The Pendragon's Hall

To go further into this idea of "Black History Month" it is pretty much like Kwanzaa--a month for white people who feel guilty about being white trying to pretend that being black, so far from being a stigma, is actually the magic cure to get one out of purgatory. If we must celebrate this month in order to help Africans feel at home here and get them to include the tag "Americans" after their racial classification (you can tell by the fact that "African" or "Asian" comes first what part of their heritage they are really proud of) then let us at least celebrate black people who did something worth while. It is especially annoying when Christians begin to ignore obvious fallacies for the simple reason that the person propagating them has a darker skin color than the average. So far in my college career here at Have-It University (my apologies to Peter Kreeft for appropriating his term) I have heard poetry with explicit sexual references read in chapel because Maya Angelou wrote it, I have heard the black racism of James Cone taught in theology class with little or not critique, and I have seen our campus store selling a book by incoming Senator Barak Obama (D-ILL), notwithstanding the fact that the good senator sponsored state legislation making it not only legal but obligatory for doctors to leave survivors of abortion to die (the bill was so extreme few other Democrats even rallied to the cause). But that's ok: the above are all black and to show them that we're really sincere in regretting slavery, we must celebrate their achievements, whatever those achievments happened to be. You'd think a Christian college could come up with a better way to celebrate. What about black spirituals or the great Christians who helped move the black people forward--Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Sojourner Truth? Sure, we can celebrate the heroics of Frederick Douglass and MLK, Jr, but why do the white men without whom they could never have succeeded get ignored? This is a real puzzle to me and has led to a sort of "reverse racism" which it never was supposed to--now blacks are all given the benefit of the doubt while whites are reviled. This is no better than the original system. Is it any less racism when a black preacher refers to white Christians as "the church of the anti-Christ" and calls on blacks to separate from them? There are no distinctions made for white Christians in Cone's writing. How about Desmond Tutu? He espoused the principals of the communist Viet Kong and exulted in the "defeat" as he saw it of American forces. How could Frederick Douglass have taken the stand he did without be ginned up by white men, including the man he thought "too conservative"--Abraham Lincoln?

Let's teach black history, by all means, many of them have made tremendous contributions to American society. But let's teach it through the same scope we teach white history: we do not belittle the good, nor do we excuse the bad. This unqualified praise of all black people everywhere, as if being born black is somehow a mark of sainthood, is no better than when white people were burning crosses and not accepting black testimony in court. Those of us in academia should be smarter than that.