Negative emotions fade faster

This is a simple — and wonderful — quirk of how memory works.

It’s the fact that, on average, negative emotions are forgotten quicker than positive.

A typical study asks people to write about things that have happened to them over a period of months.

Then they are asked to recall these events up to five years later.

A curious thing happens for most (non-depressed) people: the negative things are forgotten at a higher rate than the positive.

Psychologists aren’t exactly sure why this happens, but it seems to be part of our natural psychological immune system which helps protect against life’s inevitable knocks.

Memory distortion

When a memory is ‘misattributed’ some original true aspect of a memory becomes distorted through time, space or circumstances.

Some examples that have been studied in the lab are:

• Misattributing the source of memories. In one study participants with ‘normal’ memories regularly made the mistake of thinking they had acquired a trivial fact from a newspaper, when actually the experimenters had supplied it (Schacter, Harbluk, & McLachlan, 1984).
• Misattributing a face to the wrong context. Studies have shown that memories can become blended together, so that faces and circumstances are merged.

Memory expert Daniel Schacter suggests that misattributions may actually be useful to us (Schacter, 1999).

The ability to extract, abstract and generalise our experience enables us to apply lessons we’ve learnt in one domain to another.

The consistency bias

New experiences don’t fall on a blank slate; we don’t merely record the things we see around us.

Instead everything we do, have done to us, think or experience, is affected by past thoughts and things that have already happened to us.

One strong psychological drive humans have is to be consistent.

This, then, can lead to a consistency bias: we have a tendency to reconstruct the past to make it more compatible with our current world-view.

For example, as people get older, on average, they get politically more conservative.

Despite this people report always having had roughly the same views (Markus, 1986).

The recall effect

Many memories which have the scent of authenticity may turn out to be misremembered, if not totally fictitious events, if only we could check.

But, does the long passage of time warp the memory, or is there some more active process that causes the change?

In one experiment participants had memories laid down in a carefully controlled way to test this out (St. Jacques & Schacter, 2013).

The results showed that people’s memories were both enhanced and distorted by the process of recall. This shows that merely recalling a memory is enough to strengthen it.

This is one aspect of the fact that memory is an active, reconstructive process; recalling something is not a neutral act, it strengthens that memory in comparison to the others.

When, as a university administrator, I needed a break from the stress of reports and committee meetings, I retreated to the library stacks. There, I devoured stories of war from soldiers and civilians. The same held true at academic conferences; between sessions, I explored the Civil War collection of whatever college I was visiting. The material was so remarkable I began to write it down:  descriptions of terrible wounds and deaths, the grief of families, the misery of hospitals, the plight of starving civilians, rapes and atrocities.

At some point, collecting the stories coincided with my growing belief that we, as democratic citizens of the most powerful nation on earth, need to be fully informed about the nature of armed conflict and its impact on humanity. What better way to show the reality of war than to describe America’s greatest and most costly conflict, one that touched all classes, regions, races, and genders? By bringing the remarkable and vital folk of the 1860s back to the stage of history, I hoped to conjure the true nature of that war, reliving the struggle through their varied voices.

Eventually, I had a pivotal conversation with Robert Brugger, senior acquisitions editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press. Bob is a military veteran. He served as an officer in a combat unit in Vietnam. While still in uniform, he made a commitment to try to inform the public about the nature of armed conflict. He wanted to correct misconceptions about what happens in a theater of operations. Bob strongly encouraged me to write Living Hell, and it was he who suggested the subtitle, The Dark Side of the Civil War.

So here it is, a book about the complete human cost of the Civil War. It is arranged in  a logical way to take the reader on a journey through the full experience of the war. The introduction sets the scene by recreating the milieu in which the war came. Then, in the eight chapters that follow, we escort the reader down the dirty, dusty road of war, from military enlistment to camp, then on the march, to the battlefield, and from there to the hospitals, the graves, and the haunted minds of psychologically wounded soldiers. As we draw the reader along, the landscape grows ever darker, and we deal with massive civilian deprivation and social dislocation, invasion and violation. The road then stretches to the far horizon, charting some bleaker legacies of the war, even down to the twenty-first century.

At the very end of our journey, we will take a surprise visit to a Texas railroad halt, in 1898, where some gray-haired ladies wait to make a final mute statement about the war.  Care to join me?

