Pining for the Past

Though I often find columnist David Brooks' cultural observations compelling, I rarely agree with his political arguments. Imagine my surprise, then, to read in this week's column, "I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return."

He couldn't be more right in my view, though I sympathize sometimes with those howling Republicans--particularly when I compare the homogeneous, white classrooms of my childhood with the racially and economically diverse classrooms of my children. There's no doubt which of these settings is more challenging.

Yet on the same day that I read David Brooks, I skimmed through pages of John Hope Franklin's autobiography Mirror to America, and learned that while I was a child in one of those classrooms in the early 1960s, he--with his Harvard Ph.D. and professorship at Brooklyn College--was being denied bank loans in New York solely because of his race.

The America of the past may call to us, appealing to our wish for what's comfortable. But what's comfortable isn't necessarily better. Nor is it realistic or just.

Let the Republican Party roar and pine all it wants, applauding Newt and his racially charged innuendos. Theirs is a bitter and stingy America, one rooted in mist and mythology. The America of the present--and that of the future--demands more from us, and we must meet the challenge.