History Yes, Nostalgia No

mitt romney believes in cornfields and grandpas, also touchscreens and robots. okay. more cornfields and large farming equipment and old american cars. here's another mitt romney ad. it's called american optimism. it's 30 seconds long. do you see a single eperson who looks to be anything other than white? anyone? he's showing people who turn out to see him in very white states like iowa and new hampshire. that's the point. when you look back with longing at the america of yesteryear, it helps to believe you would have been free, have the right to vote and own property. that's how nostalgia works. mr. romney calls on the statue of liberty. in the 1880s when it was legal to employ children in sweat shops in the north. sharecropping and backbreaking domestic work. we talk about old america, the one we're supposed to want to go back to. do we mean this one where women couldn't vote? and much later where a woman could still be fired for being pregnant? or this one where someone could be denied access to a bus because her wheelchair didn't fit through a door? or this america where industries could pollute our air or water without accountability. or this america, where citizens could be forcibly removed from their homes and interned just because of their identity. ronald reagan, the object of so much current political nostalgia. this is a todem for the republican field. the candidates all want to be ronald reagan. all want to bring back his america. do i want to go back to his nasty, inaccurate rhetoric about welfare queens? do i want to return to urban decay, slashed school lunches and a gutted justice department that ronald reagan helped make possible? do you? history matters. reflecting on the past, thinking about its continuing impact on our current circumstances, using it as a guide for interpreting our collective realities. we should refer to history for all these reasons. history and nostalgia are not the same thing. in fact, respecting history actually means being willing to do away with nostalgia. historical understanding allows us to learn something, but nostalgia obscures our ability to learn by casting everything in a sepia tone. this new year's eve if you get a chance to raise a glass and sing, consider that that song actually asks us to have a clear-eyed glass and sing auld lange sign, consider that that stong actually asks us to have a clear-eyed glass and sing together and this is what i love about the negro national anthem identify lift every voice and sing". words talk about the faith that the dark past has taught us and the hope that the present has brought us. understand keep going. only nostalgia makes you believe we're worse off now than a century ago. this i know. despite the continuing inequalities in our country, there was no moment in the american story when it would have been better to be a black woman than it is right now. the march is unsteady but the progress is real. the great web site xkcd has cartoon that says it all. it's a chart of christmas songs that fill the department stores this time of year, "rudolph," " winter wonderland," "silver bel bells". two big stacks in the middle are from the 30s and 40s when christmas was perfect for some. when you mouth over the cartoon, you get the punch line "an american tradition is anything that happened to a baby boom are twice." perfectly perfect. history yes, nostalgia, no.

Nostalgia selectively remembers the past through rose-colored glasses, forgetting the injustices that were legal and culturally accepted in previous decades and centuries.