Tag: Wayback Machine

In my eyes Joy Ann Reid is still head and shoulders above her nasty, small-minded accusers. But it’s now hard to deny that she was wrong on the facts. Her graceful apology doesn’t leave much room for doubt.

So if - as I still believe, based on the testimony of those who know her well - Reid is fundamentally honest, how are we to make sense of her conduct?

As Richard Kim points out in a must-read essay, attitudes have shifted so far and so fast that it’s entirely possible for someone to have written something in 2007 and find it unthinkable today. If you write a lot, you forget about a lot of what you write. When I read my own blogging from back then - even stuff I still agree with entirely and that I’m proud to claim - I mostly don’t recall having written it.

Maybe that’s what happened to Reid.  Memory isn’t a record of events, it’s a story we tell ourselves. And sometimes it turns out the story has an unreliable narrator.

Nietzsche nailed it:

Memory says, “I did that.”

Pride replies, “I could not have done that.”

Eventually … memory yields.

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