In sixth grade, I got a language arts worksheet about Jackie Robinson that had a sentence like "When Jackie traveled with his teammates, he had to stay in hotels that were just for African Americans." I might've only been twelve, but I could tell that line had been sanitized and felt irritated that we were being coddled by adults that way. Sure, I wouldn't have liked "Jackie stayed in hotels that were just for colored people" (or some worse term) but the writer could've gone middle ground and said, "Hotels were segregated, so when Jackie traveled for away-games, he had to stay separately than the rest of his team."
That worksheet wasn't my first reading on segregation. It wasn't my first introduction to Jackie Robinson. But it was my first example of what I would later learn was called presentism-the fallacy of presenting the past through the lens of the present. For example, in 1909, the NAACP was formed under the name National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, so clearly its founders were okay with the name colored. A historian practicing presentism would look at a document describing the NAACP's founding and call all of its initial members racist because "colored" is a taboo term today. Except they wouldn't, because historians aren't stupid.
Last year, I read a historical fantasy novel set in the Wild West with both Native and LGBT characters. Every white character who has a one-page interaction with Native people instantly becomes racially tolerant. A character who learns one of his friends is lesbian instantly trots out the twenty-first century aphorism "love is love." A character who is part of a stigmatized magical group hides her magical status from her friends, but as soon as she "comes out," literally no one cares. You walk away from the story with the idea the historical prejudices simply never existed. As a reader, I didn't walk away from the story with a newly enriched sense of justice and tolerance, which might have been the authorial intent. You cannot teach justice by crafting a narrative without injustice.
Obviously some presentism is necessary to make a story palatable to modern readers. The same year I read the Jackie Robinson worksheet, I read a WWII novel where soldiers used racial slurs against Japanese people. I thought I'd read an unflinching portrayal of wartime racism, but the author's note stated that the writer had toned down the historical racism as much as possible. Stripping historical prejudices out of a story entirely does a great disservice to the people your story portrays.
One of my favorite elements of Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamuorist Histories books is that her characters don't, for the most part, have the sensibilities of modern people. In the fifth book, Jane, a white character, visits Antigua and meets slaves for the first time. Jane ponders her stance on slavery for a few seconds and remembers that she once signed an abolitionist petition and still owns a keepsake book with an abolitionist stamp in it. But then she reminds herself, "That's just how things are done here," and moves on.
That little moment moved me. I saw it as a parallel to modern people who sign online petitions and collect "stamps" in the form of retweets and profile frames, but when actually faced with a problem, can't be bothered to do anything. Jane, of course, changes her sensibilities over the course of the novel, befriending several slaves and helping free them. Jane's opinion pivot and actual action can be read as a call to arms for readers to match their clicktivism with real activism.
The problem with presentism in narrative isn't that it's unrealistic, but that it leaves readers uneducated of the realities of the time and there is no call to action. Why would a reader be inspired to fight injustices in modern times if they never existed in the past? As characters become aware of their own biases, readers can become aware of theirs.
In Prisoner of Time by Caroline B. Cooney, protagonist Devonny and her best friend, Flossie, are both wealthy Anglo-Saxon ladies expected to marry men of similar social status. The book opens with Devonny smuggling a love letter for Flossie from a poor Italian immigrant gardener named Johnny. While reading the letter, Flossie learns for the first time that his her boyfriend's name is actually Gianni. She squees to Devonny about how romantic the "spelling" is, but a modern reader should be able to figure out Gianni is, not, in fact, an alternate spelling of the American Johnny. It's a normal Italian name. A wealthy 1890's lady and an immigrant gardener face many obstacles to marriage, but that external problem is less interesting to me than the internal one: Flossie's clueless romanticization of her boyfriend's exoticness. Flossie's only an introductory character and the story soon veers off to follow Devonny's time travel romance with a boy from the future, but I find myself wondering how her relationship with Gianni would play out long term. If she doesn't even know his name, are they really ready to get married? What other crucial background knowledge is Flossie missing about Italy and how is Gianni going to deal with that?
Modern people can marry whoever they want, so they have little to gain by watching the wokest lover of the nineteenth century triumph over the tyranny of racist parents stopping their progressive-minded daughter from gallivanting off into the sunset with her one true love. But language barriers and differing social norms are still a very large part of cross-cultural dating. I once had a relationship that ended because my Congolese boyfriend was not a native English speaker and I didn't speak any of the other four language he knew. My parents have nothing against Congolese people. His family have nothing against Americans. But our relationship was peppered with "Gianni" moments. Watching historic characters learn more about a love interest's culture, rather than intuitively knowing about it already or having all the conflict stemming from outside characters' prejudices, gives modern readers a playbook for their own cross-cultural relationships.
There are many problems with presentism. It infantalizes readers and modern people can see right through it. But it's also a way of grasping low-hanging fruit and missing out on richer, more meaningful stories. Ultimately, history's messiness of colonialism, of war, of racism, of discrimination, of immigration, naturally leads to rich and compelling stories if you don't make artificial efforts to simplify the narrative. Give me a clueless Flossie or a "that's how things are done here" Jane over historic characters with modern sensibilities any day.
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