The rise of Trump isn't all about racism

Commentary
By Frances Rice

The below article is enlightening.

Note, though, omitted is how the Democratic Party fought to keep blacks in slavery and deny civil rights to blacks after the Republican Party fought to free blacks from slavery and grant freedom and equality to black Americans.

Ta-Nehisi Coates's tactic is to blame "whitey" and not the real culprit, the Democratic Party, for the denial of freedom and equality to black Americans.

Also omitted is that some of the same Americans who voted for Barack Obama, twice, also voted for Donald Trump.

Accusing Trump voters of being racist "white supremacists" is an apparent cheap shot that is no longer persuasive to average Americans.
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The rise of Trump isn't all about racism

 By Damon Linker

For a certain group of influential left-of-center analysts and pundits, it's become increasingly self-evident that Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential contest was a function of one factor above all others: racism.

These liberal analysts acknowledge other factors too, of course. Yes, Vladimir Putin meddled and the Trump team probably at least tried (ineptly, it seems) to collude. Yes, James Comey made unprofessional blunders. Yes, the media had it in for Hillary Clinton. And yes, her campaign was guilty of hubris and unforced errors. But the real culprit, they claim, was the ideology of "white supremacy" that dominates American history, persists among many or even most white voters, and reached a fever pitch in reaction to eight years of a black president.

Those convinced that racism is to blame for the rise of Trump now have a formidable new weapon in their arsenal: a new essay in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates with the stop-you-in-your-tracks title of "The First White President."

Coates is a stunningly powerful writer, penning essays that are deeply informed historically, animated by a fiery passion for racial justice, and shot through with unshakable sadness at how unlikely it is that such justice will ever be done. He writes like a prophet, rendering judgment from on high but with his heart kept low to the ground, in communion with his fellow African Americans and their unending struggles in a land that perennially fails to treat them as equals, and just as perennially fails to acknowledge the extent and persistence of that failure. Every American should read and learn from him.

But that doesn't mean he's infallible — and his new essay on Trump, like the claims of those left-of-center analysts and pundits that it will fortify, is seriously misguided.

No serious-minded person denies that race was an important factor in the 2016 election. Trump launched his political career by accusing a black president of being illegitimate and un-American. He announced his presidential campaign by demagogically describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He spoke on the stump of imposing a "Muslim ban."

What Coates wants to establish isn't that these racially charged statements and actions (and many other recounted in the essay) happened, since we're all well aware of them. What he wants to establish is that Trump won the 2016 election above all because of these statements and actions. Trump's base is white America, and white America thrilled to his message of racial repudiation — a repudiation of dark-skinned immigrants; of evidence of police brutality directed against people of color; of the members of a religion from another part of the world; and most of all, of "the fact of a black president." That absolute negation of color in the name of whiteness is something new in the history of the United States, and it's what makes Trump "America's first white president," Coates contends.

But is that really true? Is Trump's electoral triumph really first and foremost an expression of the ideology of white supremacy? Coates devotes long stretches of his essay to arguing against various alternative explanations of Trump's victory, especially those that highlight the economic struggles and status anxieties of the white working class. As far as Coates is concerned, this is just the latest example of "the myth" of virtuous working-class whites that has so often been used to conceal the "sins of whiteness itself."

Yet Coates is too intellectually honest to pretend that any monocausal explanation of something as multifaceted as a narrowly won presidential election in which nearly 129 million votes were cast would be adequate. Though he doesn't seem especially happy about it.

Responding to The New Yorker's George Packer, who wrote that white working-class support for Trump and the GOP in recent election cycles can't "be attributed just to the politics of race," Coates becomes irritable:

This is likely true — the politics of race are, themselves, never attributable 'just to the politics of race.' The history of slavery is also about the growth of international capitalism; the history of lynching must be seen in light of anxiety over the growing independence of women; the civil rights movement can't be disentangled from the Cold War. Thus to say that the rise of Donald Trump is about more than race is to make an empty statement. [The Atlantic]

No, it's to make a true statement — and one that long passages of Coates' own essay seems to deny.