It’s worth noting that we didn’t have access to much of the evidence, or at least most of the good stuff, until just about 70 years ago. The Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress  opened in 1947, more than eighty years after his death. It then took another six years, until 1953, before there was a reasonably complete edition of his writings. Sure, there were plenty of Lincoln biographies before those dates, but with only one exception (an authorized multi-volume door-stopper by his former White House aides), there were no studies of the Great Emancipator based upon the “private & confidential” material that he wrote and received –the raw political intelligence that makes any statesman’s actions understandable.

Everything written about Lincoln since has benefited from this access (or should have). But as scholars have worked through these materials, it has become clear that a great deal is missing. Famously “shut-mouthed,” Lincoln wrote “burn this” on more than a few of his documents, and apparently many people listened to him. Lincoln himself burned some of his personal correspondence when he left for Washington in 1861. His only surviving son Robert then destroyed other valuable family materials after his father’s assassination. Some political documents, however, just got scattered, misplaced, or held back, and have only been slowly, occasionally, appearing in the light of day.

Nonetheless, this trickle of new stuff has produced some especially titillating political discoveries over the last decade -- significant material that changes the way we see our greatest president....

This is how I became an indiscriminate tool adopter.

Confession time: my project, Visualizing Schneemann, is a hack inspired by Mapping the Republic of Letters. Visualizing Schneemann, which explores the artist’s edited correspondence, became a sort of proof of concept project for me. How much could I do using (mostly free) off-the–shelf tools in the very short, twelve week, timeframe I had to complete the project?

Insight #1 spend money wisely

My projects almost always begin with converting pdf to plain text files. I initially attempted to use Adobe Export PDF (Tool #1, $19.99), but the files required extensive hand cleaning due to poor OCR.  A tweet from Josh Honn directed me to ABBYY FineReader (Tool #2, $99). I ran the free trial and saw it produced excellent results. The time saved more than justified the money spent. I only wish I had not tried to cheap out with the lower cost option as that work all had to be re-done.

Insight #2 Don’t just use the popular tool     To visualize various relationships within the letters, I started with Gephi (Tool #3, free). Gephi is very cool, but it has a steep learning curve.  I persevered, until I saw a tweet from Elijah Meeks, about Raw. Cursory investigation revealed that it was more than sufficient for my needs. I abandoned Gephi because Raw (Tool #4, free) was far quicker....

But how true is that common argument of what John Maynard Keynes called a “Carthaginian peace”?

Carthage, remember, was truly emasculated after the Second Punic War and utterly razed after the Third; in contrast, Germany was mostly humiliated after 1919. Indeed, Versailles was mild compared with what Germany had subjected France to in 1871 at the end of the Franco-Prussian war — and yet a vengeful France did not preempt Germany in pursuit of payback over the ensuing half-century. The humiliating terms that Germany forced upon Russia at Brest-Litosvk in 1918 were far harsher than anything that Germany suffered at Versailles, and yet did it not lead to Russian insurgencies against Germany, much less lasting enmity between the two states. Just 21 years later, Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact.

Perhaps the most draconian envisioned treaty in the history of Europe was what Germany might well have intended to inflict on a defeated France and Belgium, had the former won the war in 1914 — the infamous Septemberprogramm proposal, which, if adopted, would have redrawn the entire map of Western Europe. And what the Allies in 1945 demanded of a defeated Germany would have been considered unthinkable in 1919; and yet we have not had a World War III in the ensuing 70 years....

In the East Coast imagination, the Midwest is populated largely by hicks, and life there is about as exciting as a field of corn. Instead of having a vital, rewarding career as, say, chief assistant to the assistant chief in the personnel department of the Federal Bureau of This or That, Midwesterners plow fields, work in factories and mills, operate small businesses. They belong to the Grange or the Rotarians, go in for church suppers and community singing. Most of them, of course, physically resemble the stern, homespun couple in Grant Wood ’s “American Gothic.” Garrison Keillor is their laureate. Their idea of a good time is a Saturday night hoedown.

Some of this is actually true, or partly true. But Midwesterners, as Jon K. Lauck stresses in a plea for renewed attention to this “lost region” and its history, aren’t so much provincial as they are populist, staunchly democratic, rooted in their communities and believers in individualism and self-reliance. In our standard accounts of early American history, we tend to emphasize the sophisticated East and the troubled South, yet as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed with his usual shrewdness, “Europe extends to the Alleghenies, while America lies beyond.” The fundamental spirit of our nation was forged on the frontier....

