William Rockhill Nelson, Racist
The progressive mindset has long since taken an adversarial posture to society…
In fact, the surest way to establish one’s street cred with other members of the liberal/left is to attack the very legitimacy of our country’s traditions and institutions.
This started well over 100 years ago, with the publication in 1913 of Charles Beard’s “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.”
According to Professor Beard, our constitution was the result of a secret plan by a well born elite to protect its power and wealth, particularly the wealth embodied in chattel slavery.
Like most leftist critiques, its value was that it discredited the very founding of the country. The American project was immoral “ab initio,” i.e. it was illegitimate from the first act. More recently, this argument has been expanded to include not just the founders, but the discoverer of America.
For at least 30 years, history textbooks have depicted Christopher Columbus as a genocidal monster. Is it any wonder that the local newspaper reported the vandalizing of his statue in various cities across the country?
Two months ago the Kansas City Star ran an opinion piece by freelance option columnist Steve Kraske reflecting an application of this mentality to local history.
Kraske’s June 16th piece demonstrated that the national mania for erasing the historical monuments to people who do not meet current standards of political correctness had reached Kansas City (“Everything’s up to date . . . etc.”)
Kraske argued that the J.C. Nichols Fountain on the Country Club Plaza should be renamed. He reasoned that the eponymous Jesse Clyde Nichols showed himself as a vicious racist by using racially restrictive covenants in deeds conveying ownership of homes in J.C. Nichols Company developments.
While Kraske conceded that most other developers at the time used similar exclusionary language, he said Nichols’ use was particularly effective and he should bear a large share of the blame for the resulting racial segregation in Kansas City.
This of course justified taking Nichol’s name off one if our city’s most iconic landmarks. (Which Nichols paid for, by the way!)
There are so many arguments against this position it’s hard to know where to begin. Consider the following item from the Star in 1913.
First of all, it’s not fair to judge people who lived 100 years ago by whether their attitudes and practices are now deemed acceptable by 21st century standards. Secondly, Kansas City had existed as a segregated city for 50 years before J.C. Nichols went into business as a builder. It has continued as a segregated city for 67 years after his death in 1950.
Clearly, some larger social forces were at work, larger than the influence of any single Kansas City businessman, no matter how powerful he was during his lifetime.
Thirdly, the covenants like those barring home buyers in Nichols’s developments from reselling to certain minorities were held to be unconstitutional in 1948 by the U.S. Supreme Court. Persistent residential segregation must have some other cause then the use of such covenants if it is still so prevalent almost 70 years later.
Mike Hendricks, Coward
What makes Kraske’s position on this issue particularly offensive is its breathtaking hypocrisy.
The Star’s own record on coverage of the African-American community was one of condescension at best. More typically it was one of derision and contempt for much of the newspaper’s history.
Consider the words of Henry Schott, a senior editor of the Star. In 1904, he gave an interview in which he happily described how the slums which had formerly surrounded downtown had been cleared and its inhabitants forced to relocate.
“Only yesterday the corridor between Independence Avenue and 12th Street had been ‘covered largely with cabins occupied by Negroes!’Now, Schott gushed, ‘the shacks had given way to fountains and gardens. . . . The pickannanies have disappeared with their homes and apartment houses of the best type have come to the Paseo.”
Boss Busters & Sin Hounds, Kansas City and its Star, by Henry Haskell, University of Missouri Press (2007).
During that same era, Haskell’s authorized history of the Star describes how the newspaper had campaigned against the traction (i.e. street railroad) monopoly’s bid to get a long term franchise on all trolleys in Kansas City. In a battle between “reformers”, led by the Star, and the trolley interests, he said the Star published;” a series of blatantly racist stories accusing the Corrigan interests of crudely attempting to buy the black vote.” Ibid, p. 148
Nor was this naked racial prejudice confined to rank and file Star employees.
In fact, it was a top down attitude coming from our own bush league Citizen Kane, William Rockhill Nelson. Nelson shared with J.C. Nichols, his protégé, an approach to city planning which aimed at segregating Kansas City by race and class.
According to Haskell, in what is otherwise a very positive depiction of the newspaper; “(s)egregation of races, like segregation of economic classes, was both a fact of life and an essential means of defusing ‘sectarian conflict”, in the eyes of “Nelson, Nichols and many other civil leaders.”
