Retroactive racism and the BLM movement

I must admit that I have some ambivalence towards the current trend of calling out retroactive racism via BLM deconstructionism. Call it presentism when something is taken out of time and context and then critiqued with modern values and morés placed upon them.

By this reckoning we would need to throw out Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and John Hume, as well as a litany of literary greats. First, get rid of the artists. Playing right into Putin’s hands. When I was in the Soviet Union, I was horrified to see how whitewashed our literary legacy was. From Ginsburg to Levertov—even Robert Frost all of their work censored, gutted.

The article from LitHub on Flannery’s O’Connor was interesting, but the politicized aspect was heavy handed. A lot of preamble and assumptions were made. And it’s unfair to attack they dead for they cannot defend themselves. The work is its own merit, it stands alone whatever their politics of the times. Behind closed doors as it were. 

And I do love Flannery’s visceral work. She’s one of the most innovative and original writers of our time. I think in many of her stories she brings to light the underpinnings of social injustice—just by the sheer brutality of chronicling it. 

It is inherently, and patently clear that people critical of her work are unfamiliar with the milieu and context by which O’Connor wrote, in the politically incorrect colloquial dialect commonly used in the South during that time. If anything, she was deeply critical of an unjust society, especially Catholic hypocrisy. Read A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Wise Blood. It’s a grim, realistic portrait of the south. I suppose they will ban Faulkner next? First, kill all the artists. For they present an inconvenient truth.

In a reference to Nazi Germany, novelist George Orwell wrote, in his science fiction novel, 1984: Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. In an alarming trend to be "politically correct" replete with an Orwellian twist, we seem to be intent on whitewashing the past. Irony intended. 

Golda Meir said, “One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.” In a toxic move to be politically correct, it seems we’re doing just that. Erasing the past, or inconvenient truths, in order to feel good.

It is so difficult right now, people have completely gone off the deep end with the social justice warrior mode. They’ve even stripped the name Drake from my high school, now they want to change the name of the main road through Marin County. And it just goes on and on....