I am not now, nor have I ever been, black, female, gay, or Jewish. That, in my opinion, disqualifies me from defining racism, misogyny, homophobia, or anti-Semitism. I can recognize any of these, especially in their more obnoxious forms, but if a member of one of these groups tells me that they are threatened or offended by something that seems harmless enough to me, I listen.

Which makes the subject of this blog especially difficult.

It bothers me that we have been redefining people who lived in historical times not by the balance of their lives, but by a single characteristic, and that characteristic changes according to who is doing the redefining.  There was a time when we could accept that sometimes people who did, by current standards, bad things could also accomplish good things.

For instance, several of my musical heroes were known to be rude and sometimes cruel people. However, I still enjoyed their music, even if I wouldn’t have wanted my sister, if I’d had one, to date them.

I could still recognize the brilliance of Henry Ford, even though I didn’t either agree with or approve his anti-Semitism.

And I still loved my grandfather who, by anybody’s definition, was a racist. The fact was that he held the beliefs that he’d grown up with, beliefs that were sometimes at odds with his character. Just as he could get upset with me for having a black singer in one of my bands, he could close down his business to try to help a black single mother and her family. Granddaddy was a complex man, just as the world is a complex place.

What brings these ramblings on is the current debate about whether we should remember anyone as honorable men if they owned slaves. This group includes a substantial number of our founding fathers, including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison (just to name a few who were elected president). There are people who think that owning slaves is a factor that overrides all other factors in how we judge people who lived in an entirely different time.

I believe this is dangerous.

I don’t think Confederate memorials, obelisks, statues, or monuments have any place on public property (any more than I think that memorials to the British should be on public property); but I also don’t think that everyone who fought for the Confederacy was a bad person, or even everyone who owned slaves was unmitigated evil. They lived in a time when a bad, but socially accepted institution was prevalent, and they did not fight against it.

But we judge them by today’s standards.

Consider where this type of thinking will carry us. Abraham, for instance, not only owned slaves, but sexually harassed one and made her pregnant. By today’s standards, his position of power would have made any contact with Hagar not only improper, but illegal. Similarly, the Lord commanded Joshua to take slaves. And keep in mind, the Jews were coming out of Egypt where they had been slaves. It's complicated.

None of the above is a rationalization for slavery. We know now that the ownership (or even the desire for ownership) of one person by another is reprehensible. But we also know that it took a lot of history for us to get to this point.

Here’s a more recent example of what judging one era’s actions by another era’s standards can do for you.

In 1947 there were a number of people who were judged for their thoughts and actions in a different period. Most of these people had spent their time on the side of the angels. They were opposed to racism, to the exploitation of workers, pretty much to anybody taking advantage of those less powerful. They were brought before the House Unamerican Activities committee and when they refused to answer questions because they considered them unconstitutional, they were found in contempt of Congress, fined and sentenced to prison.

They were accused of being Communists or communist sympathizers during the 1930s, and many of them were. But they were never accused of treason or attempting to overthrow the government. In fact, they were not accused of having anything less than a patriotic attitude. But they admired what the communists were attempting to do in Russia. When it was pointed out that Russia was an American ally and that most of the country admired what Russia was doing in draining German military resources away from the European front, these people were accused of admiring them prematurely. They became known as the Hollywood 10.

They had been convicted of having opinions that later became unpopular.

Some of the Hollywood 10 never got over the blacklist, some went underground and wrote award-winning screenplays without credit, and some were able to live through the mess. And one of the more delicious ironies of history is that the chairman of the committee, J. Parnell Thomas, was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 18 months in prison, longer than any of the Hollywood 10.

I’m not equating the black list with hundreds of years of slavery. But I am contending that people live in the context of their times, and while we may dislike or even despise some of that context, we shouldn’t reduce all history to a single part of it. Life—then and now—is much more complicated than that.

Which brings me down to the argument that made me start thinking about this: was Robert E. Lee an honorable man? There have been a lot of opinions tossed back and forth. Here’s mine:

In leading an army against the United States, he did, in my opinion, a dishonorable thing. It was, by definition, treasonous (as we look on it with 150 years of hindsight). But he was faced with an agonizing decision and made it. The same could be said for all the soldiers that fought under him (although most of them did not own slaves). Lee and all who followed him could have been imprisoned or shot, but Grant and Lincoln thought that the objectives of the war—to reunite the country—were better served by sending these men back home. And, so far as Lee is concerned, he had a life both before and after the Civil War, and in the years before he was an honored United States soldier and, in the years after, a college president.  I think, like most of us, Lee was a mixed bag, both good and bad, and while I can’t imagine why we’d put a statue of him in a Confederate uniform on public property, I also can’t imagine why we should try to erase his name from all the things he did before and after the war.

If any member of any offended group disagrees with me, please reread paragraph 1.