Writing under the handle “Bronxiniowa,” Ira Lacher, who actually hails from the Bronx, New York, is a longtime journalism, marketing, and public relations professional.

My aunt, who raised me after my parents died, would wake up early on Sunday to prepare a meal, then take a cab, at great expense, to visit her sister, confined to a mental institution. “If she were Catholic,” one of the nurses in the ward told me, “she would be a saint.”

But she also threw around the word “shvartze” to refer to black people. “Shvartze” technically means “black” in Yiddish, but it’s also the equivalent of the N-word. So, yes, my aunt was a racist. But she also did good for me, her sister, and uncounted others. And I still say a memorial prayer for her on the anniversary of her death.

No such sentiment may be forthcoming for Scott Adams, the longtime cartoonist who created “Dilbert.”

This weekend, many newspaper chains dropped his strip because he made racist remarks in his podcast, to wit: “The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people.” He also called Black people a “hate group.”

The Associated Press quoted Christopher Kelly, vice president of content for NJ Advance Media, as justifying the yanking of the Adams strip by saying his organization believes in “the free and fair exchange of ideas. But when those ideas cross into hate speech, a line must be drawn.” Adams may have spouted racism in a private moment. But “Dilbert” has never been accused of racism.

The Adams affair comes directly after we learned Puffin Books in the U.K. was editing already published words by Roald Dahl. This was because the English author of James and the Giant Peach and other young people’s books was not averse to alluding negatively if not obliquely to women, Jews, and black and brown people. (After backlash over the weekend, including from Queen Consort Camilla, Puffin announced it would continue to publish his unedited works parallel to the bowdlerized editions.)

“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” George Orwell once wrote. Many of history’s most revered figures were walking dichotomies of sainthood and sin, particularly racism. But they get a bye.

Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in America. But responding during a debate with Stephen Douglas during the senatorial race of 1858, he said: “[T]here is a physical difference between the white and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. . . . I am as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Winston Churchill told the U.K.’s Palestine Commission in 1937: “I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

As for Scott Adams? We knew who he was years ago. In 2020, he tweeted that the Black Lives Matter movement was “a domestic terror organization that is setting back race relations by perhaps twenty years.” But no editor pulled “Dilbert” in 2020.

Why now?

What is it about the way we were that makes us different from the way we are?

Was it that not too long ago, we simply turned away and pretended we just didn’t see? Was it that we saw but pretended it didn’t matter? Was it that we pretended it mattered, but not to us? That today it matters because we aren’t supposed to think that way anymore? And if we aren’t supposed to think that way anymore, what do we do about it?

Maybe instead of rushing to judgment, we should be adult about who we are and about our nature as human beings. “Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship,” tweeted Salman Rushdie, who knows something about being “cancelled”—by fundamentalist Islamists to the point of being targeted for assassination.

We shouldn’t apologize for Roald Dahl, or Scott Adams. They are who they are. But nor should we assume an air of moral superiority by erasing them. Unless we want to do the same to those we have learned to revere throughout history. However, once we start pulling up those floorboards, we may not like what we find.

Top photo by Tim Buss of the Winston Churchill statue in London’s Parliament Square available via Flickr.