Forget About the “Right Side of History.” Be on the Right Side Now.

Reflections on a common call to action.

(New York Times)

There’s a thing that people often say in moments of societal upheaval to rally support for their cause: “be on the right side of history.” I know why people say it, and what they mean by it when they do.

I’m not about it. Here’s why.

In some tellings of history, there were only three Schuyler sisters, and the Marquis de La Fayette was spitting verses faster than anyone this side of Busta Rhymes.

In some tellings of history, the Grand Duchess Anastasia survived the purge of the Russian Imperial family, avenged them by killing the undead mystic responsible, and happily spent the rest of her days in hiding with a dashing rogue from the streets of St. Petersburg.

In some tellings of history, Pope Alexander VI was secretly the atheistic head of a secret order bent on world domination, whose only purpose in claiming the papacy at all was to secure an alien mind control device hidden underneath the Sistine Chapel to subjugate humanity.

To be certain, for all their obviously intentional inaccuracies, those alternate histories are a lot of fun. And fantastic music across the board, too.

Here are some that are much less fun, and probably far more familiar.

In some versions of history, Christopher Columbus was an intrepid explorer who set out to prove that the world was round, and discovered the land that would become America in a happy accident along the way. That the world was already known to be round was most certainly not true, and he most certainly did not maim, murder, and torture the people he found there in a crazed pursuit of wealth.

In some versions of history, the Confederate States of America were comprised of impassioned revolutionaries resisting a tyrannical government insisting on overthrowing their halcyon way of life, and whose military commander was a kindly and honorable man torn asunder between the oath he swore and his love for his home state. They most certainly were not secessionists motivated by protecting their right to continue profiting off of the labor of generations of enslaved black people, with millions of their descendants…