Much of “The Lost Region” actually focuses on Turner’s immediate heirs, the early 20th-century group that Lauck dubs the Prairie Historians. These scholars came from small towns in Kansas, Iowa or the Dakotas, they taught at the university of Wisconsin or Minnesota and they believed in regional history. Their thinking and studies “focused on law, farming, Populism, land and geography, and social history.” Working in state and city archives or with small historical societies, they built prize-winning books from the ground up, relying on hard data more than grand theorizing....

As historian Ronald Radosh wrote: “Seeger would sing and give his support to peace rallies and marches covertly sponsored by the Soviet Union and its Western front groups and dupes — while leaving his political criticism only for the United States and its defensive actions during the Cold War.” Radosh, an admirer and onetime banjo student of Seeger’s, says he is grateful Seeger ultimately acknowledged the crimes of Stalin....

Some comments were laudatory, praising every aspect of his advocacy. But most of them struck the balanced tone of The Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews, who tweeted: “I love and will miss Pete Seeger but let's not gloss over that fact that he was an actual Stalinist.”

Such attempts at balance miss the mark. It’s not that Seeger did a lot of good despite his longtime ties to the Communist Party; he did a lot of good because he was a Communist.

This point is not to apologize for the moral and social catastrophe that was state socialism in the 20th century, but rather to draw a distinction between the role of Communists when in power and when in opposition. A young worker in the Bronx passing out copies of the Daily Worker in 1938 shouldn’t be conflated with the nomenklatura that oversaw labor camps an ocean away.

As counterintuitive as it may sound, time after time American Communists such as Seeger were on the right side of history — and through their leadership, they encouraged others to join them there....

Both approaches offer serious problems. Seeger’s political record—as a whole, not taken selectively—is exactly the point. As Andrew Cohen wrote in his appreciation, Seeger was often described as “anti-American”:

I think the opposite was true. I think he loved America so much that he was particularly offended and disappointed when it strayed, as it so often has, from the noble ideals upon which it was founded. I don't think that feeling, or the protests it engendered, were anti-American. I think they were wholly, unabashedly American.

Seeger’s beliefs sometimes led him to grievously wrong conclusions, but it’s not un-American to be wrong, and that same politics is what also led him to stand up to McCarthyism, fight for the environment, and march with labor unions, too. (To which one might waggishly add, can anyone to whom Bruce Springsteen had dedicated a tribute be anything other than All-American?) Nor can one separate his music from his politics, something former George W. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer tried to do.

To understand why the full range of Seeger’s political activities are indivisible from his music, you have to begin with his childhood and entry in the folk scene through his parents' involvement. There’s an instructive comparison here with Nelson Mandela, whose relationship with the Communist Party was a newly contentious topic in the days after his death. Unlike Mandela, whose alliance with Communism seems to have been a brief and opportunistic response to the brutal apartheid regime, Seeger’s was deeply rooted. Unlike the rural folk musicians he emulated, Seeger was no naif. His father was a Harvard-educated musicologist and his stepmother a composer, both early folk aficionados; he himself enrolled at Harvard. Later, Seeger also worked as an intern for the great folk-song collector Alan Lomax. The recordings that early 20th century collectors made are the basis of what we now know as American music, from blues to old-time country....

An answer may be found in the diary of a Union soldier named John Burrud. Ten years after Northup was rescued from slavery in Louisiana, Burrud marched through the neighborhood where Northup had been held captive by the brutal cotton planter Edwin Epps. The soldier knew the story and recognized where he was. “Resumed our march 4 o Clock AM followed Bayou Beauf down,” he scribbled in his little leather-bound pocket diary on May 18, 1863. “I think this is the place that Solomon Northup operated.”

I stumbled across Burrud’s diary just before Christmas in the reading room of the gorgeous Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., which is a long way from Avoyelles Parish, La., or Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where Northup lived. I had no idea when I opened it that Burrud’s diary would shed any light on Northup’s story and its legacies. In fact, I had been looking for something entirely different. History is full of surprises....

But with each passing day, more has come out to put Mandela’s allegiance to communism in more perspective. Writing in the British Spectator, the courageous South African journalist Rian Malan tells the entire story. Malan tells the tale of what Professor Stephen Ellis found in the online Mandela archives.

