Gongol.com Archives: February 2025
February 8, 2025
Just half a decade before his death, Booker T. Washington wrote a set of memoirs which included this assertion: "Experience has taught me, in fact, that no man should be pitied because, every day in his life, he faces a hard, stubborn problem, but rather that it is the man who has no problems to solve, no hardships to face, who is to be pitied." ■ If the idea of Black History Month is to have any meaning, it ought to be in exposing Americans to more encounters with historical artifacts that been under-appreciated or under-exposed -- foremost among them, primary source materials written by authors like Washington. Invariably, that leads to uncomfortable tensions: After all, one of Washington's own "hard, stubborn problems" was that he suffered enslavement at the hands of another human being. The very idea is so offensive that it's natural to be turned away from wanting to consider such an awful institution or any of its consequences any further. ■ But if the reader looks away or retreats to a categorical way of thinking, they risk denying something enormously valuable to the author: His agency. Washington published "My Larger Education" in 1911, just shy of half a century after the Emancipation Proclamation and 46 years after the 13th Amendment. He had every reason to expect that any intelligent reader then would share the same categorical rejection of slavery as a reader would today. ■ Yet he still shared those words intentionally: He pitied people like those enslavers who enjoyed a life of nothing but ease, not because he wished enslavement on anyone, but because he knew that choices make a life just as much as circumstances. ■ Even if it makes us uncomfortable, and even if it makes us want to object categorically ("Nobody should have to face the circumstances he did!" is a perfectly normal reaction), it's important for modern ears to hear a reflection like Booker T. Washington's and appreciate the enormous strength of his character. To receive and repeat his words isn't to validate the conditions of slavery, it is to celebrate the triumph of human character over evil circumstances and sinister institutions. ■ This is a real person, speaking to us from beyond the grave, asserting the right to look down with pity upon people who undoubtedly thought themselves to be his superiors in life. That's an assertion of moral standing; one which says that his human life was fully valuable, no matter what others did, and that we should see equal value in all human lives in our own time.
