I am all in favor of finding more black and indigenous heroes. But I'm afraid that search will be damaged by these new high standards, because those black and indigenous heroes will also be people of their time, and will be rejected for the same reasons you want to reject Hamilton.

I’m particularly concerned about these All-or-nothing moral judgments because of my work in combating Islamophobia. Muhammad was a great religious leader because he was often ahead of his time, but by modern standards he is behind the times. When I try to explain to people that Muhammad greatly enhanced the rights of women, and the principles of justice and charity, people reject that claim using the same basic arguments used against Washington and Jefferson: He doesn’t measure up to modern standards, therefore he is a bad guy, and Islam is a barbaric religion at war with western civilization.

All-or-nothing moral judgment have often been used to justify colonialism. India supposedly had to be civilized by the British because of the practices of Suttee (the burning alive of widows) and thugee (a religious ritual involving murder). Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto justifies the Spanish Conquest of America by referring to the Aztec and Mayan practices of human sacrifices and torture. These were horrible practices that needed to be condemned and stopped, but they do not prove that the people who created these cultures were mere barbarians and savages. As we do with people who do heroic things, we need to praise these cultures for their virtues, not dismiss them completely because of their vices. This is a key principle taught in anthropology classes.