Don't be afraid, it's just history

Untitled (Toni Morrison) by Robert McCurdy (National Portrait Gallery)

     If the three Canadians who discovered insulin in 1921 were themselves diabetic and trying to save their own lives, would that make their accomplishment less significant?
     I'd say no. Their breakthrough still benefits uncounted millions.
     Similarly, I do not discount the American Revolution because the colonists were thinking mostly of their own interests.
     They still forged a new type of freedom. For themselves. At first.
But that freedom began to spread — rather like a virus escaping a lab — and kept infecting others.
    That is the American story in a nutshell: One group secures rights for itself, then those rights are claimed by a more disadvantaged group.
     While soaked with blood and outrage, it is still an inspiring story. That's why I'm so puzzled that Florida and Texas pretend that telling the core American narrative somehow hurts their children.
     Which is more inspiring? That wealthy planter and slave owner Thomas Jefferson paused from gardening at Monticello to write the Declaration of Independence? Or that his grandchildren, descendants of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman Jefferson made his concubine, would some day gain their rights as free citizens — in theory — under that very same document?
     I'll take the second story. It displays the promise of America. You can't feel bad hearing it, unless you're rooting for slavery.
     The past helps us understand the present. If you are agog at the Alabama court casting embryos as children — albeit very well-behaved children — it might help to remember that while Black Americans won the right to vote in 1865, American women would not receive the same right for another 55 years, until 1920. American wives and mothers and sisters lagged two generations behind those once considered sub-human chattel.

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