Maybe we deserve much much better, but we’re not going to get it. Those anti-racists that you referred to earlier (without giving any names or footnotes) believed and did many things that would get them cancelled today. John Brown was way ahead of his time in his denunciation of slavery, but he was almost certainly homophobic. There is no need to find a specific quote to back this up. Everyone in the 19th century was homophobic, especially someone who read the Bible as much as he did. It was considered a sin and a perversion, and it was illegal. In your article on Malcolm X, you pointed out that he may have been unfaithful to his wife with some gay liaisons. We’re OK with his gayness these days, but cheating on the mother of your children has become even more unacceptable than ever. Should we reject any claim that Malcolm should be seen as a hero?

Those people who opposed slavery were a small number of heroes who stood against the tenor of the time. They deserve credit and praise for having the courage to stand against the majority view. However, a person who is against slavery today deserves no moral credit whatsoever. So neither abolitionists nor slave owners should be judged by the standards of our time. Some abolitionists (Hamilton and Franklin, for example) owned slaves before they denounced the practice. John Adams never enslaved anyone and spoke out against slavery. On the other hand, he did not specifically ban slavery when he wrote the Massachusetts constitution, and often used a racist obscenity to describe Hamilton. (which Miranda’s Hamilton correctly quotes). Adams also believed that people who didn’t own land should not be allowed to vote. If anyone said something like that today, we would assume that person was a crazed plutocratic conservative, who probably has a basement full of machine guns and camouflage haberdashery.

Both you and your adversaries are mistaken in thinking that our heroes must be perfect or nearly so. Moral heroes are people who faced tough moral dilemmas and made inspiring choices, which become the basis of their legends. On many other occasions, however, they were just like any regular schmoe of their times, which makes them seem monstrous by modern standards. Sometimes the great moral leaders of the past did the right thing, sometimes they tried and failed, sometimes they didn’t even try. We need to remember them for their best moments and in spite of their worst moments.

This kind of all-or-nothing moral judgment has 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. Isn’t this a key principle taught in your anthropology classes?

I’m particularly concerned about this way of thinking 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 you are using here: 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.

The article linked below compares the slavery practiced by Muhammad to the slavery practiced by Washington and Jefferson. Muhammad looks pretty good in comparison, but the fact remains that slavery is wrong, and Muhammad practiced it. Nevertheless, he is still a great man and a great moral leader for the good things he did, and he deserves to be seen as a hero.

https://teedrockwell.medium.com/washington-jefferson-and-muhammad-all-owned-slaves-should-we-tear-their-statues-down-17eeb756b628