The pretty young lady pictured above is a relatively obscure songwriter, now in her 30s, who recently put out a new album called “The Tortured Poets Department.” I’m sure she’s happy to get the boost in sales that a mention in this blog will get her.
In one of her songs, “Nostalgia,” she mentions that she would have liked to live in the 1830s “except for the racists...”
This, of course, has created consternation and “a backlash” from…uh, the racists.
In the article linked above, one complainer says that it shows “racial insensitivity” toward people in the 1830s to judge them when they really didn’t know better.
Okay, I’m not a Swiftie (though I do have two of the young lady’s albums on my iPhone), but I gotta step up to defend the poor girl against such idiocy. Indeed, that “backlash” is somewhat familiar to me as I have sometimes had these conversations with otherwise intelligent people who will say that I shouldn’t judge the horrible racial stereotypes in, say, H.P. Lovecraft because I didn’t live in his era. He was just doing what everyone else did in regards to their disdain of Black folks. Or Mexicans. Or Asians. Or Catholics. Or anyone who was not White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant.
The premise of this argument is that ethics are situational. If you lived in the 1830s, no one would comment on your use of the “n-word.” Indeed, it would be a term used by the most polite and aristocratic people to describe, you know, the inferiors.
I don’t buy it. Sure, if we were alive then and you used that word, you would be shocked if I told you that I didn’t like it and preferred you don’t use it.
Just as if I visited your plantation and told you that it was a moral depravity to keep hundreds of people as slaves, all of whom were “that color.”
Just as if a policeman was beating a poor black child in the streets and I tried to intervene, and you stopped me by saying “It’s only a n…”
Or maybe you’d tell me that it was ok for a German in 1940 Berlin to smash the windows of a Jewish business because, hey, all the Germans hated Jews back then. Why am I so culturally insensitive?
Yeah. I don’t know if I had lived back then if I would have had the racial sensitivity I have after living the last 67 years on this planet, but that would not make it right. No more than living in a country where cannibalism was legal would make eating your sister any more moral.
Racism is racism. We have grown sophisticated in our knowledge of its evils and offenses. It’s not a cultural thing. Racism is wrong, wrong-headed, and holds back every society that practices it.
I don’t pat myself on the back to think that I, of all people, would recognize the horror of racism had I lived in those other times. I literally don’t know. Except I don’t seem to accept things in our own culture which are, frankly, odious, like the glorification of ignorance or Justin Beeber. In fact, I was raised in a racist culture and found my way out by the time I was 10 years old after watching Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. So maybe I had some help.
As a Catholic, I don’t find myself nostalgic for the Inquisition or the Crusades. As a Veteran, I don’t long to be fighting the “Indian Wars.” As a lawyer, I don’t grumble that the law has been ruined ever since they let women practice.
You might be different. You’re entitled to your opinion even if it is disgusting and wrong.
If you want to live and believe like they did back in the 1830s, go ahead. Just give up your car, your indoor toilet, your cell phone. But you’d still be happy because at least you wouldn’t have to listen to the world’s biggest star call you out on your rasist assholery.
Mark Bruce, Writer 