One more reason for my mama's hungry eyes.

  Undoubtedly meant to take the sting off his comment about how "suburban housewives" will "get over" his dismissiveness, Trump decided to pardon suffrage pioneer Susan B. Anthony for her arrest in 1872 for trying to vote. I'm not sure what this was supposed to accomplish - beyond the sad political trick, of course - but there were plenty of living women Trump could've pardoned. Reality Winner, just one example. Besides, Anthony never fought the arrest because that was sort of the whole point and the law in her hometown of Rochester didn't pursue it.

 This was early in the Suffrage Movement, where Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Staton and others were gearing up to shake the world and expose the outright hypocrisy of the U.S. government denying the vote to fully one-half the population. The fight was long and hard - and if anyone tells you Joe Sixpack was on their side, even secretly, they're lying - but by 1919, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified and a person's gender no longer prevented the vote.

 All fine and good, of course. However, in response to Trump's goofy pardon, a number of people pointed out, truthfully, that Anthony was a pretty nasty racist. Famously she said she'd rather cut off her right arm if the black man got the vote before the white woman, referring to the Fifteenth Amendment. And, yes, it's okay to take this as racist because she went on to talk about virtuous white women and degraded black men, and the Suffrage Movement was pretty dismissive of black women the whole time through.

 NowThis News made this informative little video about why Anthony's history shouldn't be ignored and, indeed, maybe it's time to honor other women as well, like Ida B. Wells or Fannie Lou Hamer. Apparently, people put "I Voted" stickers on Anthony's tombstone, but that's a new one to me.

 And of course, Dudebro Twitter lost their shit and have spent the day howling about "cancel culture." It was pretty much across the board, as both soi-disant libertarians and socialists pointed out... what was their problem, anyway? This is recorded history, and frankly, I'm sort of amazed this is coming as a surprise to so many people. I thought it was common knowledge that a whole lot of folks in 19th-century American history did amazing things but were also racist as hell, either against black folks, Indigenous peoples, the Chinese, hell, the Irish and Italians before we decided they were properly white.

 I know no one likes to admit that we were a nation of Rotten Bastards built on the backs of people we wouldn't let fight back, but we're an old enough country to own the truth. And this isn't a case of "judging the past by our standards". There were people in the 1870s who thought Anthony was a bigotted jackass and, in any eve, wrong is still wrong.

 None of this soils the Suffrage Movement just like Margaret Sanger doesn't soil Planned Parenthood or Thomas Jefferson doesn't soil the ideals behind the U.S. Constitution. Nor is it "erasing history" to be blunt and coldly honest about the country's history, warts and all. That's called "being an adult," and maybe we as a culture should give it a shot.

 By the way. If you're the type of person who's getting bent out of shape over this or removal of the Confederate flag or toppling of statues of Confederate generals, you don't have to wonder "which side" you would've been on back in those days. You're pretty much staking out the claim without ambiguity.