“The fact that millions of people take part in a delusion doesn’t make it sane,” said noted philosopher Erich Fromm.

Iowa State Daily columnist Robert Zeis should reflect on Fromm’s words as he strives mightily to preserve the American Way of white privilege. In his latest column, “What’s in a Name? Revisionist History Revisited” (1/20/98), he again got the facts wrong and offers a revealing window on his value system.

Zeis says historical revisionists are stripping his heroes’ names from buildings and judging them by “the standards and norms of current society.” To him, their evils are only “flaws.” By this logic, the American Holocaust that murdered sixty to 100 million people in the African Diaspora during three centuries of absolute madness is only evil if judged by “the standards and norms of today’s society.”

Zeis writes — inaccurately — about a public school formerly named after George Washington in New Orleans: “The school board there voted to change the name of the school based on the historical fact that George Washington owned slaves during his life. They went on to decide that no school in New Orleans could be named after any person who had ever owned slaves.”

The facts, as reported in the New York Times on November 12, l997: Five years ago — before changing the Washington name — the Orleans Parish School Board voted unanimously to prohibit honoring “former slave owners or others who did not respect equal opportunity for all.” However, the board “leaves it to school communities to initiate the process,” the Times said.

In the case of the newly named Charles R. Drew School, Washington’s name was stricken after a faculty/staff committee made the decision. Students and parents in the community participated in the new name selection. The student population is 98 percent black.

In Zeis’ eyes, this virtually all-black school should still honor Massa George because he only owned “a small amount” of human beings. To Zeis, 125 human beings owned outright and another 191 co-owned with his wife, Miz Martha, is “a small amount.” Decrying slavery as inexcusable, Zeis excuses Massa George because “it was commonplace for wealthy white men” and Massa George’s slaves “were treated very well.”

Zeis applauds ol’ Massa George because his “dying wish” was to free his slaves. (Can you hear “Tara’s Theme” playing as the sun sinks behind the cherry tree?) Again, he mangles the facts. He says these human beings were freed after Miz Martha died a few years later. The Times article says the human beings owned by Massa George were in fact freed by Miz Martha a year after her husband’s death. Interestingly, the Widow Washington strictly observed the letter of the will and only freed his 125 human beings, not her own.

How do you treat a slave very well? Do you only beat him or her once a week, or maybe just once a month? (“Commonplace.”) Do you ask permission from the slave couple before you rape the wife and father children by her? (“Only bad by society’s current norms.”) Do you give them a bonus extra meal as compensation when you sell their children to another plantation? (“One flaw in their characters.”) Do you read to her or him to show your goodness after you have enforced her or his illiteracy?

In yet another naming incident, Zeis’ column upholds the honor of the Confederacy. A black school board member in Gadsen, Ala., wants the name of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest to come down from a school because Forrest became the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

KKK membership is too much for Zeis, who thinks naming the school after Forrest was “a foolish idea.” Now that fine Southern gentleman, General Robert E. Lee, would be okay because he was a “great American.”

“There should ordinarily be no problem with honoring a Confederate general,” Zeis writes, because “(m)any … fought bravely for the South [and] did so because they wanted to preserve the rights of states, not slavery.” I know of no state, either during slavery or the century of segregation that followed, who favored states rights but opposed slavery or segregation. To the oppressed, “states rights” has always been a sanitized euphemism for slavery or segregation, i.e., oppressing black people and other people of color.

Once again, “The fact that millions of people take part in a delusion doesn’t make it sane.” Millions reinforced an insane delusion then, and millions reinforce an insane delusion today. Today’s delusion says the ills and horrors created by nearly 250 years of slavery and nearly a century of vicious segregation — ills such as illiteracy and inferior education, substandard health care, cultural amnesia, subsistence level employment and exploitative sharecropping, a white supremacist judicial system, and so on — were adequately dealt with by 35 years of a flawed and fiercely resisted program called affirmative action. If many like Zeis spoke honestly, they really don’t care if those ills and horrors ever do get addressed, not if it inconveniences them in the least. “We didn’t do it!” they protest, and they didn’t, but they never, ever present ways to heal this ugly legacy.

I understand why Zeis applauds Lee and Washington. They’re his heroes, and he expects everyone to “vision” history through the same monocultural lens he uses. White Americans who fight to maintain the arrogance of white privilege always insist that everyone think like they do. That, after all, is the American Way of white privilege. It’s good to know that all white Americans haven’t felt that way, even if the history books treat them as footnotes.

Milton McGriff is a graduate student in creative writing and a member of The September 29th Movement Central Committee.