What Frederick Douglass Can Teach Us about Reading the Mueller Report

Back in February 2017 at a Black History Month event, President Donald Trump regaled his audience with his insights about famous African Americans’ contributions throughout U.S. history. He identified Frederick Douglass as “an example of somebody’s who’s done a great job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.”

Shamefully, he hasn’t received any recognition with regard to the release of the Mueller report. I’ve watched a lot of the media coverage and listened to a lot of talking heads, often the same pundits over and over, and not one network seems to have sought Douglass’s expertise.

Wait — what? He’s dead?

Oh, ok. My bad. I really need to stop listening to Trump, who sure made it sound like the major abolitionist, suffrage campaigner, author, orator, and former slave of mid-19th-century America was alive, kicking, and taking more and more names.

Douglass’s passing aside, though, I wonder if he might nonetheless be able to offer some guidance on reading the Mueller report and help Americans decipher where their interests lie when it comes to assessing the importance of Russian interference in our nation’s 2016 Presidential election.

He did, after all, have some important insights into the power of literacy — and into the efficacy of properly reading the power dynamics impacting one’s life.
And it seems, from multiple reports, that the response of many Americans to the Mueller…