Tom Cotton doesn’t cross my radar too much, but I couldn’t look away when Wonkette’s Stephen Robinson addressed his latest idiocy:

During an interview Friday, Cotton used his best words to explain his Nineteenth Century mustache-twirling villain position. He claimed that The 1619 Project is “racially divisive,” but he does concede that students should probably have to learn about slavery.

COTTON: We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.

Only a stone cold sociopath suggests that the suffering of others is “necessary” for their personal success. It’s not like America held annual lotteries to determine which children — Black or white — would endure a lifetime of bondage. This was a sacrifice only Black people made. We were never intended to enjoy America’s freedom and prosperity.

So that sparked a lot of thoughts, related to so much of what I’ve been thinking about with the last two months of #BLM protests, and this response:

Speaking very much as a white lady raised by well meaning bleeding heart liberals, I was quite insulated from the cruelties of the nation’s history, of its very founding on the backs of people in servitude and enslavement. But the civil rights movement erupted all over the national news in the 1960s, and there was no hiding from it, just an ability to soften it up, make it more palatable, and my folks, in their well meaning ways, did that. They backed the civil rights movement, but like a lot of white liberals, framed it for me as a lot of ignorant mean people being assholes to other people just because they didn’t like the color of their skin. Well, yes, Mom and Dad, but there was so much more…

So, starting in junior high and high school, I started learning about the crueler reality of racism, systemic and otherwise, and of the history of human bondage in our nation. I haven’t stopped learning, probably never will. But one of the distinct experiences for me was incredible anger at my parents, and later my schools, for not being honest with me about what had happened, and the systems still in place dividing POC from their rights and opportunities. I wished I had known. I wished I’d been aware.

And while I can hang my head at the crap white people have done to others, and to white people supporting Those Others, it doesn’t make me give up on the U.S. I think that’s what Cotton and these other yahoos think – that if we learn the real history, that suddenly we will lose the love we had for that worth cherishing in our world, or the principles of the Enlightenment enshrined in the Declaration and the Constitution (and yes, a lot of conservatives won’t willingly draw that connection).

They think so little of us. They can’t imagine we can hold the contradictions in our minds. And yes, for little kids, for teens, for anyone new to the contradictions, it can be overwhelming and enraging and ultimately so very, very sad. But we can do it, we can guide ourselves through it, and we can help our kids and our friends too.

John Lewis is a good guide these days. I’m sad he’s gone, but glad to see his words, his principles, and his life’s work celebrated for so many to experience.

https://disqus.com/home/discussion/wonkettecom/tom_cotton_says_founders_believed_slavery_was_necessary_evil_so_checkmate_1619_project/#comment-5007698370

And it seems to me this is part of the current difference (maybe much longer?) between progressives and a certain stripe of conservative, of whom Tom Cotton is very much a respresentative: Can we hold these contradictions in our minds as we consider the whole of what the United States is, has been, could be?

White progressives are trying, and it seems like POC have been doing this for a very long time. We learn a lot when we open our ears. The extreme and even middle of the conservative swath of our nation seem to have their fingers firmly implanted in theirs. It’s at the root of every plea of “but my ancestors didn’t own slaves” and “well, I’m not prejudiced but those people…” defense. They might have to recast their conception of our nation. They are terrified.

Grow up: own the bullshit, the cruelty, the patterns. Owning it doesn’t mean “I did that” (though if you did, maybe own up to that too). It means acknowledging what happened, and working to change it. It’s not that hard.

I think about this quote a lot these days too: