Peter Samuel’s letter to the editor in the Frederick News-Post hits the right points: it’s not wrong to memorialize founders and framers whose historical notability lies in their works of positive benefit to the nation, and that goes for Frederick’s Gov. Thomas Johnson as well as for figures like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. In a Twitter thread, I get into some of my disagreements with the original front-page FNP piece by reporter Wyatt Massey.
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Wyatt Massey in that awful piece in the Frederick News-Post attacks ‘whites’ referring to ‘white ignorance,’ white ‘moral timidness’ and white ‘hesitance’ to talk about slavery. He reasons from an outrageous assumption that people who happen to be ‘white’ now in 2019 bear some responsibility as ‘whites’ for evils done by other ‘whites’ 200 or so years ago. In other words, everyone in a racial group bears responsibility for the sins of other members of that racial group, past and present. Collective racial responsibility. Right there is a foul notion that is racist through and through.