Far from being a critic of J.C. Nichols and his reactionary ways, Nelson as the Star’s proprietor was the young developer’s mentor and ally. The two worked in tandem to develop the Rockhill neighborhood around Nelson’s Oak Hall estate. Together they pushed for a parks and boulevard system which, Haskell conceded, had “the tendency to ghettoize African-Americans on the city’s east side.”
So close was this dynamic duo that the Star’s publisher named the real estate developer to be one of just three trustees for his Nelson Trust, charged with deciding what would happen to the Kansas City Star after his death. (One of J.C.’s fellow trustees was William Volker, a Scrooge-type employer like Nelson, known for using a stop watch to time his factory workers’ performing their jobs, in order to force production line speed-ups.)
Steve Kraske, Hypocrite
I’m waiting for Kraske to call for the renaming of Volker Park.
Ultimately, Nichols and his fellow trustees sold the paper to a buyout group of Star executives. However, the Star’s problematic attitude towards racial issues continued long after W.R. Nelson’s death.
In 1928, when the Republican National Convention was held here, for example, the Star celebrated that occasion like any other Chamber of Commerce civic booster. Its writers conveniently overlooked the fact that black delegates to the convention had to make arrangements to stay in private homes because the hotels here wouldn’t have them.
Throughout my own youth-well into the 1960’s-the Star ran classified ads based on race, e.g. “Help wanted-men-colored.” This mirrored the paper’s own Jim Crow labor practices, with black workers relegated to manual labor while management positions were reserved for whites.
And as recently as 15 years ago, Star columnist Mike Hendricks was making not-so-sly racial innuendoes in his column.
He suggested that Mission Hills needed to install basketball courts in one of its city parks. He knew full well that this was short hand for attracting numbers of young African-American men to an otherwise white neighborhood.
This was a controversy at that time because that very thing had just happened in Prairie Village. When I encountered Hendricks at a public event soon afterward, I asked him when we could expect to see him picnicking with his family at that local park in my fair city. He became very embarrassed.
J.C. Nichols, Accused
It’s easy to taunt people in print, not so easy to face them in person.
The opinion piece by Kraske is a contemporary version of the ancient practice of “damnatio memoriae,” a Latin phrase meaning that a person’s memory must be erased, so heinous were their crimes.
In an op-ed piece from 2011 in the New York Times, the author, a lecturer at the University of North Carolina (one of the epicenters of the current controversy) discussed this custom. In describing the campaign in Egypt at the time to remove all traces of the reign of the just fallen dictator Hosni Mubarak, Sarah Bond said the following:
“Perhaps it is best that the people of Egypt be spared this forced amnesia and be allowed to retain some memories of their former president.
Erasing the crimes of the past doesn’t help us avoid them in the future.
Instead of establishing a clear precedent, it may well serve to perpetuate the misdeeds of the past.”
Kraske’s call for erasing such an important chapter in Kansas City’s history is equally misplaced.
Especially given his employer’s own sketchy history of patronizing the black community here, Kraske lacks the moral standing to attack anyone else for racism. In fact, if he followed the logic of his own argument the Nelson Gallery would have to be renamed and all traces of William Rockhill Nelson’s heritage obliterated, starting with the long overdue euthanasia (“the act of killing the hopelessly sick for reasons of mercy”) of the Kansas City Star.
everybody is offended or victimized by someone/something these days. We’ve turned into a nation of self-important pussies.
The other day I was reading a blog, and the author (a perfectly healthy liberal) was offended because the NYT crossword puzzle used the term “wheelchair bound”. Apparently, wheelchair bound people now find that term offensive.
If the current environment persists, in 100 years they’ll only build statues of deaf mutes, because everyone else will have offended someone at sometime or another.
+1
Brilliant.
Glad someone corrected the spelling. Dwight’s piece was good but it wasn’t Brillaint.
Excellent illustration of how selective the Star’s rose-tinted glasses tend to be, Dwight
I always found it both amusing at times and disturbing how the writers at the Star tend to march so closely in lock step.
When it comes to both politics and societal attitudes there really is painfully little diversity at 18th and Grand.
I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on it, but it seems to be a case where people of a certain socio-economic background with somewhat naive political and moral outlooks are drawn to the mostly low-paying field of print journalism.
Oh they mean well, don’t get me wrong.
The trouble is they have very little elasticity in there ability to reason or to try to understand differing points of view. It’s their way (of thinking) or the highway – they are always in the right – never wrong.
