Do we have to deplore past figures for not thinking like today’s good little PC boys?

Edward VIII

And do we really have to regard them as contemptible on that account?

If not about everything then about which things, please?

Do provide an official, PC certified list, OK?

Says the article,

It’s very reprehensible, no doubt, but the fact is that a hundred years ago almost every white man or woman regarded other races as inferior, sometimes dangerous and sinister, sometimes comic.

This is very sad, and, obviously, stupid, nasty and wrong, but that’s how it was.

Oh, phooey.

Much of it was just silly.

There is a scene in the wonderful movie, Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks), in which Cary Grant comments to Katharine Hepburn on something someone does or says, “That’s mighty white of him,” or something like that.

To this day, nobody seems to mind very much.

The film is still universally rated one of the best ever, and I have seen not a word of complaint about Grant’s line.

The first time I noticed it – about 50 years ago, more or less, at a guess – it just seemed odd to me.

My sister used the expression, once in a while, when we were young, too.

She was just aping her elders, of course.

Neither one of us ever even met a non-white person until after high school, so before that we really had no hint of a personal reason, founded in experience, to expect anything different from them than from white people.

That, by the way, had a lot to do with coloring my attitude toward the outbreaks of black against white race rioting just a very few years later, in the late 60's and into the early 70's.

I found it alarming and quite shocking not only that so many black people apparently hated white people indiscriminately but that so many whites insisted we deserved that hatred.

Me?

I was still in my teens, then, and had not even met a black person!

To hell with that, I thought.

And still do.