Recycled Arguments

If you were old enough to watch Roots when it aired in 1977, what did you think of it? 

I was 17 and I loved it. I learned a lot. I was a kid from a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, where literally almost everyone was white. I also remember it was a shared cultural phenomenon across the country.

Well, it turns out there were at least a few white people who didn't appreciate the phenomenon, just as there were lots who didn't appreciate Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was alive. As evidence, historian Seth Cotlar yesterday posted a syndicated column written by a Dartmouth professor at the time, attacking the series for being anti-white:

He also put out a follow-up column with quotes from white people around the country who agreed with him, which Cotlar also included. 

The writer, Jeffrey Hart, was in the Dartmouth English department. He influenced right-wing "greats" like Dinesh D'Souza and Laura Ingraham with his brilliance. In 1980, the Dartmouth Review was founded in his living room, and he was the publication's adviser.

Hart's 2019 obituary (from a right-wing podcast site called Ricochet) describes how he would come to campus in a limousine, given to him by William F. Buckley, and park it so it took up two spaces. Of course, he helped edit National Review when he wasn't publishing in his field. 

He was a Catholic convert because, as the obituary says, "he had concluded ... that the Church’s claims were, simply, true." Well sure!

His Washington Post obituary describes Hart's changing political thinking, starting in the mid-2000s. "He was especially dismayed by the rightward drift of the GOP, steered by ... the 'pestiferous Bible-banging evangelicals, whom I regard as organized ignorance, a menace to public health, to science, to medicine, to serious Western religion, to intellect and indeed to sanity.'" 

I wonder if he ever changed his mind about Roots and the ideas he promulgated about it in the 1970s. It seems unlikely, because those ideas were central to his ideology of Western intellectual supremacy. He didn't see that anti-Blackness is at the core of the rightward drift of the Republican party.