Why would Coates deny it when he knows better? I suspect it's because he's wedded to a view of American history that so emphasizes the centrality of racial injustice that he ends up constantly tempted to reify racial categories and even endorse notions of collective guilt and victimhood. This may be what leads him to write in sweeping terms about "sins of whiteness" and to claim that no explanation of the 2016 presidential race has the power to "cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump."

But "white people" didn't elect Donald Trump. A coalition of 62 percent of white men, 52 percent of white women, 13 percent of black men, 4 percent of black women, 32 percent of Latino men, 25 percent of Latino women, and 27 percent of Asians elected Donald Trump. "White supremacy" surely played an important role for some of those white voters. But it should be obvious that it can't be a sufficient explanation of the outcome overall — unless we begin to talk in terms of racial false consciousness.

Unfortunately, Coates occasionally does exactly that. In what is easily the most disturbing passage of Coates' justly lauded memoir Between the World and Me, he recounts the story of the death of a black friend at the hands of a police officer we eventually learn was also black. Instead of leading to a complex moral judgment of the tragic event, Coates treats it as a straightforward example of the evils of structural racism in which the black officer passively participated. Coates' new essay similarly accuses Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and even Barack Obama of complicity in the thoroughly racial system that ultimately produced President Trump.

There are signs, once again, that Coates knows better. "Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist," he writes at one point, "just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist." Yet he also understands that if this is true, then Donald Trump might not deserve the title of America's First White President. Which may be why Coates adds a crucial addendum to this concession: Every Trump voter may not have been a white supremacist, "but every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one."

And there's the rub: Coates' entire analysis stands or falls on the reader's willingness to elide the moral distinction between voting for Trump because he's a white supremacist and voting for Trump despite the fact that he's a white supremacist.

In this respect, Coates' argument resembles the highly tendentious one found in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners, which sought to assign collective guilt for the Holocaust to all Germans, whom Goldhagen held responsible for developing, affirming, and enacting the murderous ideology of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that defined the Nazi regime. One became complicit just by being there.

The passage of the essay about George Packer, in which Coates dismisses efforts at identifying extra-racial causes for Trump's rise as "empty statements," does not end there. It goes on to say that pointing to those other causes "is small comfort to the people — black, Muslim, immigrant — who live under racism's boot."

That may well be the case. But shouldn't writing and thinking, the effort of analyzing and understanding, aim for something more than "comfort"? Shouldn't it aim, instead, at the truth, however exigent? However painful? However unsettling?

Here are some unsettling truths: Trump won. Some voted for him because they're white supremacists, but others did for a range of other reasons (party loyalty, negative partisanship, anger about economic stagnation, resentment in response to cultural despair and decline, Clinton hatred fueled by a mix of right-wing media and foreign meddling, and on and on). Trump voters of all kinds aren't going anywhere. They are our fellow citizens and have the right to vote. Many of them probably aren't persuadable by left-of-center candidates, but some of them probably are. Moving beyond Trump and reversing the agenda of his presidency will require appealing to some of these voters.

And denouncing them all as racists is as unhelpful as it is inaccurate.

http://theweek.com/articles/723854/rise-trump-isnt-all-about-racism

A 22 Second Video Explains Why Liberals Shouldn’t Support Abortion

By Amber Randall

 

A baby holds a bunch of flowers at a vigil in Trafalgar Square the day after an attack, in London, Britain March 23, 2017. REUTERS/Darren Staples

A twenty-two second video making its rounds over social media this past week points out the absurdity of liberals championing abortion.

“You Will Never Know Me,” a self-funded public service announcement from film director Jack Thomas Smith and his fiancée Mandy Del Rio, features people declaring their support for causes like feminism and open borders.

“I believe in feminism. Animal rights. LGBT rights. Gun control. Civil rights. Bridges not walls,” the group tells viewers. “But you will never know that about me. Because I was aborted.”

Click Here To Watch The Video.

Smith, a writer, director and producer of films like DISORDER and INFLICTION, told The Daily Caller News Foundation that he wanted to create an ad that showed how liberals are hurting themselves by being staunch supporters of abortion because they are possibly aborting the very people who will share the same values as them.

