. . . Today's advocates of "woke" thinking want to condemn people like Abraham Lincoln, a man who opposed slavery in his time, ran for president on a platform that would halt its spread west beyond those states in which it was already firmly established, and who advocated for slavery's gradual end. Was Lincoln also a racist? In terms of modern American standards it would probably be fair to say he qualified. Yet he seems to have been not just an intelligent man but a fundamentally decent one whose sympathies were with the oppressed Africans who were enslaved in the American south. But he was not, by his own admission, arguing for political equality for freed slaves. He shared the prejudices of his time (though I think it's reasonable to say he would have been as woke as the next person in our own era if he had had the knowledge of human nature and of America's history since his death which we have).

So should Lincoln or Washington, or Jefferson or others who actually held slaves in their lifetimes, for that matter, whatever their writings and speeches promoted, be condemned as racists in our modern sense because they followed the practices of their own era? Who among us isn't influenced by the practices and beliefs contemporary with ourselves? Who doesn't formulate his or her judgments in terms of these? Should those men of our past, who were human beings with all the flaws humans possess, with all the imperfections, be judged by today's standards when they did not live in an environment that expressed or was governed by our standards? We all live in the times we live in but sometimes some of us see beyond our times, even if only imperfectly. . . .