The great Booker T. Washington, the 19th century slave turned orator and educator who was born on April 5, 1856, once said, "Character, not circumstances, makes the person."
This statement is in total opposition to the leftist assumption that every person is a mere representative of a group or class that determines his or her actions and either condemns or absolves him of all blame prior to any assessment of guilt. Leftists do not act if a man committed a crime or had obviously ill intentions. They ask if he is homosexual, or white, or transgender, or "disadvantaged," or Muslim, etc.
Now, circumstances do help form a person and may provide him certain advantages, disadvantages, and moral influences that will shape his character. But while we can and should acknowledge all this, we must still hold each individual to account for his actions. An honest man might recognize that a certain individual has had a troubled background while still condemning that individual's crimes. A leftist claims the individual with the troubled background was doomed to commit crimes for which he certainly cannot be held accountable. It might seem an esoteric distinction, but it's a vitally important one.
Since Booker T. was an educator, I'm going to use education as an example of what I mean. Woke public school teachers and administrators have degraded public education, particularly in areas with many minority students, to such a point that often minorities in cities have appallingly low grades. Instead of rejecting all the garbage that ruined public education, and instead of restoring high standards, classical subjects, and practical skills to education, these wokies perpetually whine that "the system" is "rigged against black and brown students." To the extent that the public school system is deliberately brainwashing instead of educating students, this is true. To the extent that wokies claim "black and brown students" are doomed to fail because of "racism," it is pure balderdash.
While laboring under all the disadvantages of lean funding and racist prejudice, the students of many black-only or early desegregated schools in the USA had high scores and high standards. Booker T. Washington's own Tuskegee Institute combined classical education with training in trades and produced well-rounded, skilled, very intelligent graduates. He emphasized truth, intelligence, and character and had proportionately positive results. Black students who do worse than white students in modern America aren't stupider or suffering from white supremacy, they're suffering — like many white students — from an embarrassingly awful curriculum, woke politics, and low standards. In fact, as Justice Clarence Thomas has noted, there is no evidence that "affirmative action" has improved education or truly helped minorities; rather, the opposite is true.
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Now, here I seem to be making the argument against Booker T. Washington — I seem to be saying that circumstances really do make the man. Bear with me a moment. It is true that circumstances have a great influence on who a person will be, but we cannot say a man is not responsible for his actions based on circumstances. During all the years of Jim Crow, black Americans still succeeded in building and attending good schools and in forming strong families. Despite decades of anti-Christian propaganda, there is a notable surge in Bible use and church attendance among young Americans. Despite a decade of lies about Donald Trump, the American people voted him into office in 2024. Even the cesspool of public education hasn't succeeded in killing most Americans' brains. We can rise above our circumstances, and we must do so.
When Booker T. Washington founded his Tuskegee Institute, he aimed to create an environment and standards that encouraged the development of character. By teaching students critical thinking, personal responsibility, and useful skills, he was giving them the opportunity to grow into men and women of integrity. They could decide to benefit from those opportunities or not as they wished, but the choice was theirs, and it was made clear to them what that choice was. In contrast, modern, woke education discourages development of character, actively encourages laziness and other vices, and obscures morality vs. immorality as much as possible. That way circumstance will be much more likely to dictate a student's fate than character.
And therein lies the key. I noted at the start of this article that while we can take circumstance into account when evaluating an individual's action, we can never let it be the sole determining factor in our decision. A person might have more or fewer advantages in a certain state or city based on his race or ethnicity, but that does not mean we can dismiss any wrongdoing of his because of his race or ethnicity. Democrats condemn innocents because of their skin color or religious affiliation, while rewarding truly guilty individuals because their race, religion, sexuality, or politics places them in groups Democrats consider "oppressed." In those cases, we must reply to Democrats/leftists as Booker T. Washington did: "Character, not circumstances, makes the person."