What Ellis found is none other than the lost Mandela manuscript – the original draft of what became his 1994 autobiography (and now a movie) Long Walk to Freedom. After reading the book, Malan writes the following:

Everyone thought Mandela was a known entity, but he turns out to have led a double life, at least for a time. By day, he was or pretended to be a moderate democrat, fighting to free his people in the name of values all humans held sacred. But by night he donned the cloak and dagger and became a leader of a fanatical sect known for its attachment to the totalitarian Soviet ideal.

Malan and Professor Ellis found new insights into how Mandela’s image has been manipulated for propaganda purposes through the decades. Having decided to use Mandela as what Malan calls “the anti-apartheid movement’s official poster boy,” since he was a “tall, clean-limbed tribal prince, luminously charismatic, and…reduced by cruel circumstance to living martyrdom on a prison island,” the ANC and its supporters knew they had to “cleanse him of the communist taint.”

This is not the first time in recent memory that American men have sprouted facial hair in great numbers. The 1960s bristled with sideburns and beards—pared down, in the 1970s, to the decade’s iconic mustache. But one characteristic distinguishes this revival from previous ones: Today’s facial-hair enthusiasts share an affection for the ornate practices of the 1800s—the exuberant beards and ostentatious moustaches, as well as the elegance and “manliness” of the shops where those styles were cultivated.

What follows is the lost story of American facial hair. Like countless other histories, it is rife with contradictions. It begins with white Americans at the time of the Revolution who derided barbering as the work of “inferiors.” It continues with black entrepreneurs who turned it into a source of wealth and prestige. And it concludes with the advent of the beard—a fashion born out of desperation but transformed into a symbol of masculine authority and white supremacy....

His 1853 memoir depicts the horrors of American chattel enslavement from the perspective of a freeborn man who had lived that way for decades. His slave narrative went on to contribute to the national dialogue on abolition. Northup was unsuccessful in his pursuit of legal action against his captors, as the laws of the jurisdiction prohibited his testimony against a white man in the nation’s capital, the scene of the crime.

A half century before, in the courts of the neighboring Upper South state of Maryland, Charles Mahoney successfully challenged the legality of his enslavement. Mahoney brought suit in 1791 against Father John Ashton, an influential Catholic Procurator General, Jesuit missionary, head of the White Marsh Mission, and slave owner. Mahoney received a favorable ruling in Maryland’s Court of Appeals in May of 1799. Mahoney’s counsel had successfully argued that he be manumitted on the grounds that he was a descendant of a freewoman, Ann Joice, who had been unlawfully enslaved. (Joice’s descendants had long asserted their freedom, and in 1770 her grandsons, the brothers Jack Wood and Jack Crane, took an axe to the neck to the man who claimed to be their overseer.)...

Can dark pasts ever be ignored or sins forgotten?

Omar G. Encarnación, a professor of political studies at Bard College, is the author of the forthcoming "Democracy Without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting."

Forgetting, in Order to Move On

Spain was ready to let bygones be bygones. After the demise in 1975 of the Francisco Franco dictatorship, the nation’s leading political parties negotiated the so-called Pact of Forgetting, an informal agreement that made any treatment of the most difficult episodes of Spanish history, such as the horrific violence of the Civil War, unnecessary and unwelcomed. Far from seeking “justice,” “truth” or “reconciliation,” the nation chose to forget and move on, even passing a comprehensive amnesty law making it all but impossible to prosecute the human rights abuses of the old regime.

The pact to forget meant that in Spain there would be no accountability for the thousands of people who perished during the Civil War (1936-39), or for the many more who were executed, forced into exile, tortured in prison or sent to labor camps in the postwar years for simply having defended democracy against Franco’s fascist coup. The pact also committed the government to “la desmemoria” (disremembering), a policy that entailed avoiding anything that could awaken the memory of the past, such as the observation of the 50th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, in 1986; the creation of a truth commission to look into who bore ultimate responsibility for the Civil War; and the use of state funds to exhume the remains of thousands buried in unmarked Civil War mass graves, most of whom died fighting Franco....

