“…I grew up attending a “school” in a church basement, where our curriculum consisted largely of old, dilapidated materials from Bob Jones University and Pensacola Christian College (A Beka), many dating from the 1960s and 1970s. There was also a bookshelf full of old books contributed by adults in the church….We were taught a romanticized version of slavery in which Africans were fortunate to have been brought to a Christian country, where benevolent white masters cared for them. I remember very little serious discussion of the brutality of the institution….The illustration showed enslaved black people arriving in America, dressed in their Sunday best, happily shaking hands with their new white masters. Everybody looked delighted with the arrangement…I accepted it. I was seven or eight years old. It was in a history book. Why wouldn’t I? ChatGPT also found the provenance. The illustration (above) appeared in a 1957 Virginia history textbook, in a chapter titled “How the Negroes Lived Under Slavery.”….This wasn’t merely an education that omitted the horrors of slavery. It taught children to imagine something close to the opposite of what actually happened.”

Holly expresses her experiencing this kind of false education as if she’s revealing a shocking and previously hidden practice like Satanism or baby-eating. Children are taught to imagine something close to the opposite of what actually happened in every school across the country, and the forces that just took over Congress are determined to do more of it and worse. Does she not know that? How?

Here’s a report from yesterday telling us that Loudoun County (Virginia) schools frame a Thanksgiving teaching unit as the history of how Native Americans were brutalized and discriminated against. This school has also been the center of controversy over teaching that the United States was built on slavery and is an inherently racist society to this day.

Holly says she taught herself about slavery “before she could drive” but also says that she needed “Roots” to hammer home just how bad slavery was….now. I learned about how brutal and wrong slavery was before I was 12 watching “Spartacus” and “Ben-Hur.” Those slaves were white, so I didn’t associate the practice solely with the United States, and that is the correct perspective. (I would prefer to pick cotton than be a galley slave or a gladiator.) Holly was also horrified by the rapes in “Roots,” finding it inconceivable that men who weren’t monsters would ever rape women that they thought the owned. This feature of previous societies was also dramatized in “Spartacus.” Cultural literacy has its benefits.

Holly asks, “How does a society make monstrous behavior seem normal?”

Yup, this intelligent woman is in the throes of toxic presentism. Society had to evolve, along with societal ethics, to realize that slavery and rape were wrong, never mind “monstrous.” That is a wildly naive question, shockingly so. The behavior was normal and traditional, served an apparent purpose and had perceived benefits, so it wasn’t “monstrous.” Women had to have sex whenever their husbands demanded it. They couldn’t vote or own property. Parents beat children: that was how discipline was normally handled. Husbands beat wives too: it wasn’t even a crime. Child labor was routine,

Slavery was relatively easy to accept. Not only was the practice thousands of years old, but it had economic benefits to the slaveholders. Black slavery was easier to rationalize than other varieties, because blacks were not generally regarded as fully human. There were respected scientists who would explain that blacks were just a highly intelligent variety of ape, or a lower primate. Didn’t Holly ever learn about Ota Benga? People did what we now think of as terrible things because they hadn’t learned that they were terrible yet. That’s the answer to Holly’s question.

One of my less intelligent Facebook friends yesterday re-posted a fatuous meme asserting that the Founders knew that slavery was evil (thus proving the “1619 Project” accurate) because John Adams said it was, and he became President. Funny, I didn’t know Adams was the official arbiter of Colonial morality and ethics. There are contrarians and visionaries in every society, but the fact that later everyone accepts that they knew best doesn’t mean their revolutionary ideas were viewed favorably by a majority of the society they lived in.

Slavery began to be widely viewed in the U.S. as cruel and intolerable in 1852, when Harriet Beecher Stowe published “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Before that, most of the American public didn’t think much about slavery and didn’t ponder its moral flaws or human consequences. Stowe’s book still holds up and is as powerful as ever. If Holly had read it, and everyone should, she wouldn’t have needed Lavar Burton.

I have Holly’s email, and am pondering whether to send her a brief message saying “Now do abortion.” Based on her woke proclivities and biases revealed in her essay—-she writes in the post—

“I’ve been in therapy for eleven years, and a great deal of that work has involved learning to believe that men are not monsters. That the men who hurt me were individuals who did terrible things, not representatives of their entire sex. That men deserve to be regarded as individuals, with the same dignity and presumption of decency I would extend to anyone else.This has not been easy work….”

—I will bet my toes that she doesn’t view killing unborn human beings for the convenience of the mother as “monstrous.”