Minority Bashing

Lots of us are doing it, and everyone needs to stop it, or we really are all doomed

Most of us learned in elementary school that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, which is largely true. But the man who did the most to prepare the nation and the ground for making that happen was an escaped slave himself, Frederick Douglass, one of the most remarkable thinkers, writers and orators America has ever produced.

Douglass was a very great man, but even he had his blind spots. When he was fighting in the years after the Civil War to make sure African-Americans had full voting rights, he shockingly disparaged Native Americans as well … less than completely human. He said they were people “too stiff to bend,” who looks on civilization, “your canals and railways and electric wires, and he regards them with aversion.”

In a speech in Philadelphia in 1866, he also made the incredible prediction that Native Americans would soon die out, since they couldn’t cope with change, and added the complete howler that while Blacks suffer prejudice, “the Indian none.”

But Douglass got a taste of his own medicine (as if the former slave should have needed one) when it came to white women’s struggle to vote. Suffragettes had every reason to resent that they were still being denied the franchise, but there’s no excuse for what Elizabeth Cady Stanton said in an 1868 debate with Douglass.

Why, she said, should “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence” get the vote ahead of refined white women?

In a direct attack on Blacks, she bemoaned that some placed women’s rights behind those of “unwashed and unlettered ditch-diggers, boot-blacks … and barbers.”

This was all very entertaining for the racists and sexists, I’m sure, but not so good for either African-Americans or women, both of which groups, perhaps in part because of that feud, had to wait decades to see their rights fully recognized.

You would think people would have learned from this. But in 2016, I saw a group of Jews who had emigrated a few years earlier from Russia protesting a resolution honoring immigrants at a West Bloomfield trustees meeting.

I could explain that our economy and our demography very much need the undocumented people who are here. But instead I’ll just say this:

To Geronimo and Sitting Bull, we all are the descendants of illegal immigrants, many of whom behaved badly. One of whom, the grandson of a thoroughly disreputable immigrant named Trump, is behaving very badly still.