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Leslie Vinjamuri is an associate professor in international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Lessons From Africa’s Efforts

The demand that states confront their past isn’t new. In the aftermath of World War II, successor regimes across Europe held trials of Nazi collaborators. Truth commissions followed a wave of democratic transitions in El Salvador, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Bolivia and beyond. In 1984, Argentina’s truth commission published its report and a handful of military officers were put on trial. Each of these initiatives was inspirational, but also necessarily compromised. It was the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that created a new global standard that served as a symbol that post-conflict reconciliation could be the basis for a fundamental restructuring of society. In 1998, the commission handed its report to President Nelson Mandela, who died in December.

Internationally, the symbolic power of truth and justice has been surprisingly robust. Many people uncritically embrace the aspiration to uncover and document the truth, and the belief that doing so will generate societal reconciliation. But confronting the past is ineluctably political, and especially in the absence of a solid democratic foundation, ill-considered efforts to deal with the past may do more harm than good and generate heightened expectations for redress. The assumption that truth or justice can provide a neutral basis for widespread societal reconciliation in the recent aftermath of conflict is at best naïve. South Africa allowed individual perpetrators the opportunity to apply for amnesty if they confessed their crimes at public hearings not because this was an ideal strategy, but because a political bargain between the African National Congress and the apartheid regime that made the transition to majority rule possible demanded it....

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Henry J. Rozycki is a physician at the Children’s Hospital of Richmond at Virginia Commonwealth University and a writer.

As a Child, I Wanted the Truth

I was about 10 or 11 when I began to wonder if my parents were Nazi war criminals in hiding. All I knew was that they said they had lost most of their family in the Holocaust and that no matter how much I wanted to know more, details of their experiences were too terrible to tell me. In the absence of any solid information, I was left to speculate, eventually to imagine that pretending to be a Holocaust survivor was a perfect cover. Thankfully, this crazy idea disappeared as I realized that no one could fake what were symptoms of their post-traumatic stress disorder. Decades later, they are gone and I still only have scattered facts and my imagination to try and understand. As a result, it took too much time for my irrational fear of Germans to leave me.

Without truth, children have only two sources with which to understand. The first are the myths which can grow like fungi when sunlight is blocked and the dead matter is not cleared. The second are their imaginations. What either one creates is often more terrible than the truth....

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Antonio Olmos, a photojournalist based in London, is the photographer of the forthcoming collection "The Landscape of Murder."

Remembering What Society Wants to Ignore

It is better to remember painful realities than to forget them. And it is better to see the ugly truths of the present day than to simply hope they will become history.

I am a photographer; the nature of my work is to give memory to things, places and events. Photographs are a record of things that have happened and people who have lived. We look at photographs as proof of the recent past. In my personal work, I mostly photograph what people would rather forget.

Recently in London, two young men were convicted of murdering a British soldier. The crime made news because the men called themselves jihadists in a war against the West, and because they tried to justify the murder to bystanders, who filmed them on smartphones....

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Melissa Nobles, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of "Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics."

Face Up to the Violence of Jim Crow

The U.S. civil rights movement was one of our country’s most important democratizing efforts. But the United States continues to grapple with how to acknowledge and understand the uglier aspects of its undemocratic past.

Scholarship has mostly analyzed Jim Crow’s undemocratic nature by focusing on black disenfranchisement. The coercion and violence that enforced political disenfranchisement and economic subordination have received far less attention. This has influenced the public understanding of that period which holds that protests, legal challenges and the power of moral suasion dismantled a bad Jim Crow system....

A word search of the past fifty State of the Union addresses—including the speeches that new Presidents give to a joint session of Congress (not technically a State of the Union address but functionally similar)—turns up very few mentions of “poverty” or the “poor” after Johnson left office. L.B.J. used one or the other of these words forty times in his annual messages; it took the next five Presidents, combined, twenty-three years to equal that number. (Reagan’s joke accounts for two of those.) Bill Clinton’s total was twenty-four—nearly half coming in his final State of the Union, in 2000, when a roaring economy, a budget surplus, and more than twenty million jobs created gave him license to talk about pretty much whatever he pleased. President Obama, with last year’s address, evened the score, at eight, with George W. Bush, but most of Bush’s mentions concerned global poverty, not the home-grown variety....

The reasons for this are fairly straightforward. It’s a truism of American politics that helping the poor is an idea that (forgive me) polls poorly. The manifest failures in the war on poverty, the relentlessness of Republicans in exploiting those failures, and the unwillingness of Democrats to stand behind its real successes, all help explain that. Whatever the accomplishments of the war on poverty—and there were many—its disappointments created a kind of collective exhaustion with the subject and the complex political, moral, and economic questions it raises about our shared obligation to those among us with the least....

