By Larry O'Connor |Townhall.com
Photo Source: AP Photo/File
The Democratic Party should pay
reparations to black Republicans who have suffered at the hands of the KKK.
Hear me out.
Make no mistake, the Democrats and their allies in the
Marxist Black Lives Matter organization are moving this country toward a
"national conversation" about reparations.
Side note: Have you noticed that whenever we have a
race-related "national conversation," it always ends up being
sanctimonious, Marxist tenured professors lecturing the rest of us about how
evil and racist and privileged we are, and if you deny it, it proves you're
racist? And the solution to the evil racism that you exhibit is
to take more of your money and give it to Democrats in government where they
pay for big programs that enrich those tenured professors, make inner-cities
even worse, and then ten years later we are poised for another "national
conversation"?
Yeah, well, they're getting us ready for another one of
those "national conversations" and this time it will be about
reparations for slavery.
Before that conversation gets driven down our throats by
the Harris-Biden presidential ticket, how about Republicans get in front of
this issue?
How about instead of moving toward reparations for
slavery (which has challenges logistically and judicially), we move for
something a little more tangible?
I mean, let's face it, it's nearly impossible to identify
who, specifically, would be responsible for paying these reparations, right?
Descendants of the slave owners? OK, try to trace that out, I suppose. But,
logically, their reparation payment should only go to the descendants of those
African-Americans their ancestors owned.
Also, isn't it unjust to punish a person for the sins of
their fathers? I mean, this is a fundamental understanding the Western world
has always embraced. But the Left would have us punish, through taxation, the
great, great, great-grandchildren for slavery.
So what do we do?
Having the US government pay the reparations would be
even more unjust. It would also tax black Americans and the descendants of
immigrants who arrived on these shores years after the Civil War. Why should
their descendants' money pay for an evil act that occurred when they were
living in another country? Also, technically speaking, the United States
government did not own slaves, so why should the government pay for the sins of
some (a very small percentage) of her citizens?
Meanwhile, there are very real victims still alive who
suffered from systemic and violent racism at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan
(KKK). Many are still alive to tell their stories. Or, their children are alive
and have suffered greatly due to the terror inflicted upon them by the Klan.
The KKK's terror was specifically directed at black
Americans who dared to vote. And, how did they vote? They voted Republican.
Furthermore, the Klan was populated by Democrats. Southern, racist,
segregationist Democrats. And their reign of terror began because they had to
terrify newly freed African-Americans from voting. Because these Klansmen
knew they would vote Republican.
How powerful did the Klan's political clout grow? In
1924, organized Klansmen marched through the streets of New York and attended
the Democratic National Convention that nominated Woodrow Wilson for the
presidency. After winning office, Woodrow screened the racist ode to the
Klan "Birth of a Nation," a film produced by racist Hollywood
producers. It was the first film ever screened at the White House.
Spoiler alert: the film rationalizes and
glorifies the rise of the Klan.
From the Wilson presidency, the intertwined narratives of
the Klan and Democratic Party were inseparable. It's no mistake that Exalted
Cyclops of the West Virginia Klan Robert Byrd chose the Dems when he went into
politics.
Byrd rose to the level of Majority Leader of
the Senate because his fellow Democrats saw him as a leader and an inspiration.
Joe Biden had nothing but praise for the Klansman after his death.
FLASHBACK: 10 years ago
today Joe Biden delivered a eulogy for Senate segregationist and former KKK
"Exalted Cyclops" leader Robert Byrd. He called him a
"mentor," a "guide," and a "friend." Byrd once
led a KKK chapter with 150 members.
Video at: https://twitter.com/i/status/1278732729174106114
In short: Democrats not only benefited from the rise of
the KKK by silencing Republican votes in the South, but they also
welcomed their members into their ranks and celebrated them.
Do you want some reparations? This is a pretty easy
argument to make. The violence of the KKK against black Republicans was
real, historic, well-documented, and recent. And the one entity that
benefited most (if not encouraged it and/or participated in it) was the
Democratic Party, which still exists.
Why not go after those deep
pockets?
