Conservatives, stop trying to cancel Rosa Parks | Opinion

Throughout the 2010s and culminating in 2020, conservatives rightly objected to the left's increasingly infantile ideas about race and sex. No, not every interaction can or should be viewed through the lens of racial oppression. No, men aren't and can't become women. No, looting and riots are not racial justice. And no, Pride Month should have no place in the nation's grade school classrooms.

The through line: Progress is not always good. Sometimes conventional wisdom is plenty wise.

Amen.

But today, increasingly mainstream voices on the right are overplaying this hand in ways that are every bit as untrue and immoral as anything the left has alleged. Take podcaster Matt Walsh, whose documentaries "What Is a Woman?" (2022) and "Am I Racist?" (2024) skewered the left's zeitgeist on gender ideology and racial grievance.

In his recent “Real History” series, Walsh leads the right down a dangerous and false path: denigrating and belittling the 1960s Civil Rights Vovement. His films collapse the 1960s' push for racial integration into the 2010s' hegemony of "antiracism," drawing no distinction between the truths of the former and the lies of the latter.

Walsh tells his audience that everything you've been taught about the Civil Rights Movement is a lie. He claims that the movement was not peaceful, and that its legal challenges to segregation – Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat, for instance – were staged rather than organic.

Podcast host Matt Walsh's sleights of hand

The sleights of hand in this argument are an exercise in obfuscation and irrelevance.

Yes, some who called themselves civil rights crusaders embraced violence. So did some who called themselves abolitionists in the 1850s and some who called themselves patriots in the 1770s. The justness of a cause exists, or doesn't, independent of the actions of those who claim to embrace it.

If taxation without representation was wrong in the colonial era, the Sons of Liberty's destruction of British property didn't make it right. Ditto slavery in the antebellum period: The violence perpetrated by John Brown and Nat Turner was abhorrent, but their claim to be enacting it on behalf of abolition didn't justify slavery.

And of course, ditto Southern segregation in the mid-20th century. Civil rights leaders called for nonviolence. The fact that some who embraced the same ends also embraced the immoral means of violence doesn't change the morality and justice of those ends. Similarly, the fact that Parks was a longtime activist who deliberately provoked her own arrest ‒ not merely a tired seamstress who needed to sit down ‒ has zero bearing on the fundamental injustice of segregated buses.

The most insidious part of Walsh's argument is what it concedes. By collapsing the 1960s into the 2010s, he implicitly accepts the left's own thesis: that the virtue-signaling crusade against popularly racialized police violence in the 2010s was of a piece with the virtuous campaign against real, racist police violence and segregation in the 1960s.

The academic and journalistic left has long wanted everyone to believe exactly that, because it lets them steal the valor of the Civil Rights Movement for today's oppression Olympics. They need some plausible basis for rejecting the plain fact that America is no longer an endemically racist country.

Otherwise, too many White, college-educated elites would forfeit the in-group currency of performed empathy for their non-White peers, and with it, the ability to ignore everyone else, of every race, while keeping their progressive credentials intact.

Now the reactionary right wants us to collapse "I Have a Dream" into "Black Lives Matter," too, so they can cast the flimsy patronization of “antiracism” backward. Why? Because they want race-based grievances of their own, borrowed from the left's morally bankrupt 2010s playbook, put to even more spurious ends.

Like the 2010s left, this segment of today's right is hurting its own alleged cause. What good does the already widely known fact that Parks was "an activist" do for a 20-something White guy struggling to get his life together? Does it give him a cause for faux-racial grievance, so he can feel it's somehow the late Rosa Parks' fault when he can't keep a job he failed to show up to on time in the first place?

Unless the resentment is the point, there doesn't seem to be much upside to Walsh's non-reveals.

What I'm teaching my son

This summer, I'm reading E.D. Hirsch's "What Your Preschooler Needs to Know" with my 5-year-old son. Its history section is hagiographic about Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr., among others. As it should be.

My son is multiracial, with maternal great-great-grandparents from Italy and Russia, and paternal grandparents from Liberia. I would read him the exact same book, the exact same way, with the exact same omissions about both Jefferson and King, regardless of his skin color or theirs.

One day, of course, he'll learn that both men were flawed. As he should.

But by then he'll be old enough to understand – and, God willing, morally formed enough to accept – that he is uniquely and rarely blessed to live in the United States of America, where no long-dead person's strengths or shortcomings can determine his own.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, politics and culture. Follow her on Substack.