That all men are created equal

I encounter people who seem astonished that America's founders held that all white men are created equal. What about women, people of color, the enslaved, transsexuals? And so on. The way I see it, making all white men equal was a first step. The ancients had to start someplace.

Which brings me to George Washington and the high school named for him in San Francisco, the high school closest to my granddaughter. In this school there stands a series of panels, public art. The mural was created long ago by a Marxist friend of Diego Rivera, and in one panel he showed black people condemned to work for no wages; and in another, a dead Amerindian. That is, he managed to insert a critique into an official government project. The school board is now going to paint over all this on the ground that it makes the students uncomfortable (as it should make all of us).

They are not going to remove the statue of George Washington or change the name of the school. The school board is content with erasing slavery and genocide. 

Washington owned about $10,000,000 worth of slaves (in our money). He freed them in his will. So all along Washington and Jefferson and Adams and Franklin (an abolitionist) knew better--that tells us something about human failings, a lesson far out of the reach of one more dull school board.