My fellow blacks, please: Stop wasting time on statues and solve today's problems | Herman Cain

This is insane.

Atlanta’s Bishop Jerome Dukes was quoted widely in the media last week explaining why he thinks we should be spending time protesting statues of people from the Confederacy, and ultimately having them taken down.

He explains that some of our nation’s founders may have seemed like visionaries and trailblazers to some, but to African-Americans all that matters is that they owned hundreds of slaves.

Let’s talk about that.

I am an African-American. I hate the institution of slavery as much as Bishop Dukes does. But I have noticed something he seems to have missed. I am not a slave! And neither is he.

Slavery was an awful historical injustice, and it helped set in motion many of the problems the black community faces today. But it is not the problem we need to solve today. Those problems are poverty, illiteracy, drugs, crime and violence.

Tearing down statues doesn’t solve any of those problems, and solving those problems is what we need to be focused on.

It might create a problem, though. Tearing down statues that represent history is like pretending history didn’t happen. It did. And not everything that results from history is something you will like. We need to remember all of it, even (and perhaps especially) the parts that bother us because this is what we learn from.

Now we’re hearing that it’s not enough to tear down statues of Confederate soldiers, because having fought for the slave-owning Confederacy is not the only sin that needs to be erased from history. Now some want to tear down memorials to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson too, because they also owned slaves.

Tell you what: Why don’t you erase from history every reference to a person who had a serious character flaw? Do that and you’ll have very short history books. You’ll be able to get through a semester in a day or two. There’d be almost nothing you would be able to teach.

Or we could just tell the whole story. Yes, these men had an amazing vision and used it to create the greatest nation the world has ever seen. Yes, they gave us a political system that has protected freedom and prosperity like nothing we’ve ever seen.

Also, they were participants in an institution that was evil, if very common for wealthy men of their day. They might have been better men if they had rid the world of that institution, and they did not do that. But they did create the political system through which it would be eliminated less than a century later. That is not nothing.

So how do you regard them? As heroes or as villains? It’s the wrong question. The right question is how to ensure that people know the full story. Maybe one of the things we can learn from this is that history has offered us very few people who had no character flaws at all. I can think of only one, probably the same one you’re thinking of.

But flawed men and women have given us quite a world, and we should know as much about it as we can. Maybe the lessons they teach can even help us solve the problems we face today.

Or we can waste our time tearing down statues, which solves nothing, nor does it make history go away. It just makes us ignorant of it.

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My fellow blacks, please: Stop wasting time on statues and solve today's problems | Herman Cain