Happy Birthday Abe, Charles, and Chris!

[UniBrier]

Had they lived to today, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin would have celebrated their 200th Birthdays today. It’s also my little sister’s birthday, but you don’t know her and she doesn’t lurke here, so we’ll just leave that one alone except to say she’s much younger than Abe or Chaz.

Also 150 years since Darwin wrote On The Origin Of Species. Who would have though that after all these years he’s best known for the Darwin Award, named after him.

[ThisGuyIKnow]

And Google chose to celebrate Darwin.

[UniBrier]

I just got this from the State of Florida on one of the e-mail lists I am on due to my professional licensing:

February 12, 2009

Dear Floridian:

Today is a day to reflect upon two of the most historic events in the timeline of our nation.

Two hundred years ago, Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States, was born in Hardin County, Kentucky. The bicentennial celebration of his birth is inspiring, for it reminds us not only of his achievements, but of his beginnings: on February 12, 1809, the man who would fundamentally change the direction and purpose of our nation was barely a day old.

One hundred years ago, in a small apartment in New York, a multiracial group of progressive thinkers came together with a vision of an America free from racial oppression. Although slavery had, at that time, been abolished for 40 years, segregation was standard and notions of equality were nonexistent. Out of that meeting, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born.

The remarkable achievements resulting from the anniversaries we celebrate today started small, and there were obstacles along the way. Abraham Lincoln lost a U.S. Senate race before he was elected President, and it was over fifty years after that first meeting in New York for African Americans to be granted civil rights. However, these milestones exemplify the progression of freedom that makes our country great.

Now, with President Obama serving as the first African American president in our nation’s history, there couldn’t be a more exciting time to recognize a legacy 200 years in the making. I hope today, and throughout this Black History Month, you take time to remember the visionaries and trailblazers who fought to make it possible.

Watcha think?

[Biggestbtc]

@ThisGuyIKnow

And Google chose to celebrate Darwin.

Google is liberal, if you haven’t noticed.

February 12 is a day to remember two individual people, whether or not their influence had been good or bad.

[harper]

…and Kempton, my next door neighbor as a kid.

[Biggestbtc]

Oh yeah, and him too.

[harper]

@Biggestbtc

Oh yeah, and him too.

Yeah. He’s really liberal AND it’s his birthday today. Why the confusion?

[Biggestbtc]

I don’t know him.

[SqueakyOnion]

Although progressive for his time, Lincoln was a racist who signed the Emancipation Proclamation in order to cripple the Southern economy, which was dependent on slavery…which is why the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free the Northern slaves. It also gave Lincoln a moral imperative to win the war in the eyes of many citizens, thus gaining him more support from both abolitionists and freed slaves, who would presumably (and did) join the war effort in one way or another, after being freed.

I don’t think it was about “freeing the slaves” as much as it was about winning the war.

Lincoln DID preserve the Union, which he can and should be commended for…but signing the EP was more of a political and strategic move, rather than a ideological one.

Although undoubtedly a big issue at the time, I do not believe the Civil War was fought over slavery. It was an issue, but certainly not the issue, as many textbooks would lead you to believe. But then again, the textbooks I’ve read were written by northerners.

[UniBrier]

@SqueakyOnion

Although progressive for his time…

Is it as simple as that?

I stumbled upon an online discussion at the Washington Post with Henry Louis Gates Jr, editor in chief of The Root. they were discussing this essay; here are some quotes from the essay:

…But the truth is that until very late in his presidency, Lincoln was deeply conflicted about whether to liberate the slaves, how to liberate the slaves and what to do with them once they had been liberated. Whereas abolition was a central aspect of Lincoln’s moral compass, racial equality was not. In fact, Lincoln wrestled with three distinct but sometimes overlapping discourses related to race: slavery, equality and colonization. Isolating these three—like the three strands of a braid of hair—helps us to understand how conflicted the man was about African Americans and their place in this country…

…Three days before he was shot, Lincoln stood on the second floor of the White House and made a speech to a crowd assembled outside celebrating the recent Union victory over the Confederacy. With his troops and Frederick Douglass very much in mind, Lincoln told the cheering crowd, which had demanded that he come to the window to address them, that he had decided to recommend that his 200,000 black troops and “the very intelligent Negroes” be given the right to vote.

Standing in the crowd was John Wilkes Booth. Hearing those words, Booth turned to a man next to him and said, “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God! I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.” Three days later, during the third act of Our American Cousin, Booth followed through with his promise.

It is important that we hear Lincoln’s words through the echo of the rhetoric of the modern civil rights movement, especially the “I Have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King Jr. It is easy to forget that when Lincoln made a public address, he was speaking primarily—certainly until his Second Inaugural Address—to all-white or predominantly white audiences, who most certainly were ambivalent about blacks and black rights, if not slavery. When Lincoln talked about wrestling with the better angels of our nature, he knew whereof he spoke: about his audience and, just as important, about himself.

