Read the two documents attached in this quiz (Washington-DuBois debate) and use them to answer the questions below. 1. Identify the ethical choices offered by the two speakers. 2. Discuss both sides of the ethical choices offered by the speakers. 3. Offer a personal evaluation of the ethical choices to be made. 4. Identified the pros and cons of both sides of the ethical choices to be made. 5. Indicate how the student’s own cultural background relates to the ethical choices proposed by the speakers. 6. Identify how the speaker’s point of view might be affected by the speaker’s cultural backgrounds. 7. Discuss how reading these two speeches allows them to relate to other cultures and helps them to understand and react to other cultures. 8. Indicate how reading these two speeches promotes their ideas of civic involvement in relation to the issues raised by these two speeches. · Opinion · Commentary Jussie Smollett and the Hazards of Moral Sentimentality Narratives about ‘racism’ and ‘homophobia,’ stoked by news and social media, stir self-affirming rage. By Lance Morrow March 1, 2019 6:29 p.m. ET Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s 1852 novel, “Uncle Tom's Cabin.” Photo: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images A well-known story says that when President Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he remarked, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Stowe’s 1852 novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—with its melodrama of Eliza’s flight across the ice, of Simon Legree’s cruelty, of Uncle Tom’s martyrdom—had so roused American feelings on the subject of slavery that nothing less than a great civil war could have done justice to either the crime or the novel. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a supreme work of moral sentimentality—of feelings stirred to noble and lethal purposes. The story tore sentimental 19th-century America apart. It ended not with Uncle Tom’s crucifixion but with Appomattox. Sentimentality may enlist in the cause of justice. Beware: It serves just as often in the ranks of evil. Hitler and Joseph Goebbels deployed sentimental storylines of the Volk, of Aryan purity and blood and soil. Righteousness sometimes waxes sentimental, but so do monsters. Anyone who ever organized a lynch mob in Alabama knew how to sentimentalize white womanhood. Newsletter Sign-up Today’s media storytelling has perfected a genre of intensely sentimental and spontaneously generated folk tales, especially stories dealing with race and sexuality. Social media and cable news pour forth vividly moralized tales that are sometimes true and sometimes not. The stories dramatize wrongs in order to amuse and polarize what has become the Republic of Maury Povich. They boost TV ratings, ignite apoplexy in our iPhones, and organize Americans along angry ideological lines. Sentimentality, the regime of feelings, tempts people to exaggerate facts in ways that awaken grievances and encourage hatreds. Social media and cable news move faster than the speed of t.

1. Read the two documents attached in this quiz (Washington-
DuBois debate) and use them to answer the questions below.
1. Identify the ethical choices offered by the two speakers.
2. Discuss both sides of the ethical choices offered by the
speakers.
3. Offer a personal evaluation of the ethical choices to be made.
4. Identified the pros and cons of both sides of the ethical
choices to be made.
5. Indicate how the student’s own cultural background relates to
the ethical choices proposed by the speakers.
6. Identify how the speaker’s point of view might be affected by
the speaker’s cultural backgrounds.
7. Discuss how reading these two speeches allows them to relate
to other cultures and helps them to understand and react to other
cultures.
8. Indicate how reading these two speeches promotes their ideas
of civic involvement in relation to the issues raised by these
two speeches.
· Opinion
· Commentary
Jussie Smollett and the Hazards of Moral Sentimentality
Narratives about ‘racism’ and ‘homophobia,’ stoked by news
and social media, stir self-affirming rage.
By
Lance Morrow
March 1, 2019 6:29 p.m. ET
Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s 1852 novel, “Uncle Tom's Cabin.”
Photo: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
A well-known story says that when President Lincoln met
Harriet Beecher Stowe, he remarked, “So you are the little
woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
Stowe’s 1852 novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—with its melodrama

