PUTTING A HAPPY FACE ON SLAVERY

I finally crossed paths with Michael Coard, a prominent Philadelphia lawyer and black activist. I listened to him for years on WHAT (which doesn't exist anymore), where he dispensed legal advice to all comers on a wide array of legal topics. For a lawyer, this is a sort of circus trick. It is not at all an easy thing to do, and there was never a time in my legal career when I could have done it. Yet he was able to impart something useful to every caller, and all of it was delivered in an utterly humorless and pedantic monotone that was so humorless and so pedantic and so monotonic that I couldn't help but be entertained by him.

Mr. Coard was one stop on a walking tour in the Independence Hall area of various sites relating to George Washington. His venue was the archeological lab that had been overwhelmed with artifacts from the excavations for the Constitution Center. In particular, he was interested in the slave quarters at the "First White House," where Washington had lived during his two terms as president.

And that, among all the history to be found in old Philadelphia, was the only thing that interested him. He made this point crystal clear to us several times in several different ways. As a child, he said, he had been brought to the area on school trips and had witnessed the excitement of his white classmates as they learned about the heroes of the American Revolution, but it had meant nothing to him. Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington---all of it was irrelevant to black people, he told us. He is the kind of speaker who will pick out a word and repeat it a number of times to ram it home for the listener. "Irrelevant" was the word he chose for us day-trippers. It was irrelevant to him as a child and it was irrelevant to him as an adult.

We got fifteen minutes of the humorless and pedantic monotone I had come to love on the radio, but it wasn't quite so entertaining this time, partly because there wasn't any history in it, and that's what we were there for. Instead, it was the tale of Mr. Coard organizing his Avenging The Ancestors Coalition and confronting the Park Service, and the negotiations over what would be done with the slave quarters at the house where Washington lived. And this was all that mattered to Mr. Coard, even now. Not even his close acquaintanceship with the historic buildings and monuments and historians and guides over the past few years, had changed his view that the birth of the nation, the drafting of the Declaration and the Constitution---all of it was "irrelevant" because it had been done by people whose skin color was different from his own. The people who swept Washington's floor and cooked his food were the only ones who mattered to him, because they were black slaves.

Now, we all know that slavery existed before 1776 and for the first eighty-five years of this country's existence. Fine. But what do we really need to know about Washington's cook in order to understand the inspiring and dangerous path of the founding fathers in building this country and creating the free society we have today? What possible significance does this have? There was probably a very nice German woman who made Beethoven an omelet every morning and sewed buttons on his shirts, but who cares? Does Michael Coard? And what about the guy who cut Einstein's grass?

All of us have met a Michael Coard, or someone like him, and I expect most people feel sorry for guys like this. I know I do. After all, not every little black boy on a school trip to Independence Hall feels the way he did. Most, I'm sure, get the same whiff of the heroism and love of freedom that I did when I went there as a kid. The message is an easy one for a kid to understand, isn't it? This is your country and this is how it started, in idealism and bravery and selfless devotion to a dream of human rights that no country had ever dreamed before.

So why did little Michael Coard find all this "irrelevant"? Well, somebody had to teach him to think that, didn't they? A parent? An uncle? Somebody had to sit him down when he was four or five or six and say, "Listen, Michael. You're black. You're screwed. They're all against you out there. They hate you. White people hate you because you're black, and they always will. You're a stranger here, in a land run by white people, and you're different, and they will NEVER let you succeed."

And look at the result. Michael Coard grew up in America, went to good schools, became a successful lawyer at an important Philly law firm, hosts a radio show, and is welcomed at the table when the movers and shakers in this town get together. Among the planet's inhabitants, he is firmly situated in the top 1% of humans in terms of wealth, power, and education. Yet his skin color remains the only prism through which he can view the world. Despite the evidence all around him, despite the evidence of his own life, he is convinced there is something grievously wrong with the fundamental structure of American society. And there is nothing that could happen at this point to change his perspective.

In the recent presidential campaign, commenting on her husband's success, Michelle Obama said, "For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country." Mrs. Obama is 45 years old, which means her adult life began around 1982, and there was nothing for her to be proud of for those 26 years between 1982 and 2008. Nothing, until a black man (her husband), ran for president.

Well, let's see. American entrepreneurs built an unimagined new world of information, computing and technology. No, nothing to be proud of there. Life-saving drugs and medical procedures developed in American labs? Guess not. Well, how about the fall of the Soviet Union, the most vicious and efficient killing machine in the history of civilization? We had something to do with that, didn't we? Still, I guess it's nothing you can really be proud of. Billions to fight disease in Africa? Rescuing the world's victims from earthquakes and tsunamis? Welcoming refugees from around the world? Freeing 100 million people from the sadistic rule of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein? Oops, sorry---I guess that's something we're really not proud of.

Which explains why this Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer, who has had a succession of high-profile legal jobs and whose husband was about to be elected president, believed there is something grievously wrong with the fundamental structure of American society.

I believe it was 1989 when Ricky Henderson reported to Spring training with the Yankees, where he was scheduled to play the season for $2 million. He was not happy about it. It was the last year of a multi-year contract he had signed with New York, and with baseball money exploding over the previous few years, he felt he was "underpaid" because lesser lights would be getting more money than he was, at least for the 1989 season. But he had signed his contract when $2 million had sounded like a lot of money, and he was stuck with it. And he was pissed. And he let everybody know it.

