Photo By the New York Public Library
After reading in today’s press that M. Elizabeth Magill was elected as President of Penn, I checked out some of her thinking when she was Dean at Stanford Law School. I read some of her personal views when she was interviewed at Stanford.
I think that she should run for President of the United States based on this interview which is at the end of this blog.
She goes to the heart of our current partisan politics of division. She talks about the importance of agreeing on the facts of any matter and quotes John Adams wonderful phrase that “facts are stubborn things.” Ever since one of Trump’s spokespeople reflected that there are “alternative facts,” we have been in a downhill ethical slide that led to the Big Lie and others who are passionately in the pursuit of truth.
Facts are of paramount importance when trying to heal our divisions. We have become people of the spin where honesty is relegated to the sidelines. Facts are harder to make themselves known when perceptions of events become the facts.
I was raised on that detective show, Dragnet, where there was a spoken line in every episode. The episodes would begin with a voiceover that the names of the people in the episode were changed to protect them. The lead role was Detective Joe Friday whose investigations would always include, “I want the facts, just the facts.” There are many in Congress including most recently, Kevin McCarthy, who are not interested in facts. Spin and perception is the language that they choose to use. I love the way that the words of such as Jim Jordan come back to haunt him, for he pontificated that “only people who have something to hide won’t testify” when referring to Hilary Clinton who was interviewed for 12 hours regarding the Benghazi Affair.
There is another way that perception is hurting Joe Biden. He and his Attorney General may be working hard on the wrong doings of the past president, but the nation is perceiving that nothing is being done. “He committed crimes out in the open. What more do you need?” is the statement moving through our nation. Perception matters no matter how right you are investigating a crime. Perception always comes to equal reality. There is a science, Phenomenology, which is devoted to making this point.
I have already mentioned in blogs that the best example of division comes from a different understanding of facts. I listened to the history of Palestine from a spokesperson one evening
when studying at St. George’s College in Jerusalem. The next night we had a spokesperson from the Israeli perspective. It was like watching two very different movies. Nations that do not have a clear understanding of facts will be divided forever. They keep this difference of understanding truth and reality at their own peril.
I am taking a course in “Race” that I am finding to be a terrific experience as I am learning so much from it. But something dawned on me after doing the readings in preparation for the last class. What’s in a name? Maybe everything. Critical Race Theory has been misnamed as it is attacked across our nation in many school districts. The word “theory” implies interpretation of facts. To some extent you can disprove theory. You can’t debate the facts as they are “stubborn things.” It should be named Critical Race Facts.
This is the important weekend when we remember the facts of the essential work for justice that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King did. I wonder how things will work out across our nation as various states have attempted to muzzle the real case for the rights that were lost to racism and how these same threats to justice still exist today. Dr. King would be making a passionate plea against banning books that tell the real story of our racial history and the key concepts of institutional racism as revealed in the FACTS of Critical Race Theory.
As John Adams said at the age of 34 when defending British soldiers and their captain, “Facts are stubborn things and whatever our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our Passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” We do so at our own peril. Who knew that John Adams was an ethicist in search of truth and justice along with being a political force.
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