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RELATED ARTICLE
How the Left Hijacked Civil Rights
By Robert L. Woodson Sr. and Joshua Mitchell | The Wall Street Journal
The
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr with James Forman of the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee (left) and singer Harry Belafonte, April 30, 1965. - Photo:
Bettmann Archive
For
centuries black Americans debated how to overcome racism—but they always
emphasized human agency and individual responsibility.
The civil-rights movement, led by the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr. , helped deliver America from the historic sins of slavery and Jim
Crow by forcing the nation to confront the full humanity of its black citizens.
King’s words and actions glorified America by transfiguring its racial wound
and revealing its redemptive promise. Yet today many black leaders have lost
sight of King altogether and are aiding and abetting the crucifixion of their
own people. Rather than hope, they see despair; rather than the Easter Sunday
of true liberation, they offer the bleak Good Friday of never-ending misery.
The history of black American responses to slavery and Jim Crow generally
followed three paths. They were hotly debated, but all emphasized human agency,
sought liberation, and rejected despair.
First, there were the recolonization or “back to Africa” movements championed
by the likes of Marcus Garvey. These movements sought an exit from America.
Second, there were the insurrectionists of the 19th century, who believed that
black Americans should engage in armed rebellion or vocal opposition so that
they might find a home in this country. Here lie Nat Turner and, later, W.E.B.
Du Bois. They wanted to have their resistant voice heard in America.
Third, there were accommodationist movements of the sort undertaken by Booker
T. Washington, who thought that loyalty to America was the best course.
Exit, voice, loyalty—however different these strategies were, each supposed
that human agency mattered, that oppression wasn’t destiny. That is why, even
amid great struggle, black Americans responded by building their own
institutions and businesses. Great universities, medical schools, hotels,
restaurants, movie companies and even a flight school sprung up. All of this
was self-financed—and made possible by two-parent families, churches and other
cultural institutions that provided shelter against the outside storm of
racism.
In the 20th century, that same creative conflict between these three schools of
thought reappeared. Debaters included the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Black Panther
Party and the Republic of New Africa, which sought to establish a separate
black state within our borders as an exit strategy.
King offered an inspiring combination of the strategies of loyalty and voice. In
1960, when students in Greensboro, N.C., became frustrated with the slow pace
of legal action favored by Thurgood Marshall, King was sent to discourage them
from engaging in civil disobedience. The students told King to lead, follow or
get out of the way. They were determined to liberate themselves. They
understood the difficulties and were undeterred by the obstacles. Like King,
they were willing to persevere toward justice even when it was inconvenient,
and to suffer the consequences of their actions. Hope, not hopelessness,
animated all that they did.
King paid a heavy personal price for his hope that America was redeemable.
Twice his home was bombed; once, his wife and daughter were nearly killed.
Surrounded by hundreds of angry, armed black men after that bombing, he
discouraged retaliatory violence. He was assaulted several times, and jailed as
well, but he remained steadfast in his commitment to nonviolence. He united
black Americans behind the proposition that racism is evil in itself, not simply
because white people visited it upon blacks, and that all must unite to combat
evil. He warned us about the self-destructive path of violence, not only for
blacks but for the whole nation.
One of the original arguments to justify slavery was that blacks were morally
inferior and thus incapable of self-government. John C. Calhoun famously
asserted: “There is no instance of any civilized colored race of any shade
being found equal to the establishment and maintenance of free government.”
Black efforts at self-liberation in the 19th and 20th centuries were based on
the opposite assumption.
Today many black leaders defer to angry white progressives who make the same
arguments about blacks’ lack of moral agency, reject the country’s founding
principles, and seek to undermine its institutions. For months, the radical
left has been exploiting the country’s genuine concern for fairness to keep
blacks in a constant state of agitation, anger and grievance, urging them
toward behavior that lives down to the slanderous stereotypes of white
supremacists. The leaders of these movements insist that every inequity
suffered by blacks is caused by institutional and structural racism, that they
have no power to liberate themselves, and that they will remain oppressed until
white people change. Even to raise the issue of what role self-determination
plays for blacks earns you the label of “racist.”