“I wanted to show the hypocrisy of liberals and abortion. First of all, they’re hypocrites because they are already here,” Smith told TheDCNF. “Second, they very well could be aborting those who will someday believe in and champion their very causes. For example, feminists always say my body, my choice but what if your pre-born child is a girl? Shouldn’t it be her body, her choice?”

The release of the PSA coincides with the National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children, a yearly event that occurs on the second Saturday of September. Sponsored by the Pro-Life Action League, Citizens for a Pro-Life Society and Priests for Life, the day calls for people to gather at the graves of aborted children to host prayer vigils.

Smith created “You Will Never Know Me” because he felt that it was a statement he needed to make about the current debate over abortion; he’s preparing himself for negative reactions from groups like Planned Parenthood should the video take off, he told TheDCNF. He has already ran into some backlash while trying to cast the video.

“To cast this little public service announcement was one of the toughest things I’ve done because so many actors and actresses are so liberal, “he said to TheDCNF. “… You would not believe how many people blasted me. The actors and actresses would say ‘Oh a man should never say what a woman does with her body. This is horrible what you’re trying to do.'”

Regardless of the potential backlash, Smith said it could be worth it because “it’s something I believe in, and it’s a statement I wanted to make.”

http://dailycaller.com/2017/09/10/a-22-second-video-explains-why-liberals-shouldnt-support-abortion/

Comey’s Secret Power

By  Kimberley A. Strassel 

Here’s a question: What if the FBI had a lot to do with that fake Trump ‘dossier’?

J. Edgar Hoover’s abuse of power as FBI director led Congress and the Justice Department to put new checks on that most powerful and secretive of offices. By the time Congress finishes investigating James Comey’s role in the 2016 presidential election, those safeguards may be due for an update.

Powerful as Hoover was, even he never simultaneously investigated both major-party candidates for the presidency. Mr. Comey did, and Americans are now getting a glimpse of how much he influenced political events.

Mr. Comey’s actions in the Hillary Clinton email probe are concerning enough. He made himself investigator, judge and jury, breaking the Justice Department’s chain of command. He publicly confirmed the investigation, violating the department’s principles.

 

He announced he would not recommend prosecuting Mrs. Clinton, even as he publicly excoriated her—an extraordinary abuse of his megaphone. Then he rekindled the case only 11 days before the election.

An inquiry by the Senate Judiciary Committee has now shown that Mr. Comey’s investigation was a charade. He wrote a draft statement exonerating Mrs. Clinton in May, long before he bothered to interview her or her staff. This at least finally explains the probe’s lackluster nature: the absence of a grand jury, the failure to follow up on likely perjury, the unorthodox immunity deals made with Clinton aides.

But the big development this week is a new look at how Mr. Comey may have similarly juked the probe into Donald Trump’s purported ties to Russia. The House Intelligence Committee’s investigation took a sharp and notable turn on Tuesday, as news broke that it had subpoenaed the FBI and the Justice Department for information relating to the infamous Trump “dossier.” That dossier, whose allegations appear to have been fabricated, was commissioned by the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and then developed by a former British spook named Christopher Steele.

But the FBI had its own part in this dossier, and investigators are finally drilling down into how big a role it played, and why. The bureau has furiously resisted answering questions. It ignored the initial requests for documents and has refused to comply with the House committee’s subpoenas, which were first issued Aug. 24. Republicans are frustrated enough that this week they sent orders compelling FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appear before the committee to explain the obstruction.

One explanation is that the documents might show the FBI played a central role in ginning up the fake dossier on Mr. Trump. To this day, we do not know who hired Fusion GPS to gather the dirt. The New York Times early this year reported, citing an anonymous source, that a wealthy anti-Trumper initially hired Fusion to dig into Mr. Trump’s business dealings, but the contract was later taken over by a Clinton-allied group. That’s when Fusion shifted its focus to Russia and hired Mr. Steele.

The question is when the FBI got in on the act. The Washington Post in February reported that Mr. Steele “was familiar” to the FBI, since he’d worked for the bureau before. The newspaper said Mr. Steele had reached out to a “friend” at the FBI about his Trump work as far back as July 2016. The Post even reported that Mr. Steele “reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work.”