Your fourth sentence is inconsistent with the rest of your post. People of a certain socio-economic background with somewhat naïve political and moral outlooks tend to go into the private sector more than print journalism. I think print journalism tends to be more of a draw for liberals/Democrats. 🙂
Do you really want me to consider someone’s words in 1904 considering that in the immediate paragraphs before it, you said it wasn’t fair to go that far back. The least you could do is separate your contradictory statements by three or four paragraphs to let the attention deficit disorder to kick in.
I think Dwight was using the long ago examples in the Star to illustrate a somewhat obvious point, Frank
I don’t think it’s fair to go back a hundred years and judge someone who lived then by today’s standards. The Star and most people on the Left do,hence Kraske’s column. The point is you better not have any skeletons from the past in your own closet if you insist on rummaging around in others’. This is especially true if it’s the very sin you accuse others of. There is no inconsistency in rejecting some one’s argument but in also pointing out that even if it was valid,they are not the ones to make it.It’s the old legal maxim,”You cannot come into a court of equity with unclean hands”,I.e.don’t complain of others doing the very thing of which you are guilty.
I probably agreed, for the most part, with all but two paragraphs of this piece. Unfortunately it was the first two paragraphs. “The progressive mindset has long since taken an adversarial posture to society. In fact the surest way to establish one’s street cred with other members of the liberal/left is to attack the very legitimacy of our country’s traditions and institutions.” Really ?? You opened with a massive blast that took out a lot of innocent civilians but then followed it much better with a series of precision strikes that hit the intended targets with little if any collateral damage. I’m sure we both know lots of liberals who recognize the problem with political correctness gone to excess, would support stronger immigration controls, or who lean more pro-life. Likewise I’m sure we both know lots of conservatives who see the difficulty of having public symbols of our troubling history, who would support common sense gun laws, and who lean left on the social issues. To me, the only real difference between us is how we view the role and responsibility of government. We should try to emphasize the ideological debate itself more and reduce the focus on the individual personalities. With regards to local politics, Kraske doesn’t speak for all liberals any more than Jack Cashill speaks for all conservatives.
Concerning the negative reaction to public symbols of our past that offend some in the present, I do agree that it is unfair to judge those who lived in the past by standards set today, whether that be in politics, military/war, private industry, or civic affairs. There is a wide range in the offensive level of some of these public monuments to Confederate leaders. On one end, I doubt that very many on the right would fight very hard to support a public monument to honor Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general that executed African-American troops who had surrendered and went on after the war to establish the KKK. On the other end of the spectrum, Robert E. Lee presents a much less offensive figure. When considering his entire lifetime of efforts, both before and after the Civil War, much of what he accomplished would by itself earn him a solid position as an American hero. Son of American Patriot (and Princeton grad) “Light Horse” Henry Lee, he graduated at the top of his class at the U.S. Military Academy and distinguished himself during the Mexican-American War in the service of his country. So highly regarded, he was offered command of the Northern Armies at the beginning of hostilities in the Civil War. Following the war he worked hard to reconcile the North and South and he opposed the building of public memorials to Confederate leaders, recognizing it would harm efforts at reconciliation.
Before just a few weeks ago, I think if you asked 100 Kansas Citians what the memorial just to the south of Meyer Circle represented, 99 would have had no idea. There should be no doubt that slavery is an ugly blight on our history as a nation, but it is a part of our history and we must own it. I get it that the tie to the Confederate causes is an abhorrent one. There is an argument for States Rights but there is no argument for slavery , racism, or it’s perpetuation. The decisions to remove monuments or names are best made by those closest. City or County leaders, University Boards, maybe State based on location. What’s not tolerable in Kansas City may be just fine with the folks in out state Missouri. A statue of Lee might not sit well with city leaders in Richmond but be much more acceptable in rural Virginia. I don’t know the answer
I think I see some merit in how your alma mater handled this dilemma when the student body wanted Princeton to remove all recognition of Woodrow Wilson on campus because of his racist views at that time in history. While the Trustees left the name on the buildings/school, they did remove it from other areas and recognized the contradictions of his legacy and took pro-active steps to create programs to build consensus going forward.
I had a recent conversation with an African-American friend where we talked about the actions of Colin Kapernick and other black athletes regarding their refusing to stand for the National Anthem. I respect their right to express their opinion but I also understood the resentment some had for this visual disrespect in honoring our homeland. He asked if I was familiar with the third verse of the song, which I was not. After researching it, I now completely understand why an African-American might have a serious conflict in pro-actively standing and reciting the words of this song.