Civil-rights organizations and their leadership, as well as the Congressional
Black Caucus, need to wake up before it’s too late. A faction of black leaders
has been silent about, or complicit in, the takeover of the civil-rights
movement by the radical left. The effect of this is not to glorify black
achievement but to crucify low-income blacks, who are represented in national
media outlets by their worst-behaved members, and bear the brunt of the attacks
by the woke radical left on the cities where they live.
“Justice” for black America cannot be achieved by framing it solely through the
distorted lens of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others in
fatal police encounters. For every unarmed black American killed by the police,
hundreds are killed in neighborhood homicides.
Those who call for the defunding of police departments, such as leaders of the
official Black Lives Matter organization, are silent about this inconvenient
truth. They have a narrative and cannot let the facts get in the way. Their
story is that the whole of American history is stained and the whole of America
must be overthrown. When citizens declare that they support Black Lives Matter,
do they share its opposition to the nuclear family, its objective of abolishing
the police, and its view that the Christian cross is a symbol of white
supremacy? These positions of the organization—language that has largely been
scrubbed from its website—in no way improve the lives of black Americans. They
give up on black America and encourage its needless suffering.
Like all Americans, blacks have triumphed over their circumstances only when
they have adopted bourgeois virtues such as hard work, respect for learning,
self-discipline, faith and personal responsibility. In the 19th century,
Frederick Douglass found reading to be the key to his own personal liberation
amid slavery, and he understood that whites deliberately withheld literacy from
blacks precisely because it was so valuable. Bourgeois values drove blacks to
build the powerful religious, fraternal, and other voluntary associations that
helped them thrive in the worst days of Jim Crow and cultivated the essential
virtues in the next generation.
There would have been no civil-rights movement without this. But radical
progressives now insist that such virtues are the legacy of white supremacy,
colonialist values that reflect the continuing bondage of blacks to oppressive
Western culture. The only “authentic” expression of blackness in America, they
claim, is the opposite of bourgeois self-restraint and discipline—indulging in
the passions of the moment, whether anarchic rioting, insulting teachers or
other unsalutary forms of expression. The radical left—disdaining exhortations
toward work, family and faith as “respectability politics”—argues that blacks
should feel free to indulge their “true” nature, echoing the age-old
white-supremacist notion that said nature is violent, lascivious and incapable
of self-restraint.
The slave masters’ trick of old was to dissuade blacks from adopting bourgeois
values precisely so they could be kept in servitude. Marriage was forbidden and
families were split apart. Douglass observed that slaves were encouraged to
indulge in drink and debauchery during the holidays so they would be “led to
think that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and
very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So,
when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took
a long breath, and marched to the field—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to
go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the
arms of slavery.”
But there were always those who saw through the trick and used the holidays to
hunt, make items for sale, visit distant family members, and hire out their own
labor. Some of these were even able—eventually—to purchase their freedom.
Tellingly, leftist elites teach their own children the values of working and
studying hard even as they encourage behavior among blacks that will make sure
they remain uncompetitive but “authentic.” By the time young blacks today
discover, as did the slaves of Douglass’s time, that freedom understood as “do
whatever you feel like” is no way to build a worthwhile life, it will be too
late. The fruits of the civil-rights movement’s hard labor—teaching the young
to be so self-disciplined that they were able to resist responding in kind to
hatred and abuse from whites—will have been lost.
We must turn away from the present course, which preaches despair rather than
hope. Black achievement must be glorified. The crucifixion of black America by
the radical left must halt. There is a grander, more fruitful future for us
all.
Mr. Woodson, a veteran of the civil-rights movement, is founder and president
of the Woodson Center and author, most recently, of “Lessons From the Least of
These: The Woodson Principles.” Mr. Mitchell is a Washington Fellow at the
Claremont Center for the American Way of Life and author of “American
Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-left-hijacked-civil-rights-11610748711?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
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EDITOR’S NOTE: For additional information about civil rights history, see the posting on this blog ”Republicans and Democrats Did Not Switch Sides On Racism” at: http://blackrepublican.blogspot.com/p/the-party-of-civil-rights-by-kevin-d.html