Who was Mr. Steele’s friend at the FBI? Did the bureau influence the direction of the Trump dossier? Did it give Mr. Steele material support from the start? The timing matters because it could answer the vital question of why the FBI wanted the dossier. Here’s one thought: warrants.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees spying activities, is usually generous in approving warrants, on the presumption law-enforcement agencies are acting in good faith. When a warrant is rejected, though, law enforcement isn’t pleased.

Perhaps the FBI wanted to conduct surveillance on someone connected to a presidential campaign (Carter Page?) but couldn’t hit what was—and ought to be—a supremely high bar for getting such a potentially explosive warrant. A dossier of nefarious allegations might well prove handy in finally convincing the FISA court to sign off. The FBI might have had a real motive to support Mr. Steele’s effort. It might have even justified the unjustifiable: working with a partisan oppo-research firm and a former spook to engineer a Kremlin-planted dossier that has roiled Mr. Trump’s entire presidency.

Now that’s power.

Mr. Comey’s meddling has never seemed to stem from some hidden partisan impulse, but rather from an overweening self-righteousness. But power can be misused as much in the hands of the sanctimonious as the corrupt. And it’s overdue for congressional investigators to get to the bottom of precisely how much power Mr. Comey was exercising.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/comeys-secret-power-1504825899

Beware of Narratives and Misinformation

By Victor Davis Hanson

U.S. intelligence agencies said Russia was responsible for hacking Democratic National Committee email accounts, leading to the publication of about 20,000 stolen emails on WikiLeaks.

But that finding was reportedly based largely on the DNC's strange outsourcing of the investigation to a private cybersecurity firm. Rarely does the victim of a crime first hire a private investigator whose findings later form the basis of government conclusions.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is many things. But so far he has not been caught lying about the origin of the leaked documents that came into his hands. He has insisted for well over a year that the Russians did not provide him with the DNC emails.

When it was discovered that the emails had been compromised, then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz weirdly refused to allow forensic detectives from the FBI to examine the DNC server to probe the evidence of the theft. Why did the FBI accept that refusal?

That strange behavior was not as bizarre as Wasserman Schultz's later frenzied efforts to protect her information technology specialist, Imran Awan, from Capitol Police and FBI investigations. Both agencies were hot on Awan's trail for unlawfully transferring secure data from government computers, and also for bank and federal procurement fraud.

So far, the story of the DNC hack is not fully known, but it may eventually be revealed that it involves other actors beyond just the Russians.

There is not much left to the media myth of James Comey as dutiful FBI director, unjustly fired by a partisan and vindictive President Donald Trump. A closer look suggests that Comey may have been the most politicized, duplicitous and out of control FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover.

During the 2016 election, Comey, quite improperly, was put into the role of prosecutor, judge, and jury in the investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. That proved a disaster. Comey has admitted under oath to deliberately leaking his own notes -- which were likely government property -- to the media to prompt the appointment of a special counsel. That ploy worked like clockwork, and by a strange coincidence, it soon resulted in the selection of his friend, former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Comey earlier had assured the public that his investigation of Clinton had shown no prosecutable wrongdoing (a judgment that in normal times would not be the FBI's to make). It has since been disclosed that Comey offered that conclusion before he had even interviewed Clinton.

That inversion suggests that Comey had assumed that whatever he found out about Clinton would not change the reality that the Obama administration would probably drop the inquiry anyway -- so Comey made the necessary ethical adjustments.

Comey was also less than truthful when he testified that there had been no internal FBI communications concerning the infamous meeting between Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac. In fact, there was a trail of FBI discussion about that supposedly secret rendezvous.

Before he fired Comey, Trump drafted a letter outlining the source of his anger. But it seemed to have little to do with the obstruction of justice.

Instead, Trump's anguished letter complained about Comey's private assurances that the president was not under FBI investigation, which were offered at about the same time a winking-and-nodding Comey would not confirm that reality to the press, thus leaving the apparently deliberate impression that a compromised president was in legal jeopardy.

