Khari’s Reviews > Black Rednecks and White Liberals > Status Update

"Where beliefs are not checked against facts, but instead facts must meet the test of consonance with the prevailing vision, we are in the process of sealing ourselves off from feedback from reality. Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.
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"The viability of these traditions is attested to by the mere fact that they are still here to be criticized, while the viability of alternative “constructions” has yet to be proved and they may be able to survive only in the minds of those who put them together. Notions and knowledge are different precisely because the former have not passed through the verification process, while the latter has."

"To be relevant to our times, history must not be controlled by our times. Its integrity as a record of the past is what allows us to draw lessons from it."

"Galling as it may be to be helpless to redress the crying injustices of the past, symbolic expiation in the present can only create new injustices among the living and new problems for the future, when newborn babies enter the world with pre-packaged grievances against other babies born the same day."

"While the lessons of history can be valuable, the twisting of history and the mining of the past for grievances can tear a society apart. Past grievances, real or imaginary, are equally irremediable in the present, for nothing that is done among living contemporaries can change in the slightest the sins and the sufferings of generations who took those sins and sufferings to the grave with them in centuries past."

"Wanting to line up on the side of such people may be a generous impulse, but it can also be a dangerous self-indulgence. Such moral partisanship is
unlikely to do much good to those unfortunate enough to be born without the social and cultural prerequisites for prosperity or freedom."

"Reaching conclusions after the fact is not the same as taking sides before the facts, even if those conclusions reflect credit or discredit on different individuals or groups to differing degrees. The historian is the agent of the reader. That is whose side is supposed to be served and it is a conflict of interest to set out to serve some other cause while pretending to be informing the reader."

"Peoples subjugated and oppressed by others have often been the objects of solicitude by intellectuals, as well as by political movements seeking their liberation. Yet, time and again, that liberation has been followed almost immediately by the liberated peoples oppressing the minorities now subject to their power."

"Among the many other distortions of history growing out of a posture of taking sides is casting particular groups or societies in the role of victims, while overlooking their victimization of others."

"Taking sides too easily degenerates into being morally one-up and imagining that we would have handled the problems of the past so much better than those who were there. Nothing is easier than creating higher standards for judging other people."