By Donald W. Shriver, Jr., President Emeritus, Union Theological Seminary, New York.
I am the author of the book, Honest Patriots, which on March 5 received the Grawemeyer award in religion for 2009. Darren McVey’s column of that week in your campus newspaper is proof that he read at least some of the book. In some respects, he read it carefully. In some other respects, he did not read it at all.
What pleased me about his review was that he confirmed to me one of the principal claims of the book: That high school students in South Africa, Germany, and the USA are better educated to the “misdeeds” of their national pasts than have been some previous generations. My book documents this fact and celebrates it. As Professor Sue Garrett, who chaired much of the award process, said on March 5, “This is a hopeful book.” It means to be so. It shows how several generations in three countries have acknowledged both the good in past history and the bad. It does not encourage an end to combining better appreciation of our national pasts nor ongoing repentance for some of it.
Mr. McVey neglects the celebratory spirit and substance of this book. And he stretches our credulity when he claims that Americans in general have “remembered and repaired” all the damages of slavery and the near-extinction of Native Americans. Before he continues to believe this, he had better talk with some Native and African American contemporaries.
We Americans have made real progress as a nation in accurate remembering of our pasts, but we still have a way to go. I hope that Mr. McVey’s children and grandchildren have textbooks which are even more truthful about the bright and dark sides of the American past than were the texts from which he benefited in his high school.