There is also a media fantasy about the Antifa street protestors. Few have criticized their systematic use of violence. But when in history have youths running through the streets decked out in black with masks, clubs and shields acted nonviolently?

Antifa rioters in Charlottesville were praised by progressives for violently confronting a few dozen creepy white supremacists, Klansmen, and neo-Nazis. The supremacists were pathetic losers without any public or political support for their odious views, and they were condemned by both political parties. Yet Antifa's use of violence was compared perversely by some progressives to American soldiers storming the beaches on D-Day.

 

Later, Antifa thuggery in Boston and Berkeley against free speech and against conservative groups without ties to white supremacists confirmed that the movement was fascistic in nature.

It was recently disclosed that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had warned the Obama administration in 2016 that Antifa was a domestic terrorist organization that aimed to incite violence during street protests. That stark assessment and Antifa's subsequent violence make the recent nonchalance of local police departments with regard to Antifa thuggery seem like an abject dereliction of duty.

Doubts about official narratives of the DNC leaks and the errant behavior of James Comey and misinformation about the violent extremists of Antifa illustrate media bias -- not to mention entrenched government bureaucracies that are either incompetent, ethically compromised or completely politicized.

https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2017/09/07/beware-of-narratives-and-misinformation-n2377797?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=

BREAKING: AG Sessions Announces President Trump Ends DACA

Photo: Getty Image

Attorney General Jeff Sessions made the formal announcement in a press briefing today that President Donald Trump has ended the Deferred Access for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that President Barack Obama put into place in 2012 that was a violation of our constitutional separation of powers.

Click here to view the announcement video.

Sessions says the Department of Justice represents all of the American people and integrity of the Constitution.

He states that Trump's leadership and immigration stance have led to reduction in the number of illegal immigrants passing through the southern border.

He also says that Congress should pass immigration legislation that advances the wishes of the American people.

Sessions continues by saying "we are people of compassion and we are people of law" but there is nothing compassionate in not enforcing immigration law. Failure to not enforce these laws have lead to crime.”

Sessions reads a quote that says DACA was passed because former President Obama disagreed with a part of the immigration policy and breached the separation of the branches of government.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement following Sessions' briefing that reiterates the "wind down" process that he mentioned.

That statement reads, in part:

“This Administration’s decision to terminate DACA was not taken lightly. The Department of Justice has carefully evaluated the program’s Constitutionality and determined it conflicts with our existing immigration laws,” said Acting [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary Elaine Duke. “As a result of recent litigation, we were faced with two options: wind the program down in an orderly fashion that protects beneficiaries in the near-term while working with Congress to pass legislation; or allow the judiciary to potentially shut the program down completely and immediately. We chose the least disruptive option.

“With the measures the Department is putting in place today, no current beneficiaries will be impacted before March 5, 2018, nearly six months from now, so Congress can have time to deliver on appropriate legislative solutions. However, I want to be clear that no new initial requests or associated applications filed after today will be acted on.”

U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader Paul Ryan released his statement on the DACA announcement that reads, in part:

“However well-intentioned, President Obama’s DACA program was a clear abuse of executive authority, an attempt to create law out of thin air. Just as the courts have already struck down similar Obama policy, this was never a viable long-term solution to this challenge. Congress writes laws, not the president, and ending this program fulfills a promise that President Trump made to restore the proper role of the executive and legislative branches..."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/09/05/sessions-talks-trump-stance-on-daca-program-live-blog.html

Labor Day In America: The Land Of The Free And Home Of The Brave

By Frances Rice

As we celebrate Labor Day, let us also pause to remember the victims of Hurricane Harvey and give due recognition to the brave men and women, risking their own lives to aid those afflicted by that horrific storm.

It’s true, as the old adage says, one picture is worth a thousand words.

 

This photo captures the heart and spirit of Americans who forged this great nation—the land of the free and home of the brave.

Click here to read a related story “Hurricane Harvey photo proves chivalry is alive and well in America.”

This is a demonstration of the middle-America that’s mocked by coastal elites, mainly liberal Democrats, who support anti-America hate groups, such as Antifa.