2. of Eliza’s flight across the ice, of Simon Legree’s cruelty, of
Uncle Tom’s martyrdom—had so roused American feelings on
the subject of slavery that nothing less than a great civil war
could have done justice to either the crime or the novel.
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a supreme work of moral
sentimentality—of feelings stirred to noble and lethal purposes.
The story tore sentimental 19th-century America apart. It ended
not with Uncle Tom’s crucifixion but with Appomattox.
Sentimentality may enlist in the cause of justice. Beware: It
serves just as often in the ranks of evil. Hitler and Joseph
Goebbels deployed sentimental storylines of the Volk, of Aryan
purity and blood and soil. Righteousness sometimes waxes
sentimental, but so do monsters. Anyone who ever organized a
lynch mob in Alabama knew how to sentimentalize white
womanhood.
Newsletter Sign-up
Today’s media storytelling has perfected a genre of intensely
sentimental and spontaneously generated folk tales, especially
stories dealing with race and sexuality. Social media and cable
news pour forth vividly moralized tales that are sometimes true
and sometimes not. The stories dramatize wrongs in order to
amuse and polarize what has become the Republic of Maury
Povich. They boost TV ratings, ignite apoplexy in our iPhones,
and organize Americans along angry ideological lines.
Sentimentality, the regime of feelings, tempts people to
exaggerate facts in ways that awaken grievances and encourage
hatreds. Social media and cable news move faster than the speed
of thought. They flash about in the collective mind, propelled
by sentimentality and by sentimentality’s evil twin—rage.
The tale of Jussie Smollett will be remembered as a minor 21st-
century classic—a would-be tragedy turned comedy, a self-
sentimentalizing narrative of persecuted innocence. Gay and
black Mr. Smollett was assaulted by improbable Nigerian
Klansmen on the coldest night of a 2019 polar vortex in Emmett
Till’s hometown of Chicago. Mr. Smollett’s story was even
dumber than Tawana Brawley’s tale of racially motivated gang

3. rape, and it fell apart much faster. The shoe bomber was more
competent.
Mr. Smollett’s performance was an affront to the memory of
Matthew Shepard, a gay man brutally murdered in 1998. It was
an insult to the ghost of Emmett Till—and to those of James
Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and of
Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. and others—the heroes
and martyrs who made it possible, eventually, for Jussie
Smollett, a well-paid young black actor, to star in a TV epic of
black success.
In fact, his story was an insult to the intelligence of anyone who
heard it. Nonetheless, Pavlovian opportunists—Sens. Kamala
Harris and Cory Booker, among others—could not help but
salivate when Mr. Smollett first told the tale. It was not the
details that interested them, but rather the generalized claims of
“homophobia” and “racism,” which, like slavery in Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s time, provided a master narrative.
The same impulse arose in people who last September cried, “I
believe Christine!” The details of Christine Blasey Ford’s
testimony against Brett Kavanaugh did not matter so much as
the larger generalization—the fact of life, they’d say—that vile
males do such vile things as Christine spoke of, and get away
with them.
An invidious sentimentality was the entire story of the
encounter not long ago at the Lincoln Memorial between
Catholic high-school students and a drumming “Native
American elder” and “Vietnam veteran”—sentimental
characterizations that turned out to be not quite true. When the
story was told upside-down, with the Native American cast as
the victim, millions accepted it upside-down because it affirmed
their own sentimentalities. Sentimentality is like the flu—
people infect one another.
None of which is to deny that racial prejudice, sexual assault
and animus against homosexuality exist and are destructive. But
many have discovered how effective it is to sentimentalize the
politics of race and sexuality. The very words “racist” and

4. “homophobic” now possess a generalized and imprecise
political power that is careless of the truth or falsehood of one
particular case or another and may be lobbed at the enemy lines
like artillery shells.
The false victim—Mr. Smollett, for example—is attracted by
the radiant power of blamelessness. To be a victim is to be
justified—heroic, if you tell the story right. Abstractly
speaking, a victim is sublimely, metaphysically, inherently not
responsible, least of all for himself. This promises a paradoxical
kind of freedom. The oppressor is the one to blame. In that
sense, if not in others, the victim is sitting pretty.
Some victims fare better than others. Emmett Till was savagely
murdered and sunk to the bottom of the Tallahatchie River.
Jussie Smollett got written out of the plot of a TV show. That is
one difference between the 20th century and the 21st. No doubt
it is a measure of progress.
Mr. Morrow, a journalist and essayist, is a senior fellow at the
Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Appeared in the March 2, 2019, print edition.