via Black Star News by Ezrah Aharone
While Django Unchained is stirring controversy, Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln, has unchained the Legend of Lincoln to new mythic heights, without due challenge.
Just as organizations like the NAACP denounced conservative-revisionist textbooks in Texas in 2010, they should denounce liberal-bent historical accounts that either ignorantly or deliberately fail to concede that “Abraham Lincoln did the right thing for the wrong reasons.” Or as Lerone Bennett aptly conveyed in the title of his book, Lincoln was in effect – Forced Into Glory .
Nevertheless, the fictions of Lincoln enrich the commercial and moral value of Americana more than the facts of Lincoln. As Bennett writes, Lincoln “is a national industry involving hundreds of millions of dollars a year” and “the thousands of people who profit materially and the millions who profit psychologically and culturally are not going to stop.”
So what really happened with Lincoln and the Civil War?
Considering the racism that abounds today, it’s inconceivable that three million Whites would fight gung-ho and 600,000 would unselfishly die for a “Black cause” way-back 150 years ago. And if Lincoln factually wrote the Emancipation Proclamation to genuinely “free Africans” after 2½ centuries, its contents would seemingly be more etched into African-American minds.
But if you ask around, it would be a near-miracle to find anyone, Black academics and leaders included, who can even paraphrase any portion of it, much less clarify its contents. Isn’t that strange?
An unlikely but well-accredited vetting source of the Legend of Lincoln is President Obama himself, who as a senator in a 2005 Time piece remarked: “I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as ‘The Great Emancipator’… I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a ‘Military Document’ than a clarion call for justice. Scholars tell us too that Lincoln wasn’t immune from political considerations and that his temperament could be indecisive and morose.”
Neither due justice nor the ambiguousness of the real Lincoln can be condensed here, but his “racism” or “limited views on race” as Obama diplomatically cites, is evidenced in a 1858 speech when he candidly said he was not “in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races… and I just as much as any other man am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race.”…
Ezrah Aharone is an adjunct associate professor at Delaware State University, and author of two acclaimed political books: Sovereign Evolution: Manifest Destiny from Civil Rights to Sovereign Rights (2009) and Pawned Sovereignty: Sharpened Black Perspectives on Americanization, Africa, War and Reparations (2003)