Now, there are always plenty of people who will tell you athletes are paid too much money. "Millions to play a kids' game!" they cry. We could use all that money to cure cancer or rebuild the levees in New Orleans or fight cyber-bullying, or something.

I'm not those people. I'm more of a free market guy. In fact, I think the people who say that sort of thing are communists, whether they know it or not. So I don't begrudge athletes for making $2 million or $20 million or $200 million. On the other hand, if you are making $2 million to play baseball for the New York Yankees, there is a simple rule I apply to your behavior: DON'T BITCH ABOUT IT!

Which pretty much summarizes my feelings about both Michael Coard and Michelle Obama. God bless them, I say, for their elite educational opportunities and what they have made of them. They worked for their wealth and power and celebrity, and I want them to enjoy it. It's good for everybody in America that such success is possible; let's never forget there are people in other parts of the world who are screwed from the get-go no matter what they do. Eat at the best restaurants, guys. Vacation in the Caribbean. And don't skimp on the grooming products. Just don't bitch about it.

Please note---I'm not asking anyone to put a flag pin on his lapel. I'm not suggesting Michael Coard should attend 4th of July celebrations and put his hand on his heart when they play the Star-Spangled Banner. All I am saying is that if you are Michael Coard or Michelle Obama (or any number of other people), and you cannot see that the lofty perch you enjoy in life is at least partly attributable to the circumstances of your birth and the values of the nation you live in, there is a fundamental flaw in your character. If, in a public forum, you are unable to refrain from expressing contempt for the American experiment, then you need to step back and think about your life for a minute or two. Admittedly, there was a form of child abuse at work here, by the elders who told little Michael and little Michelle their lives were hopeless, but that cannot absolve them of all responsibility for their attitudes. People recover from child abuse, and whether they can or not, they should try. Others certainly have been exposed to the same mantra of victimhood and have managed to reject it.

Slavery was not the major focus of our history walk, but it was a focus. It came up several times, and always with the semi-apologetic undergirding that seems to represent the politically-correct default position for white folks on the issue of slavery. The founding fathers were all profoundly evil, of course, and they're probably burning in hell, and we are all tainted with their immutable sins, but.... And then the guide will mention, in a hushed tone, that Washington freed his slaves upon his death, or that Robert Morris only traded slaves for a short time, or that some laws made freeing slaves a criminal offense. Not that anything can excuse the perfidy of our forebears, of course, but we're historians here, you see, so we're allowed to provide a thing us historians call "context," so long as we only whisper it. Because if we say it any louder, you see, it might hurt the feelings of the "victims."

I can't think of any other area where this judge-the-past-by-the-present standard of historical thinking is applied. Typically, when we view the progress of civilization, we see just that: progress. Let’s take a simple example. According to Black's Law Dictionary, the punishment for poison-murder in 13th-Century England was boiling. Couldn't have been that pleasant for the poor bastards, but we don't do that anymore, and I say good for us. I'm happy about it. Let’s slap a happy face on the way we deal with murderers who poison their victims. We’ve come a long way from boiling. Now we put them in prison and give them cable TV. Good for us!

I feel the same way about the oppression of women. Let the little darlings vote, I say, and drink in bars and own property and have jobs and drive cars. What the hell? It's progress! Let's slap a happy face on the whole "women as chattel" thing. We don't do that anymore. We don't kill defective infants either! More progress. More happy faces! We all feel good that civilization (at least Western civilization) has moved on from practices that today seem barbaric. None of us rend our garments and howl with grief over the brutish world inhabited by our ancestors because we don’t live in that world. We don’t work sixteen hours a day just to get enough food to make it to the next day. Instead, we work four hours a day, often on the internet, then go to the gym, then wash down our linguini and fava beans with a nice chianti. The knowledge that our past was so ugly is a source of happiness. Isn't it wonderful we don't live like that?

Well, I want to put a happy face on slavery too. Why not? After all, America did not invent slavery, which has existed in every culture, among every race and every ethnic group, since the beginning of time. What America invented, along with other Western liberal democracies, was the idea that slavery should be abolished. Good for us. Boiling murderers? A thing of the past. Oppression of women? Oh, that is so early 20th Century. And slavery? Well, it's over, you see. It still exists in plenty of nasty hellholes around the world, but we've moved on. We put a happy face on it 150 years ago.

This is the approach we take regarding every other artifact of the muck we crawled out of, so why not be proud of the history of slavery in America as well? After all, the only purpose of the apologetic political correctness around the issue is to placate the Michael Coards of the world, AND THEY CANNOT BE PLACATED. Mr. Coard et al. don't care about slavery anyway, only about their personal, imagined, seven-generations-removed victimization by it. If they had any real interest in slavery itself, there are tens of millions of slaves, in a hundred countries THAT ARE NOT AMERICA, who might benefit from their concern. But today’s slaves don't seem to interest folks like Mr. Coard or Mrs. Obama. Nor does it interest the Congressional Black Caucus, for that matter, or President Obama. For the left, real slavery is purely a t-shirt/bumper-sticker/website cause, like the Free Tibet movement.

Copyright2010MichaelKubacki