host body, in this case the German nation itself. Whether average German citizen of those years is or isn’t fairly described as a willing partner in genocide is a matter for historians to debate. But that the Nazis’ first efforts to deny justice to all were not met with the kind of opposition that even they could not have ignored—that too is part of the story of Germany’s descent into a hell of their own making.

Could that descent have been averted by people in the streets demanding a different course forward? None can say. But that is the specific question that the events of the last week across our nation prompted me to ask myself as I watched the nation’s streets becoming filled to overflowing with people insisting that all citizens get a fair shake, that the police relate to citizens of all races precisely in the same way and with neither prejudice nor racist preconceptions guiding them, and that the legacy of the Reconstruction era—still very much alive and with us more than a century and a half after Appomattox—be finally laid to rest as a pernicious part of our history that deserves to be studied carefully even as it is forcefully and formally repudiated at every level of civil life.