 

Photo: Black-clad Antifa attack peaceful right wing demonstrators in Berkeley

The below article “Stop Making Excuses for Antifa Thuggery” details how liberals make excuses for left-wing violence against innocent Americans who are trying to exercise their freedom of speech.

Below are pictures that exposes another anti-American hate group, Black Lives Matter, which cares nothing about black lives.

Photo: Black Lives Matter Protester

 

Photo: Black Lives Matter Rioters

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Stop Making Excuses for Antifa Thuggery

By Rich Lowry

 

One of the least safe places to be in Berkeley, California, is in the vicinity of someone holding a “No Hate” sign.

So-called anti-fascist, or Antifa, activists bearing shields emblazoned with those words assaulted any of the handful of beleaguered Trump supporters they could get their hands on at a small political rally over the last weekend. All in the cause, mind you, of demonstrating their supposed opposition to hatefulness.

Too many people were willing to perfume Antifa in the wake of Charlottesville, where it clashed with Nazi thugs who caused, and deserved, a wave of national revulsion. But Berkeley demonstrates once again the true nature of this left-wing movement, which is thuggish in its tactics and totalitarian in its sensibility. Anyone who at this point makes excuses for antifa — or worse, justifies it — is participating in its moral rot.

The antifa goons showed up in force at Berkeley at what had been a small “anti-Marxist” rally of Trump supporters at a public park. Antifa wore its usual fascistic garb of black masks and body armor. They overwhelmed the police who had been trying to maintain order and, holding aloft smoke-spewing flares, chanted, “Whose park? Our park!”

They then treated suspected Trump supporters with all the decorousness of torch-wielding medieval villagers who believed they had stumbled upon a witch. A leader of a pro-Trump group had to run from a mob that pepper-sprayed and beat him, until he was taken into police custody for his own protection. The targets weren’t Nazis bearing Nazi regalia, but supporters of the duly-elected president of the United States. Or people who were guilty of the offense of committing journalism — a reporter was beaten by the antifa cadres.

Antifa benefited enormously from the horrific events in Charlottesville. It became Nazis versus the people standing up to the Nazis, and in that formulation the people standing up to the Nazis always win. There can be no moral equivalence, we were told, between Nazis and their opponents. But that depends on who the opponents are — there is a vast difference between peaceful counterprotesters and violent thugs, even if they are marching on the same side. 

There was certainly moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin. Likewise, bully-boy fascists spoiling for a fight and black-clad leftists looking to beat them up exist on the same moral plane. They both thrill to violence and benefit from the attention that comes from it. They both reject civility and the rule of law that make a democratic society possible. They both are profoundly illiberal.

All this was lost in the reaction to Charlottesville. Liberal commentators spread memes comparing Antifa to American GIs who stormed the beaches at Normandy. The comparison would be apt if the 1st Infantry Division got together to spend an afternoon beating up fellow Americans rather than giving its last measure of devotion to breaching Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.

There is a cottage industry in excuse-making for Antifa. Mark Bray of Dartmouth College says in the Washington Post that its activists are characterized by “their willingness to physically defend themselves and others from white supremacist violence and preemptively shut down fascist organizing efforts before they turn deadly,” i.e., assault people and shut down uncongenial speech as they deem necessary. Todd Gitlin of Columbia University writes in the New York Times that Antifa is “not squeamish about its means” — but he is clearly squeamish about describing it frankly.

There will always be thugs who enjoy breaking things and hurting people. The real scandal is that otherwise respectable people are willing to look the other way or explain away the violence, so long as its perpetrators are on their side. They are just as cowardly as the mask-wearing Antifa thugs who are brave enough to punch and kick people, but not to show their faces.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450906/antifa-berkeley-protest-turns-violent-again

Why Did White Democrats Fool Black People Into Believing Uncle Tom Was A Sellout?

Click Here To View The Video “The Truth About Uncle Tom.”

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Modern Liberalism’s False Obsession With Civil War Monuments

By Jason L. Riley

 

A statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson in Richmond, VA - Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Black accomplishments in the ’40s and ’50s prove that today’s setbacks are not due to slavery.

