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Quid De Cogitatione? Glenn Rose
Last week’s News-Gazette ran a 15x7 inch ad on page 2 titled “Sunshine and Lollipops At W&L - - The Kinney Letter.” It was a literary phantasmagoria criticizing everything that Washington and Lee University has done over the last several years to recognize and assuage the harm and pain of slavery and the ensuing years of racial segregation, prejudice, and injustice.
The author did not identify himself with more than his supposed initials and supposed graduation date, “JEL, III Class of 1974.”
Singled out for criticism were Mr. Kinney, University President William Dudley, and the Washington and Lee University board of trustees. The ideas and proponents of Critical Race Theory, D.E.I. (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), and Intersectionality (“the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination … combine, overlap, or intersect) are assailed with no explanation for, or proof of, any harm they do to the American discourse or to “JEL, III Class of 1974.”
I could try to rebut all the notions and objections this screed voices, but I am harassed with doubts of denting its implacable stand. It demonstratively ignores that racial prejudices and injuries still linger and offers no new or alternative ideas to those striving to ameliorate the divisions and injustices in our society.
I suppose the author believes that racial discrimination ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
I’m a Virginian and Southerner by birth and rearing. I know better than that just by the prejudices in my own family.
I remember my beloved maternal grandfather, who was born and raised in Clifton Forge, slapping his thigh in glee at the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.
I remember more recently my own father, who died almost 50 years later (!) in 2017, and the role his bigotry played in his own death.
He lived in the town of Vienna for the last sixty years of his life. Fairfax County was mostly rural when my stepmother and he bought the home he would spend the rest of his life in for around $45,000. It was in a housing development that in those days would not have allowed Black ownership.
(It sold at his death for $550,000. There are no Black heirs who would have enjoyed the legacy my brothers and I received.)
Dad lived there by himself after my stepmother died.
He was in good health when he hit his 90s, but as he became more frail and unsteady, I was worried about him being alone 2½ hours from Lexington.
He denied my efforts to get a system that would alert help if he fell or became disabled.
I finally prevailed upon him in late 2016 to let me get an agency to send in someone twice a week to clean, do the laundry, fix some meals, and most importantly, check on his vitality.
When that person first showed up at the door, he wouldn’t let her in.
She was Black. In February 2017 Dad, alone, fell. We don’t know how long before neighbors, seeing the front door open, discovered him on the floor.
Dad died within two weeks after I moved him to a care facility in Buena Vista.
But this is not about my father and his irrational prejudices.
One might argue that he’s taken that prejudice with him.
However, I wonder how many other people on his street harbor that same ill-conceived distrust of skin color.
How many still in now cosmopolitan Vienna?
How many still in our own commonwealth, the birthplace of so many of the minds that framed our freedom and country, in contradiction to their slaveholdings?
While some might argue that racial intolerance is waning, what of the personal wound that rejected helper must have felt at the door when her knock was ignored?
Perhaps she was in her sixties, a generation younger than my father.
Perhaps she was in her twenties out on her first job, maybe three generations younger!
My father may have replanted the injuries of racial prejudice yet another 70 years deeper into our healing.
I expect there are millions more who continue perpetrating that same grief.
Yet “JEL, Class of 1974,” offers no recognition of the pain suffered then or even acknowledges that yet endures. There is no empathy or concern for the struggle that African Americans have had in escaping the caste that enslavement put them in.
Just a jeremiad on the efforts to respect the rights of all Americans and level the playing field.
This “ad” bolsters its position quoting Booker T. Washington as saying, “Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
I wonder what “JEL, Class of 1974,” is guarding with all his grievances!
Ignoring the past won’t protect anyone’s future.