Often, articles attest that our world today isn't that far off from 1914, stating a "haunting currentness of WWI," a "past that doesn't go by," and "the Great War's disastrous echo."

And there are in fact similarities between 1914 and 2014....

And just like Sarajevo's conspirators, there are indoctrinated people today who are willing to die for their extremist ambitions: the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks or suicide attackers who kill innocent bystanders in Baghdad on an almost daily basis.

But such actions are ostracized by the international community today. And so is the dictum of war as "continuation of politics with different means" which was coined by the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz in the 19th century. On the eve of the First World War, he described a legitimate political course of action available to those in power....

1. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness. (1956) Miller, a professor at Harvard for two decades after World War II, wrote how Puritan theology—before that, popularly identified with sexual repression and witch burning—influenced America’s idea of itself as having a mission—an “errand into the wilderness.” In Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, Miller also parsed the early conflicts within American Christianity that issued, paradoxically, in the First Amendment. Ideas of American exceptionalism and of America having a special mission in the world all date from the Puritan beliefs that Miller described in his books....

Sirens sound around this Chinese city as the last few eyewitnesses of a massacre gather. Starting Dec. 13, 1937, and lasting six weeks, as many as 300,000 civilians were murdered during the atrocities.

The remaining survivors bow their heads in memory as the sirens blasts above their heads. A flock of pigeons is released into clear blue skies above the 5,000 people gathered in the square of the Nanjing Memorial Museum. The ceremony closes with marching soldiers laying wreaths as the memorial bell is sounded.

Standing sandwiched between survivors, soldiers, Buddhist monks, state officials and thousands of school children, I become aware of just how deeply the Nanjing Massacre resonates across Chinese society. There is reverence and solemnity, which is touching, particularly as the survivors are honored for their presence. The media outlets clamber for their photos as they stand in a line before large yellow wreaths of flowers.

I have the opportunity to personally thank Madame Xia Shuqin and Mr. Lee Gaoshan for being among the first of 12 survivors to give their testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation, which today announced its partnership with the Nanjing Memorial Museum to collect as many as 100 testimonies from the 200 survivors of the massacre still believed to be alive. Madame Xia stands below a large "300,000" carved into stone above her, and thanks us for the opportunity to make her testimony known. The octogenarian previously sued Japanese deniers of the massacre through the Chinese courts and still has a case progressing through the Japanese courts. The warrior of historical truth is unbowed in her final years to the distortion of her experiences.

Mr. Lee is very clear that the reasons he gave testimony are "to ensure the memory of the past is taught to future generations. We need to teach them the ways of peace."

The significance of the Nanjing Massacre on the memorial landscape is seen first through its scale. By way if comparison, the site dwarfs the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in footprint and attracts over six million visitors a year.

As the crowd subsides, I drift into a temporary exhibition space where Chinese visitors to the museum are filing through an installation about Auschwitz. There is purpose behind this. The museum wants to broaden the scope of its educational mission and to educate the Chinese public about genocide. The history of Auschwitz is one way to begin.

As the memorial bell rings across the square, the survivors make their way home for another year. Soon, very soon, that dwindling crowd will be no more, and only their voices we preserve will remain.

"Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn't mean it has to change," Kelly said. "Jesus was a white man, too. It's like we have, he's a historical figure that's a verifiable fact, as is Santa, I just want kids to know that. How do you revise it in the middle of the legacy in the story and change Santa from white to black?"

Setting aside the ridiculousness of creating rigidly racial depictions of a fictitious character that does not actually exist—sorry, kids—like Santa, Kelly has made a more serious error about Jesus. The scholarly consensus is actually that Jesus was, like most first-century Jews, probably a dark-skinned man. If he were taking the red-eye flight from San Francisco to New York today, Jesus might be profiled for additional security screening by TSA.

The myth of a white Jesus is one with deep roots throughout Christian history. As early as the Middle Ages and particularly during the Renaissance, popular Western artists depicted Jesus as a white man, often with blue eyes and blondish hair. Perhaps fueled by some Biblical verses correlating lightness with purity and righteousness and darkness with sin and evil, these images sought to craft a sterile Son of God.

The only problem was that the representations were historically inaccurate....