Presentism

Context Is Not Exoneration

Sometimes, “don’t judge them by today’s standards” is asking us not to name the harm, not to talk about who held the power, telling us not to use words like ‘exploitation.’ It is asking us not to say that poverty was treated as a moral failing, not to mention that children were taken from families while the institutions doing the taking called it rescue, not to notice that some people were made comfortable by the very systems that wounded others.

The answer to a flattened past was never a silenced one. The answer is better context.

Honest history does not ask us to believe that everyone in the past was cruel. Most people were not. Most were doing the best they could inside a world they did not design. But honest history also refuses to pretend that harm stopped being harm simply because it happened a long time ago.

And this is where we have to be careful, because legal is not the same as right. A thing can be legal and still be cruel. It can be orderly and still be unjust. It can be written into statute, blessed by the courts, defended from the pulpit, and quietly approved by respectable people, and still be wrong.

History is full of legal wrongs. Slavery was legal. Child labor was legal. Coverture was legal. Forced institutionalization was legal. The separation of families has very often been legal, and so has dispossession. In many times, genocide was legal. The law can tell us what a society was willing to permit, but the law can never tell us whether the thing permitted was good.

Our own founders understood something close to this. I can believe the Constitution is a remarkable document and still know that it did not say everything it should have said. That is why we have a Bill of Rights, why we have amendments, why citizenship expanded and voting rights expanded and slavery was abolished and equal protection was finally written into law. It is why rights had to be claimed, again and again, by people the original promises had left out. A founding document can be brilliant and incomplete at the same time. In fact, the capacity to be amended may be one of the wisest things about it: a document humble enough to admit it was not finished is a document built to keep faith with the people it did not yet see.

And the people who lived under unjust laws never needed us, never needed some future generation, comfortable and well-fed, to arrive and explain that something had been wrong. The enslaved knew slavery was wrong. The children worked past exhaustion knew they were being used. The mothers who lost children to poverty and stigma and institutional power knew exactly what grief was. Indigenous families whose children were taken by policy knew their children had been taken. Women held inside laws that gave them almost nothing knew the cage was a cage.

The people of the past were never one undifferentiated mass, all believing the same thing at the same time. There were always people resisting, always people objecting, always people who said plainly, this is not right. There were always lives that testified against the official version of the story.

So when we hold a record in our hands, the question is not only whether a thing was legal at the time. The better questions are harder, and they are the ones worth asking. Who made it legal? Who benefited from it being legal? Who suffered because it was legal? Who objected while it was happening? Whose testimony was written down, and whose was left out? And what did the law make possible that conscience should have refused?

And then, because this is family history, and family history is rarely simple, we have to hold two true things at once. Many reformers genuinely believed they were saving children by sending them west or placing them in an institution. Many receiving families genuinely offered love and shelter and a future. Many children did survive because someone opened a door. And also: many children lost their names. Many were parted from brothers and sisters they would spend a lifetime trying to find. Many had living parents who were never able to get them back. Many were counted as labor. Many were handed a story about where they came from that was incomplete, or softened, or simply false.

Holding both of those at once is not presentism, it is the complex nature of a human life.

The work of the historian, the genealogist, and the family storyteller was never to turn the past into a rescue story, and it was never to turn it into a horror story. The work is to ask better questions. What choices were actually on the table? Who had power, and who did not? Who was helped, who was harmed, who benefited, who was silenced? What did people at the time believe they were doing? What did the law allow, and what did conscience resist? And, always this last one, what did the records leave out? Because the silence in a record is not empty. The silence is evidence too.

Context matters. It matters enormously, and we owe our ancestors the world they actually lived in.

But context is not exoneration. We can understand the past without romanticizing it. We can name a harm without flattening a human being into a villain. We can sit with a difficult story and tell it tenderly and tell it true.

That is not presentism. That is responsible history. And it is, I have come to believe, a form of love.