Do we share a knowledge of history?

Can we ever have a national conversation about racial issues? President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, called us a “nation of cowards” when it comes to this issue. Of course, most conservatives believe the kind of conversation Holder would have had in mind would begin with the liberals calling all conservatives racists and, with that as a starting point, begin the discussion. It is a sad fact that the Republican Party, founded in 1854, to oppose slavery and its expansion into new territories and states of the Union is considered a racist party by many. It is the Republican Party that put the voting rights act of 1965 on the books. It was the Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who wrote and signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Most of the famous civil rights leaders, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (this is disputed but many others are not), were registered Republicans because the Democrat Party would not allow blacks to register in their party. So, what happened?

It is too long a story to get into here, but, suffice it to say, a lot of history has been rewritten over the last few decades to minimize, if not outright dispute, actual happenings that have occurred within the lifetime of many living Americans. For example, many Democrats say that Nixon has a secret method of communicating racist messages to his formerly Democrat supporters. By fighting hippies, drugs, and the like, this was supposed to be a secret sign to racists he was on their side. Ridiculous! But the vast majority of the hippies, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman were white. However, Democrats and revisionist historians were eager to take away the Republicans’ long history of supporting civil rights, and, the Republicans, who must be the world’s worst fighters (present President excepted), allowed all of this to take place.

So how are Americans expected to have an honest national discussion on race relations when so much of what people think is true is clearly not? Nor does it end here! For over a decade, a midwestern college professor has asked each of his classes about slavery and consistently 60 percent to 70 percent of those students told him they thought slavery was an American invention.

Let me tell you a little story I ran across the other day. It seems that about 2,350 years ago, Alexander the Great and his teacher, Aristotle, had a falling out because Alexander had found that in conquering so much of the known world there were competent people in many different lands of many different races. But his former teacher insisted that Alexander should consider peoples of foreign lands no better than plants or animals if they were not Greeks. Aristotle, himself, narrowly escaped being enslaved when his hometown was destroyed by King Phillip, of Macedonia, Alexander’s father. As a matter of fact, King Phillip, unaware that America was supposed to invent slavery, took a great many slaves over his years of fighting as did Alexander, his son after him, and the Romans after them! Nor were these societies and cultures concerned with the race of their slaves, enslaving conquered people as part of the peace treaty obligations, and taking their slaves in whatever form the vanquished nations could provide. So, the slavery that occurred in the United States only lasted a short while, historically speaking, and has since been vanquished forever. Or so we hope! If we could trace everyone’s genealogy, we would probably find we have all been both slave and slaveholder, free and enslaved. And being black is no guarantee of not owning slaves since, historically speaking, many blacks have owned slaves through the years.

In the early 1900s, the black family was alive, well, and intact. And the family is the building block for society. Before the “war on poverty,” the rate of poverty was decreasing in America. But with the “Great Society” of Democrat President Lyndon Johnson, the breakdown of the black family began and, with it, all the problems we now see in communities of color. As long as people of color continue to vote back into office the people and the party that gives them substandard schools and underwrites the massive number of illegitimate births, it is going to be very difficult to improve the lot of black Americans in the United States. Do you know what the poverty rate of married black couples is? It is 6.9 percent! If we could just get the illegitimate birth rate down and the marriage rate up, see how we could change that society? But is that the official causes of black poverty you hear on the “street?” I think not. So sad! And I don’t think President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, wants to have that conversation. But, until we address the true causes, we will not get real solutions.

Let’s turn to another bitter disappointment from these last few weeks. The Supreme Court has ruled that the 1964 ruling that bans discrimination on the basis of race, religion, etc. also covers transgenders, which it couldn’t have possibly covered. The point is not that such people should be abused but rather that if Congress wants to protect them, then Congress is obligated to write a law that says so. And in the case of the DACA ruling, this is as clearly a political ruling as you will ever find. To call ending an unconstitutional presidential order arbitrary and capricious is as close to failing the giggle test as any ruling I have heard from them lately. Then again, look at all the appeals they refused to hear concerning churches’ rights to open during the pandemic, the ridiculous laws that do not allow a person to take their firearm from their home to a firing range to practice… The list goes on and on!

Until next week!