I, too, Have a Dream

I have a dream that schools, universities, businesses, and (especially) educated persons, inhabitants of large cities and small towns, in short, everyone, will return to the insights of Dr. Martin Luther King. 

We will all understand that the defining virtue or vice of people is the content of their characters. We will abandon affinity groups, victimology, resentment, grievance. We will recognize the political virtues of the Englightenment and of Western democracies. We will abandon the fantasy that "whiteness" exists or that it is an ideology of oppression. We will stop reading children propaganda like Antiracist Baby and Not My Idea. We'll read children a bunch of authors, and if we have a problem with what appears to be a prejudicial idea, we'll mention that to the kid as we read. If I ever have a grandchild, I'll read If I Ran the Zoo and Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, and say kid, do you know what a stereotype is? I'll read the kid Just So Stories and if somebody says Kipling was a racist or a colonizer I'll say yeah, sure, and how about Gunga Din--and how about reading it as Kipling "Doing The Work?" Which he was. Jump to the near present and think of Tony Hoagland, hounded when he was practically on his deathbed by Claudia Rankine, who insisted his lovely poem, "The Change" was racist. Which it isn't--he wrote her a very nice reply, but she would not admit that he was, again, "Doing the Work" and probably felt jealous because he's the wittier poet. 

We will practice gratitude. We're grateful for the gorgeous design of a Japanese kimono, a Bavarian dirndl, a sarape. And we'll wear those things because we love them, no matter what color our skin and no matter what our ethnicity. 

We'll say what we think, too. Just like I'm doing here. We won't say to friends or neighbors or co-workers, "I don't want to talk about race." We'll talk. Openly. Say just what we think of critical race theory and the 1619 Project. Oh, for a day when we all say what we think.

Books to be abandoned:

Anything by Ibram X Kendi

Anything by Robin Di Angelo

Anything by Rennie Edo-Lodge

Anything by Ijeoma Oluo

Books to be taken up and read with delight:

Woke Racism, by John McWhorter

Anything by Wilfred Reilly

Anything by Thomas Sowell

Anything by Douglas Murray, but especially The Madness of Crowds

 

 Podcasts to enjoy: 

Peter Boghossian: All things Reconsidered and "Street Epistemology" videos

Glenn Loury and John McWhorter: The Glenn Show

Heather Cox Richardson (plus, of course, her substack)

I have a dream!