Treasury Sec. to announce Harriet Tubman will replace Jackson on the $20 bill

[Lyin' Steve]

Apparently we're doing it on the other currency too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/us/mlk-eleanor-roosevelt-susan-anthony.html

A bit much, don't you think?

[Lyin' Steve]

Yeah, too many in the left-wing and even mainstream media have turned this into a Tubman vs. Jackson issue and said, Republicans (who are all racist) don't like Tubman replacing Jackson (because Tubman is black and they are racist).  The fight is on!  Let's write about why Obama and Tubman and an interesting future currency are right and the Republicans and Jackson and the boring status quo are wrong.

But it's not so much that people are mad that Tubman is replacing Jackson specifically.  It's more two things.  A: Harriet Tubman isn't an important or influential enough historical figure to deserve a spot on our currency next to our founding fathers (Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton) and the men who won the Civil War, thus freeing the slaves (Lincoln, Grant).  B:  Andrew Jackson is one of our greatest presidents and a historical figure who does deserve that place of honor.  Jim Webb is solely arguing B.  The left ignores the distinction between the two arguments, turns any attempt to engage in this discussion into taking sides in an imaginary Tubman vs. Jackson fight and, since Tubman is black, Jackson owned slaves, and calling someone racist is easy and gets a lot of clicks, every argument becomes "Jackson was a racist and so are you."  So in addition to defending point B, Webb also tries to say, look knock it off you fools, Jackson was hardly a racist.

So was Jackson a racist?  The man owned slaves, but so did most of our founding fathers and virtually every wealthy landowner at the time.  Most people point to his attitude towards native americans as evidence of his racism.  But it's easy to stand on the sidelines today and say, oh you racist.  It's easy to forget that many native american groups were basically the al-Qaeda of their day, rampaging pioneer communities, committing mass killings and atrocities, and scaring the living daylights out of Americans.  We had spent years fighting on and off wars against them.  The Census bureau estimated that 19,000 Americans were murdered by Indians.  If you are capable of empathy and can put yourselves in the shoes of an American in the early 19th century, and realize that Indians probably came second only to disease as your greatest fear, perhaps you would have not be so quick to just shout "racist!  he's a RACIST!  and you're a racist too!"
That aside, as Jim Webb points out, Andrew Jackson adopted and raised two Native American children.  If we use the convenient left-wing definition of racism as "doing things that disproportionately negatively affect a particular race" then that's a moot point.  But using the actual definition of racism -- hating a group purely for their race regardless of all other factors -- it's clear that Andrew Jackson was not a racist.  At the very least, it would be nice if we could at least stop calling the trail of tears a genocide, since it's pretty obvious that it was motivated by, at worst, an antagonistic view of the tribes as cultural units, and not a hatred of his children's people for their skin color or race.

Unfortunately, this is America, and most people will never take the time to think about this or understand it; instead, everyone is just mocking Jim Webb for being a racist old fool and defaulting to "Andrew Jackson was a racist, genocidal maniac, how did he ever make it on our currency in the first place?  We should punish him more, take down statues of him and stuff, rename Jacksonville.  Thank god we have come to our tolerant senses and replaced him with a minor African American folk hero."