The fine art of whitewashing, brought to you by Tennessee’s tea parties.

It might have been Chris Rock’s anti-Fourth of July tweet, or perhaps because there hadn’t been enough news stories making tea party members look racist or foolish (though there have), but suddenly Salon and other left-leaning websites started publicizing an 19 month-old press conference by Tennessee tea parties demanding that the Tennessee legislature pass a law that would whitewash American history, particularly as it applies to the Founders. From a report in the Commercial Appeal from January of 2011:

“Hal Rounds, spokesman for the group, recently claimed at news conference that there was ‘an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the Founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.’ As a result, the Tea Party organizations argue, there should be ‘no portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.’ ‘The thing we need to focus on about the Founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,’ Rounds explained of his interpretation of the legacy of the Founding Fathers.”

There is a lot of useful information to be extracted from this remarkable theory, some with ethics ramifications, and some without. Among the non-ethical conclusions are that…

1. Teaching American history is a minefield, and probably beyond the ability of any elementary school teacher to do completely fairly, objectively and well.

2. The spectacle of a group supposedly dedicated to the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence telling a state government that it needs to make accurate accounts of the creation of those documents illegal is something to behold. Wow.

3. Whatever one thinks about the Tea Parties and their mission, it is undeniable that they attract a stunning number of stupid people in leadership positions.

The ethical conclusions bring us back to Chris Rock’s Independence Day tweet. Defenders of Rock, other than those who resort to the old “it was just a joke” excuse, argued that he was “telling the truth.” But half-truths are not truths; indeed, they obscure truth and distort it. That many of the Founders were slaveholders and that neither the Declaration nor the Constitution ended the institution of slavery is an essential part of the nation’s history, without which neither the dynamics of the nation’s beginnings nor the difficult route to slavery’s end can be understood. Rock’s innuendo suggesting that the fact that slavery wasn’t abolished makes the Fourth irrelevant to black Americans was equally distorting. It is wrong, in such an important matter as explaining to students and other Americans what their nation means and stand for, how it came to be and the turmoil that created and shaped it, to seek to manipulate the facts in the pursuit of political goals. It would be nice, convenient and remarkable if the Founders were perfect, prescient beings with attitudes and beliefs centuries ahead of their culture in all things, but they were not. In many ways, the presence of their flaws and misconceptions makes what they accomplished all the more impressive. We cannot understand the good they did without reference to the bad; similarly, Rock’s attempt to dismiss all the Declaration of Independence achieved with its universal assertion of human rights is no more “truthful,” and is in fact an insidious misrepresentation calculated to divide races and the country itself.

The Tea Party plan also embraces indoctrination and dishonesty by omission. That the roots of discrimination and the abuse of minority groups, including women, were well established at the nation’s birth is crucially important, and must not be hidden, disguised, or wished away.The fact of it must certainly not be erased by edict, as the Orwellian demands of the Tennessee tea parties suggest.

“Truth,” especially in examining history, is always subjective and devilishly complicated. Those whose objective is to manipulate history reveal their unethical and ignorant motives by claiming it to be otherwise.

* In the linked story, the Las Cruces, N.M. Tea Party float in a local parade featured a Confederate flag. The too-clever-by-half Tea Party group defended its coded race message by noting that the New Mexico heritage-themed float was only referencing the Civil War effort by the Confederacy to take over the New Mexico territory. Sure. [Hat tip to Jeff Field]

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Pointers: Little Green Footballs; Jeff Field

Facts: Commercial Appeal

Source: KOB4

Graphic: Newsreel Blog

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.