All in all a good piece Dwight. I just wish you wouldn’t paint with such a broad brush against all liberals/Democrats when your actual issue is much more specific. I’m sure I’ve committed the same transgression in broadly bashing conservatives in general when in reality, there is almost always some common ground that both sides can share. Not all liberals are elitist socialists that want to take away everyone’s guns and kill unborn babies. Not all conservatives are shallow selfish racists who see healthcare as a privilege based on the size of your bank account and not a basic right. Finding common ground is our only hope.
On a closing note, a shout out to Steve Glorioso, local Democratic consultant on his passing. While supporting liberal causes, he always tried to keep it civil. Even Jeff Roe, local and national republican consultant who often faced off against Steve, remembered him as a gentleman and good guy. God speed Steve.
Ah Stomper, methinks had you actually known Glorioso and observed far more closely his character (or lack thereof) and practices you wouldn’t be giving him a shout out.
And getting a compliment from a fellow of Roe’s rep isn’t exactly a resume maker.
On top of which, most people in the public eye say something nice when someone of note passes.
I’ll have a few thoughts one this topic for you to chew on shortly
Sorry, I guess I temporarily forgot that you are the smartest guy in the room. I’ll be sure to check with you to make sure the life and work of any future decedent clears your personal bar before offering any positive comments following their passage.
Flatterer!
Stomper-thanks for your thoughtful comments. The problem is that the current day Democratic Party and Liberalism are no longer those of John Kennedy and Harry Truman. When Antifa followers last week here in Kansas City were carrying loaded AR-15s at Pershing Park in a demonstration, we are over into a whole new paradigm.. BLM and Occupy Wallstreet were both embraced by the Democratic Party and its leadership and both had followers who have now committed seven murders and countless assaults with intents to kill, i.e. the Bernie Bro who shot Congressman Scalise.Formerly mainstream liberal voices like the W.P. and the LA Times have now applauded left wing violence(“action,not just the usual liberal talk”). Tim Kaine,the supposedly moderate 2016 v.p. Democratic nominee,has called for “fighting in the streets”to resist Trump.. Why is Trump a deranged racist for simply saying both sides,the extreme left and the extreme right, bear responsibility for creating the current climate of violence?
Kraske’s piece was fluff and I didn’t take it seriously. The fountain of which he speaks doesn’t celebrate racism in the manner that Confederate monuments do. It’s a wonderful piece of art, one of the iconic pieces of Kansas City that is often featured in photos. This author has fashioned a terrific rebuttal, well researched and logically presented.
The author’s captions underneath the photos are a bit over the top, in my opinion. He wrote a solid piece of journalism and his captions degrade the article. Nevertheless, it was a fine piece and I enjoyed reading it. Bravo!
Sorry, Laura…
The captions are on me, not Dwight
So, what you’re saying is that because the Star has its own complicated and not-always-on-the-correct-side-of-history history and because they’ve never confronted it sufficiently to satisfy you, a columnist can’t use that forum in which to write a piece wherein he critiques another entity with a not-dissimilar hostory? I mean, you used a lot of words, but that’s pretty much the point of this, right? Since the Star had problems 100 or so years ago and haven’t adequately confronted them (I’m not saying they haven’t. I have no idea if the Star has ever issued retractions or apologized for positions and policies they advocated. Do you?), they may not question anyone else who has sinned?
You do understand, don’t you, that the Star has undergone multiple changes in ownership and editorial oversight in the last 100 years and doesn’t pretend to represent what it did ten decades ago? But the Nichols fountain? That represents the same man, unchanged, unapologetic and dead without having repented his own sins. You know a lot of words, so I’ll credit you with understanding the difference and just choosing to wholly elide it in this column.
It’s sort of like how the GOP likes to say that the Republican Party is the true party of civil rights and equality because their party was the one that ended slavery. mean, yeah, it’s true, Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator and Andrew Jackson was notoriously in favor of slavery and owned many of them himself. But it’s a tough thing for the present-day GOP to claim when they’re constantly doing everything they can to unwind the civil rights protections that have been given to us by liberals, progressives and Democrats like Lyndon Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy. Lots of people forget how many Dixiecrats left the Democratic Party once civil rights reform became an important agenda for the Democratic Party. Strom Thurmond is only the most famous of many who left the GOP because they were no longer reliable supporters of Jim Crow.
