Brilliant Bigots

How brilliant do you have to be for people to overlook your bigotry? The other day I was reading about how students at Manchester University had painted over a poem-mural by Rudyard Kipling to protest the deification of a notorious racist. An English professor had reacted thus to the incident: "Of course he was a racist, of course he was an imperialist, but that's not all he was ... Dickens said dreadful things about black people in the Jamaican rebellion. Does that mean you stop reading Dickens?" But the issue here is not whether one should read Kipling but whether one should deify  him. A common argument in such debates is that it is improper to judge historical figures against current norms. How does anyone judge anything except against the norms of their times (unless you can teleport yourself and your psyche to a different age) is beyond me. But the students were not protesting Kipling, who has been dead for ages. They  were protesting their university's decision to glorify a person whose views many people of color find offensive. And, context matters so much. Lionizing a racist in Brexitting Britain, with its resurgent white nationalist movement, is either a malicious or a foolhardy move. I am personally opposed to deification of any sort. Critique a person's work by all means and praise their work if you think they deserve it. But don't make a personality of him. And I really believe the bar for brilliance is significantly lower if you are a privileged white heterosexual male.