Visit the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and between exhibits of dinosaur skeletons, Asian elephants and Alaskan moose you might notice a bust of Henry Fairfield Osborn and a plaque honoring Madison Grant. Osborn and Grant were two of the country’s leading conservationists in the early 1900s. They also were dedicated white supremacists.

Osborn, a former president of the museum, founded the Eugenics Education Society—now known as the Galton Institute—which sought the improvement of humanity through selective breeding.

Grant, a co-founder of the Bronx Zoo, is known today for his influential 1916 best seller, “The Passing of the Great Race,” a pseudoscientific polemic arguing that nonwhite immigrants—which included Eastern and Southern Europeans by his definition—were tainting America’s superior Nordic stock.

Osborn, who was a zoologist by training, wrote the introduction to Grant’s book, which Hitler called “my Bible.” The New Yorker magazine once described Grant as someone who “extended a passion for preserving bison and caribou into a mania for preserving the ‘Nordic race.’ ”

Given their options, why are liberals so focused on monuments to Civil War figures?

Politically, it makes some tactical sense.

The GOP has spent decades warding off claims of racism, and forcing Republican politicians to defend prominent displays of Confederate statuary keeps them on the defensive. [Even though Democrats created the Confederacy and put up the Confederate statuary.]

On another level, however, liberals make a fetish of Civil War monuments because it feeds their hallowed slavery narrative, which posits that racial inequality today is mainly a legacy of the country’s slave past.

One problem with these assumptions about slavery’s effects on black outcomes today is that they are undermined by what blacks were able to accomplish in the first hundred years after their emancipation, when white racism was rampant and legal and blacks had bigger concerns than Robert E. Lee’s likeness in a public park.

Today, slavery is still being blamed for everything from black broken families to high crime rates in black neighborhoods to racial gaps in education, employment and income. Yet outcomes in all of those areas improved markedly in the immediate aftermath of slavery and continued to improve for decades.

Between 1890 and 1940, for example, black marriage rates in the U.S. where higher than white marriage rates.

In the 1940s and ’50s, black labor-participation rates exceeded those of whites; black incomes grew much faster than white incomes; and the black poverty rate fell by 40 percentage points.

Between 1940 and 1970—that is, during Jim Crow and prior to the era of affirmative action—the number of blacks in middle-class professions quadrupled.

In other words, racial gaps were narrowing. Steady progress was being made.

Blacks today hear plenty about what they can’t achieve due to the legacy of slavery and not enough about what they did in fact achieve notwithstanding hundreds of years in bondage followed by decades of legal segregation.

In the post-’60s era, these positive trends would slow, stall, or in some cases even reverse course.

The homicide rate for black men fell by 18% in the 1940s and by another 22% in the 1950s.

But in the 1960s all of those gains would vanish as the homicide rate for black males rose by nearly 90%.

Are today’s black violent-crime rates a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow or of something else? Unfortunately, that’s a question few people on the left will even entertain.

Just ask Amy Wax and Lawrence Alexander, law professors at the University of Pennsylvania and University of San Diego, respectively, who were taken to task for co-authoring an op-ed this month in the Philadelphia Inquirer that lamented the breakdown of “bourgeois” cultural values that prevailed in mid-20th-century America. “

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow,” they wrote.

“Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”

The professors noted that disadvantaged groups have been hit hardest by the disintegration of these middle-class mores and that the expansion of the welfare state, which reduced the financial need for two-parent families, hastened social retrogression. “A strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect,” they wrote. “Instead, the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.”

For the suggestion that something other than continuing racial bigotry and the legacy of slavery has contributed to racial inequality, a coalition of faculty and students at the University of Pennsylvania promptly accused the professors of advancing a “racist and white supremacist discourse.”

The reality is that there was a time when blacks and whites alike shared conventional attitudes toward marriage, parenting, school and work, and those attitudes abetted unprecedented social and economic black advancement.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/modern-liberalisms-false-obsession-with-civil-war-monuments-1504045658?mg=prod/accounts-wsj