I also have a quarrel with this sentence: “First of all, it’s not fair to judge people who lived 100 years ago by whether their attitudes and practices are now deemed acceptable by 21st century standards.” Um…what? That is EXACTLY why we teach and learn history in schools, to learn from our mistakes. If we don’t judge the acts of 100 years ago, or fifty or ten years ago, with a present-day understanding and perspective informed by scientific, technological and humanitarian advancements, what hope do we have as a species? Now, I’m aware of Godwin’s law and I want to be clear that I am not calling ANYONE “Hitler,” but this sentence means that we can’t judge Hitler because anti-Semitism was rampant throughout the world, especially Europe, at the time he rose to power. The most we might say is “well, maybe don’t try to KILL them all, but hating Jews was okay a the time because everyone was doing it.” This is not only foolish, it’s dangerous.
Then there’s THIS gem: “Persistent residential segregation must have some other cause then the use of such covenants if it is still so prevalent almost 70 years later.” Well, yeah. OF COURSE there are other reasons. Reasons like racism, racism which you would not see condemned because it’s not fair to judge people 70 or 50 or 25 years ago “by 21st century standards.” Did it occur to you that people who bought houses in a Nichols neighborhood might have still refused to sell to a Jew or a black family because they WANTED to live in a segregated neighborhood and that was why they bought in an area exactly like that and would fight to keep the neighborhood segregated after 1948? Did you stop and think that real estate agents might still, to this very day, use techniques like steering and redlining to help keep neighborhoods segregated?
And this, this right here, may be my favorite bit of gibberish in this whole post: “Erasing the crimes of the past doesn’t help us avoid them in the future.” One more time, just to make sure it’s clear: NO ONE IS ERASING ANY CRIMES OF THE PAST! NO ONE IS EVEN ERASING ANY *EVIDENCE* OF CRIMES OF THE PAST! All Kraske recommended was that we rename a fountain that lauded a man who notoriously used restrictive covenants and other tools at his disposal to promote segregation and to restrict minorities from owning property in neighborhoods he developed. No one is taking his name out of any history books. This isn’t Orwell where “historians” go back into books and records to remove any trace of the existence of people like Nichols and chuck them into memory holes and make their existence retroactively canceled. (And before anyone tries to make a “slippery slope” argument that this is just one step closer that that happening, keep in mind that ABSOLUTELY NO ONE is suggesting any such thing happen. People who don’t like Nichols or would want the fountain renamed want him to remain in history books to show what a louse he was. People who think he was a great man don’t want him erased because they want to see h is legacy endure. NO ONE is suggesting that he be removed from history books.”
This whole post is just a bunch of straw men piled up together to support a screed underscoring the author’s reflexive attack of what he perceives as liberal/progressive ideals.
You say that The Star as an institution could evolve over time and atone for past racism. I.C Nichols as an individual,by contrast,died unrepentant and thus his legacy is forever teinted.
We can debate endlessly the metaphysics of imputing the sins of its founder to an institution.So let’s just examine the two individuals in question,William Rochkhill Nelson and J.C.Nichols.Since both qualified as racists by today’s standards and both never recanted their beliefs, both their names should come off the things that memorialize them. That would mean that Nelson’s name must come off the art museum and the papers’s masthead just as Nichols’s name must come off the fountain,right? Why isn’t that the necessary result of your logic?
The quality of blogging in KC continues once again with one of Dwight’s historically documented posts. Kudos to Dwight and bricks to the morons whose less than insightful attempts to criticize him have once again fallen flat.
I’m assuming this is directed at me and since it such a well-thought and point-specific rebuttal, I will take it as such.
Actually, I hadn’t read yours when I wrote that, but after reading yours, it fits. As for being point specific, one simply doesn’t know where to start with the collection of inane and specious nonsense you’ve presented above so it’s good enough as is.
Oh, excellent. You’re the type to refer to yourself in the third person *AND* you’re unable respond to a paragraph-by-paragraph note in a like manner.
I’ll bet you’re a ton of fun at parties.
The fact that I choose not to waste time addressing the drivel you’ve posted has nothing to do with ability and the real question is where you get off, you narcissistic bastard, demanding that people reply to your specious nonsense on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. That would hold particularly since you don’t have the balls to publish under your real name and instead hide behind a screen name like the gutless troll you are.
