I Am Not a Saint, And You’re Not Either
We are doing people, and ourselves, a serious disservice when we elevate any one person to hero-worship level purity.
I saw a tweet on the 4th of July advocating for canceling Frederick Douglass because of how he treated his first wife, Anna Murray.
At the moment, I had nothing but instinctual outrage at the tweet. Now we’re trying to cancel Frederick Douglass? Frederick Douglass, the hero who fought slavery and changed the world?
If there was an example of cancel culture going too far, that was it for me. But then I caught myself — I realized that hero-worship is just as dangerous as cancel culture.
Here is a list of people we have commonly hero-worshipped: the Pope, George Washington, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, and in my case, Frederick Douglass.
It’s not like the tweet was wrong about the fact that Frederick Douglass was unfaithful to his first wife, but so what, I asked? It’s Frederick Douglass. The point is that yes, Anna Murray deserves much more attention in history for her efforts to help Frederick Douglass escape slavery and support him, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of turning the tide on Frederick Douglass.
