Danger Close
A "race only" approach negates the lives of every abolitionist, every single person who marched for equality in the 60's and every soldier who died in the Civil War.
It appears the main organizing principle of the Democrats and their allies in the BLM and woke community is a singular focus on race to exclude all else. Given the last year or so, that seems to be the way this country is going and if so, America has wasted a lot of time, effort, treasure and lives to reach a point where race was not a factor.
This current "race only" approach negates the lives of every abolitionist, every single person who marched for equality in the 60's and every soldier who died in the Civil War. It renders the Civil Rights movement the largest scam on the face of this planet
I just saw something I think was a real mistake - LSU hired a new president and it looks, for all appearances, social justice warrioring and Critical Race Theory were the deciding factor. The guy they hired is no doubt an accomplished academician, but he is also one of the people who brought CRT to life and weaponized it in the educational sphere.
As noted at Legal Insurrection, Dr. William F. Tate IV is "the first black man to lead a university in the Southeastern Conference (SEC). Many alumni have raised questions over the hiring process, after the original list of eight semi-finalists for the position did not include Tate’s name. Tate takes over as university president on July 2."
He is also a fan of Marcus Garvey. If you don't know Marcus, he was a Jamaican-born, turn of the century, black nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism movement, which sought to unify and connect people of African descent worldwide. He created several black owned businesses as well as the Universal Negro Improvement Association, or UNIA, a fraternal organization of black nationalists. The UNIA advocated for “separate but equal” status for persons of African ancestry, and as such they sought to establish independent black states around the world, notably in Liberia on the west coast of Africa.
Garvey was one of the first to assert the only way blacks should ever view the world is through the lens of race., saying in the early 1900's:
"In a world of wolves one should go armed, and one of the most powerful defensive weapons within reach of Negroes is the practice of race first in all parts of the world."
There is no workaround for a position like that. If that is going to be the deal going forward, there can be nothing but conflict ahead, and that conflict may just include bloodletting.
The fact is slavery predated America by thousands of years. Even though the first African slaves were brought here in 1619, slavery existed in North America before the first European planted a foot on these shores. Africans were not the first, nor are they the last racial group to experience slavery.
One wonders if slavery would have been ended if it weren’t for what Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Washington and the thousands of other people who fought for freedom of all people did not do what they did in 1776. Many of the statues being destroyed today are of people who had a role in creating a path to an idea that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights.
There are always trade-offs in every situation. Compare the lives of American blacks today to those of black Africans from the regions from whence slaves were captured – many by people with the same skin color as the slaves themselves. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, arguing that slavery in the Western Hemisphere was a positive for black Americans, I am proposing a thought experiment in which the US never existed. The existence of the US did not change the European colonialism of Africa – perhaps the worst of which was by the Belgians in the Congo – but one could assume the current state of Africa’s indigenous peoples is a valid comparison.
Back in 2007, noted libertarian/conservative commentator, Michael Medved, took a similar look. At Townhall dot Com, he wrote:
“There is no reason to believe that today’s African Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in Africa. The idea of reparations rests on the notion of making up to the descendants of slaves for the incalculable damage done to their family status and welfare by the enslavement of generations of their ancestors. In theory, reparationists want society to repair the wrongs of the past by putting today’s African Americans into the sort of situation they would have enjoyed if their forebears hadn’t been kidnapped, sold and transported across the ocean. Unfortunately, to bring American blacks in line with their cousins who the slave-traders left behind in Africa would require a drastic reduction in their wealth, living standards, and economic and political opportunities. No honest observer can deny or dismiss this nation’s long record of racism and injustice, but it’s also obvious that Americans of African descent enjoy vastly greater wealth and human rights of every variety than the citizens of any nation of the Mother Continent. If we sought to erase the impact of slavery on specific black families, we would need to obliterate the spectacular economic progress made by those families (and by US citizens in general) over the last 100 years. In view of the last century of history in Nigeria or Ivory Coast or Sierra Leone or Zimbabwe, could any African American say with confidence that he or she would have fared better had some distant ancestor not been enslaved? Of course, those who seek reparations would also cite the devastating impact of Western colonialism in stunting African progress, but the United States played virtually no role in the colonization of the continent. The British, French, Italians, Portuguese, Germans and others all established brutal colonial rule in Africa; tiny Belgium became a particularly oppressive and bloodthirsty colonial power in the Congo. The United States, on the other hand, sponsored only one long-term venture on the African continent: the colony of Liberia, an independent nation set up as a haven for liberated American slaves who wanted to go “home.” The fact that so few availed themselves of the opportunity, or heeded the back-to-African exhortations of turn- of-the-century Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey, reflects the reality that descendants of slaves understood they were better off remaining in the United States, for all its faults.”
The challenge of America has always been to find ways history can liberate rather than bind. America was designed so that all people, no matter who they are or what color skin they wear, have the chance to break the bonds of which they assume history condemns them to suffer.
Meanwhile, the media and BLM-profiteers helping divide this nation from within, ignore their former darling cause, South Africa. Where diamond mine managers had learned to never intermix certain of the indigenous Africans on the same shift in their mines; they would invariably end up slaughtering one another from centuries of blood feuding.
Flash forward to today and one finds yet another horrifyingly tragic situation proving systemic duplicity for a start, at the UN among many other organizations, etc. But, after all, it is largely all about those white farmers who thought it safe for themselves and their families to remain in South Africa.