Speaking of straw men, where did I ever claim that the GOP gets a pass on racial justice issues,just because it was the party of Lincoln? You inadvertently ,though,made a point for me by analogy,i.e. How can you liberals reconcile the Democratic Party and its unapologetic racist past? Numerous Democratic politicians of our own era had segregationist histories.These include Democratic leader in the U.S Senate and KKK member Robert Byrd and civil rights filibusterers Senators Sam Ervin and J William Fulbright. This also shows that your claim that the Southern Dixiecrats left the Democratic Party for the GOP with Strom Thurmond in 1948 is errant nonsense. ( Thurmond himself didn’t leave the Democratic caucus in the Senate until 1964.)
George Wallace,Lester Maddox,Ross Barnett,etc, NEVER LEFT the Democratic Party.Even more moderate Democrats like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were happy to support segregationists like Orville Faubus and George Wallace to win their followers over. Lyndon Johnson purposely alienated white southerners based on a cynical electoral calculus;” I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” LBJ only pushed the 1957 Civil Right Bill because he feared African-Americans would return to their pre-New Deal ancestral loyalty to the GOP due to advances for black people under Eisenhower such as Brown v. Board of Education.You have completely distorted what actually happened politically to make a misleading partisan plug apropos of nothing in my post.
You claim that the NYT article I quoted on” damnatio memoriae”is stupid and pointless. (Anytime I can get liberals to attack each other it is a good day!)
Forty-five years ago I was lucky enough to visit Italy with a student group. We heard that phrase in a history lecture and several days later we visited a monument in Rome. The references to Mussolini and his regime had been crudely chiseled off the face of the building.
” Erasing the past” means more than just such acts of physical destruction or Stalin rewriting the Soviet Encyclopedia to remove references to Trotsky. It includes any act to take away the public recognition of any individual or political movement who has fallen out of favor with the then current regime.Watch the recent video of the bronze statue of a Confederate soldier in Durham,North Carolina being torn down by a mob, pummeled,spat on and then torn apart. We’re beyond Orwell and well over into the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard,with its wholesale destruction of the past. What you are advocating and this last sickening spectacle are the same phenomenon,differing only in degree.
Who said the following? A) “There are 8,000,000 people in this town.7,5000,000 are Israelish, 400,000 are Dagoes, and 100,000 are white men.” B) ” Those islands are finally going to be good for something besides sugar and niggers.” C) ” I’ll just make him ambassador to some boog country in Africa and he’ll never be heard from again.” D) “You’re nothing but a god damn Stevenson Jew!” The answers are A) Harry S.Truman, in a letter to his brother on visiting New York for the first time, B) Franklin D. Roosevelt,reacting to the British offer to give the U.S. military bases in the Bahamas in return for Lend Lease destroyers. C)John F.Kennedy, reacting to being double crossed by a fellow Democratic politician during the 1960 presidential primaries,D)Robert F. Kennedy,in an angry outburst at a journalist at the convention that year. “Has anyone here seen my old friend Bobby? Can
you tell me where he’s gone?” Dion ,”The Ballad of Abraham,Martin and John”,1968.
Your idols have feet of clay,Gavin! A little more tolerant approach would be in order because I think we would agree that each of these leaders more than transcended their unfortunate private comments with their public careers. This more nuanced approach does not serve to rationalize away the Hitlers of the world.Hitler became the epitome of human evil not because of his words or even his beliefs.It was because he comitted mass murder in his own country and genocide in others.Such crimes were never acceptable in any era,let alone in the middle of the 20th century. Any attempt to conflate ethnic prejudice,however ugly,and actual crimes against humanity is sheet sophistry.(Talk about ‘elision’!)Is it any wonder that the Pharisees in the Bible were Doctors of Law?
“I have no idea if the Star has ever issued retractions or apologized for positions and policies they advocated.Do you?”
Yes, I do. In the fifty plus years I have been reading the paper,I have never known them to admit a mistake or to being wrong on anything.Any criticism by a reader,however well reasoned and measured,is met with denial.anger,and,in my case,retribution.The Star’s readers’ representative,Derek Donovan, has taken the position that absent absolute proof (g.a video or audio tape)of unethical behavior by Star staff, they are under no obligation to investigate complaints.(“Prove it!”)
“OF COURSE,there are other reasons.(for continued residential segregation in Kansas City) Reasons like racism….”If racism was so endemic here that Nichols’s home buyers would insist on preserving their neighborhoods as all white,as you-correctly-claim,what was Mr. Nichols supposed to do? Tell them to “Embrace Diversity” and extol to them the benefits of multiculturalism,concepts that were fifty years away from being invented? Your arguments are absurd.