Is Presidents Day a lost opportunity for advancement?

Today is Presidents Day, a day to discuss our Presidents' legacies, which is a worthy conversation when approached in good faith. Yet, if these discussions are not grounded in unmodified truth and context, isn't it all just propaganda?

Let's take President Harry Truman as our example who is often associated with advancing civil rights — which is clearly great! — however shouldn't we also learn about his racism as a young man in order to dissect how his beliefs changed and facilitate that change in others?

This excerpt pictured was published in the New York Times in 1983. In it we see Truman wrote “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he's honest and decent and not a n_gger or a Chinaman.” He goes on, in reference to his Uncle: “He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is a race prejudice, I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negros ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.”

Now, am I trying to drag President Truman’s name through the mud? No, I am not. But I do think we would benefit from analyzing how his — and all our historical leaders’ — racism, xenophobia, sexism, and general bigotry still impact our world today.

Giving President Truman the benefit of the doubt we can assume he changed his racist views due to becoming more educated, more worldly, and by listening to different perspectives and experiences. So wouldn’t we benefit as a society from talking about this transition? To say ‘here was a racist man who un-learned some/much of his racism and then fought for civil rights’. White saviorism aside, wouldn't that be a story to encourage folks brought up to be racists to progress?

Validation for BIPOC folks and a way to foster progression in white people? This feels like a win-win to me. Yet these critical contextual points are consistently being neglected. Furthermore many historical BIPOC perspectives or present-day experiences are outright being banned.

We need President's Day to be more than simply propaganda to the tune of Lego Movie’s **Everything is Awesome**. We need for these days to be an opportunity for reflection, analysis, accountability, and advancement. We need to ask each other and our children who they want to be: younger Harry Truman, the racist; or older Harry Truman, the civil rights ally? Because there’s really no in between.