(Todd A. Smith)
Hypocrisy runs deep in some segments of the American population.
When many Black people, and their allies, tried to remove Confederate statues and other Confederate imagery, some people in White American protested claiming that Black people were trying to erase history.
To many who love what the Confederacy stood for, such as treason and slavery, taking down monuments of people who almost destroyed the United States of America meant taking down a huge part of American history.
To many, American history needed preservation and not elimination, no matter how painful and bitter that history might make others feel.
Many Confederacy fans did not care if Black people saw the enslavement of their ancestors when they passed a Confederate statue or a school, town, county or parish named after a general who fought to keep Black people in bondage.
To some, Black people’s feelings did not matter even if those Black people ended up on the right side of history and their Confederate idols ended up on the wrong side of the history books.
Although many Confederate monuments have since been removed, I have often wondered over the last year if the same people who wanted to keep Confederate imagery and monuments because they wanted to preserve American history are the same people who want to eliminate the same time frame in American history from the classroom because it might make White students feel ashamed or guilty.
Where were some of these people when Black people spoke about how Confederate statues and schools named after Confederate generals made them feel?
Are the feelings of one group more important than the feelings of the other group?
Now, I do not know if some of the people fighting to remove critical race theory (CRT), better known as American history, out of the classrooms are some of the same people that fought to preserve Confederate images.
However, they sure do look like some of the same group of people.
Both groups look like the Fox News, Breitbart, OAN and Newsmax crowd.
If my assessment is valid, then that crowd must be the most hypocritical group of people ever to live in this great country.
If some White people are unhappy and offended, then America should remove what makes them uncomfortable, even if that means whitewashing American history.
But if some Black people are unhappy and unoffended, then they just need to stop playing the race card and get over it.
After all, America is the Newsmax crowd’s country, right?
And anyone that does not like it should just go back to their sh*thole country to paraphrase former President Donald Trump.
Additionally, isn’t the Fox News crowd often the group of people that is so adamant about ending cancel culture?
That Breitbart bunch is often the same group that is against woke culture and anyone that is against free speech.
If that’s the case, why are some people from that same group trying to cancel so many books from school libraries because they deal with the realities of racism, sexism, religious intolerance and homophobia.
It seems that the aforementioned group is against cancel culture when something they like gets canceled.
However, that same group will proudly cancel things that they do not like or something that does not fit their bigoted narrative.
That is hypocrisy at its best, or should I say worse?
The reason that I’m calling out one side of the political and racial spectrum for hypocrisy is that I do not see any hypocrisy in Black people trying to remove Confederate monuments because I do not recall any of those people trying to remove the Confederacy from the actual history books that children learn from.
Those people just wanted to remove the monuments and remove names from buildings, etc.
The difference is honoring people with statues and buildings should be reserved for heroes that ended up on the right side of history, not people who have been deemed evil by history.
No one wants to remove Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis from the history books.
In fact, no one should be removed from the history books because how else will we learn from our mistakes?
But a parish in Louisiana should not be named after Davis.
Predominantly Black schools or streets in predominantly Black neighborhoods should not be named for people who chose violence just to make sure that Black people stayed enslaved.
However, those people who falsely believe that the law school elective course Critical Race Theory is being taught to their elementary school-aged son or daughter, want to totally rewrite history and omit everything that American was built on, just so that some White children can get a sugarcoated view of American history.
That attempt will only make it more likely that the children of the future will make the same mistakes that the children of yesterday made when it comes to race just so some White students can feel comfortable while at school.
The problem with comfort is that is often leads to stagnation and no growth.
When God wants people to grow, He often makes them uncomfortable because people sometimes do not move when they are comfortable with the status quo.
If God wants you to move to a bigger and better job, often He will make you unhappy on your current job so that you will think about moving on.
God wants America to grow when it comes to race relations.
But growth as it pertains to race relations requires being uncomfortable for a brief moment in time.
Unfortunately, America cannot seem to grow because of the hypocrisy of a certain segment of the population that cares about their comfort and not the comfort of their brethren of different races.