It should not surprise us that Lincoln was no exception to his times; what is exceptional about Abraham Lincoln is that, perhaps because of temperament or because of the shape-shifting contingencies of command during an agonizingly costly war, he wrestled with his often contradictory feelings and ambivalences and vacillations about slavery, race and colonization, and did so quite publicly and often quite eloquently.

So, was Lincoln a racist? He certainly embraced anti-black attitudes and phobias in his early years and throughout his debates with Douglas in the 1858 Senate race (the seat that would become Barack Obama’s), which he lost. By the end of the Civil War, Lincoln was on an upward arc, perhaps heading toward becoming the man he has since been mythologized as being: the Great Emancipator, the man who freed—and loved—the slaves. But his journey was certainly not complete on the day that he died. Abraham Lincoln wrestled with race until the end. And, as Du Bois pointed out, his struggle ultimately made him a more interesting and noble man than the mythical hero we have come to revere.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is editor in chief of The Root. He is co-host of the PBS series Looking for Lincoln, which premieres Feb. 11 (check local listings for time). His book, Lincoln on Race and Slavery, is available now.

Read the essay and discussion. Watcha think?

[SqueakyOnion]

@ UniBrier

I read the whole article - twice.

I also read most of the commentary, which seemed to be some people calling each other racists, fakes, and vaguely debating affirmative action. Not sure of the relevance of this commentary, though, I didn’t read all of the comments.

So what I gathered from the essay was that the author believed that Lincoln “started out” rather racist, but in the end was less racist?

@essay

One important part for me was the paragraph:
“In the collective popular imagination, Abraham Lincoln—Father Abraham, the Great Emancipator—is often represented as an island of pure reason in a sea of mid-19th-century racist madness, a beacon of tolerance blessed with a cosmopolitan sensibility above or beyond race, a man whose attitudes about race and slavery transcended his time and place. These contemporary views of Lincoln, however, are largely naive and have almost always been ahistorical.”

and

@essay

“Lincoln’s myth is so capacious that each generation of Americans since his death in 1865 has been able to find its own image reflected in his mirror. Lincoln is America’s man for all seasons, and our man for all reasons.”

I guess this is what bothers me the most…the pedestal that Lincoln has been put up on.

@essay

“Whereas abolition was a central aspect of Lincoln’s moral compass, racial equality was not.”

Here, I question whether abolition was part of “Lincoln’s moral compass.” I guess I’m not sold on the idea that his abolitionist ideas were based on ideology or morality.

@essay

Interspersed among these three discourses is the manner in which Lincoln seems to have wrestled with his own use of the “N-word.”

I don’t buy this. I believe that in that day and age, the “N-word” was the same as you or I saying “black,” or “African American.” It was the correct term to use, and only decades later has its meaning evolved to become an offensive, racial slur.

@essay

Lincoln despised slavery as an institution, an economic institution that discriminated against white men who couldn’t afford to own slaves and, thus, could not profit from the advantage in the marketplace that slaves provided.

Moral justification for abolition on the basis of equality? This passage supports otherwise. In fact, it supports my assertion that a lack of slaves would severely hinder a region’s economy.

In today’s age, doesn’t it seem absurdly backward that Lincoln thought slavery was discrimination against white men?!

The author tries to reconcile this somewhat with the following passage:

@essay

having fundamental doubts about their innate intelligence and their capacity to fight nobly with guns against white men in the initial years of the Civil War.

Of course he had doubts about their ability to fight! The North was losing the war and needed more soldiers wherever they could get them! The author even asserts that here:

@essay

Lincoln quickly realized that the margin of difference between a Southern victory and a Northern victory would be black men.

The author began the article talking about Lincoln was a hero for ending slavery and whatnot. He then spend two pages talking about all the racist stuff he did. Then, the author tries to bring things full-circle with:

@essay

…he had decided to recommend that his 200,000 black troops and “the very intelligent Negroes” be given the right to vote.

I doing so, the author tries to end the essay with a positive spin on Lincoln…even though the quote itself is racist (the idea that only some black people are intelligent enough to vote?)

@UniBrier

Watcha think?

I think the author effectively described Lincoln’s attitudes about racism, but still tried to bookend everything with a positive spin. The last sentence of the essay says:

@essay

…his struggle ultimately made him a more interesting and noble man than the mythical hero we have come to revere.

So, his overt and blatant racism is somehow “interesting” and “noble?” My only conclusion is that the author is either himself racist, or clinging to an irrational and idealized Lincoln.

I’m not trying to assert that Lincoln was a bad man or that he didn’t do good things for the Union and, perhaps somewhat inadvertently, for the abolitionist movement. All I’m trying to say is that he isn’t the civil rights hero that he’s been painted up to be.