“The Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” These words were delivered by a former slave. The all-caps emphasis was his. In an 1852 speech entitled What to the Slave is the Fourth of July the inimitable Frederick Douglass called out the evil of slavery while praising an undeniable instrument of liberation: the U.S. Constitution.
If you visit the National Museum of African-American History and Culture’s (NMAAHC) online exhibit of Douglass’ Fourth of July speech, you won’t see or hear any mention of the Constitution. It’s not the first or last time that the Smithsonian will suppress history. Remember, NMAAHC is the same museum that heavily pushes racist “White Privilege” rhetoric and the infamous (but removed) “Whiteness and White Culture” infographic that proclaimed having a hard work ethic, intact married family, and using objecting rational thinking were “white.”
The Left loves its racism.
We live in an America that is vastly changed from the one in 1852. Too many enjoy being bound up in the past as they refuse to see the profoundly altered present. They choose to paint a false America and take pride in dividing us by the beautiful hues of our skin.
Former NFL antagonist and activist, Colin Kaepernick, loves trotting out the pre-abolition excerpts from this Douglass’ speech in an attempt to justify his fake oppression as a multi-million-dollar brand ambassador for Nike (an actual oppressor that profits from forced labor) and former professional athlete. Douglass rightfully denounces the failure of our nation’s political and religious leaders to live up to our national creed and Biblical principles. However, anti-America progressives ignore the hope offered in Douglass’ fiery address: “Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country.”
If a former slave can say he does not despair, why do modern-day, self-proclaimed (celebrity) victims constantly portray America as a place of oppression, doom and gloom? Douglass continued:
“‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened,’ and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.”
What are the obvious tendencies of this age? With the rise of wokism in our public schools, the solidifying of Marxism in our colleges and universities, and the celebration of tyrannical regimes like China in Hollywood and professional sports, leftist tendencies seem to want to “burn down the system.” Literally.
Ruth Colker, the Distinguished University Professor and Heck Faust Memorial Chair in Constitutional Law at Ohio State University, has a radically different take than Douglass. She calls the Law of the Land the “White Supremacist Constitution.” Colker, who is white, writes: “The United States Constitution is a document that, during every era, has helped further white supremacy. Rather than understand the document as a force for progressive structural change, we should understand it as a barrier to change. Put differently, the U.S. Constitution has been a resounding success at preserving white supremacy. For example, U.S. citizens in the District of Columbia, who are disproportionately racial minorities, are provided no power in the U.S. Senate, while the former slave-holding states of Alabama and Mississippi have as much Senatorial power as California and New York.”
There’s that hopeless and historically-challenged progressivism. The Senate is intentionally meant to have equal representation from each state; Colker doesn’t mention that the House’ representation is based on population. You would think a “distinguished” professor would know these basic facts. The Constitution was ratified in 1788. The District of Columbia wasn’t created until 1790. In 1800 the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 70% of DC was white. DC didn’t become a majority-black city until 1957.
Don’t let historical accuracy get in the way of political zealotry. New York Times bestselling author and anti-racism propagandist, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, wants to pass an “anti-racism” amendment to our Constitution. Kendi has expressed the only way to fight (alleged) discrimination is with more (actual) discrimination. He believes his racist Critical Race Theory approach to governance is the way forward: “To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.” In his Politico Op-ed, Kendi duplicitously demands that “we have to prevent public officials from dividing Americans through racist ideas” as his best-selling books undeniably divide people by color.
Kendi’s worldview is hostile to that of Dr. Martin Luther King. With “anti-racism”, content of character no longer matters; color is supreme. Yet Dr. King, who actually experienced the codified systemic racism that Kendi pretends to face, had this to say about nonviolent activism and the Constitution in his I’ve Been to the Mountaintop speech: “And I knew that as they were sitting in [at the lunch counter], they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
The concepts of liberty espoused in our Declaration of Independence and our amendable Constitution are worth defending and celebrating. Combined with our rich Judeo-Christian heritage, they make America an exceptional nation that draws more people worldwide than any other nation.
Douglass impacted millions in his lifetime with his indefatigable advocacy for human equality. His words have generational reverberations. He influenced a President – a friend – who continually evolved on the issue of “race” because of Douglass’ faith-based convictions and eloquence. Abraham Lincoln so presciently summed up the power of We The People: “The people — the people — are the rightful masters of both Congresses and Courts — not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it.”
Kendi duplicitously demands that “we have to prevent public officials from dividing Americans through racist ideas”
That sounds a lot like what us boomers did throughout our lives until BLM decided that we are all racist scum.
Ibram X. Krement . . .
“Douglass rightfully denounces the failure of our nation’s political and religious leaders to live up to our national creed and Biblical principles.”
The Bible is filled with Holy Scripture that defends and encourages SLAVERY. Holy Scripture was used by pro-slavery Christians to defend slavery. Holy Scripture was also used by pro-Apartheid Christians to defend Apartheid.
It is sickening to see Christian conservatives whitewash the history of Christianity at every single turn. Just like the Muslims and the Marxists whitewash and evade the factual history of their evil mysticism.
Part 1
“The Bible is filled with Holy Scripture that defends and encourages SLAVERY.”
Then by all means please cite it. In context as well. Considering you got caught misquoting it a bunch of times, such as forgetting the Parable of the Talents (oh, there’s a freebie, dealing with slavery in a matter of fact and rather utilitarian manner, as most people alive at the time did it; you can dig out the rest). It’s also worth noting that the Bible does encourage people to be Slaves to God, but that also is used to contest slavery to anybody and anything else, as the Epistle to Philemon attests.
And that’s before we talk about the institution of the Jubilee Year, which was almost if not completely without precedent in its neighborhood in the form of a periodic manumission of all slaves and nullification of all debts, preventing the establishment of a strong caste system of slaves and slave owners or debtors and indebted like what did so much to destroy the Corinthian, Syracusian, and Roman citizen body (and which would undercut Iranian sovereignty on their own soil until the Sassanids ended centuries of foreign rule, at least for a while until the Arab Muslim Conquests).
The Bible is not exactly an abolitionist text, but it is generally QUITE scathing about slavery as a whole. It treats it as a fact of life and society, but a shameful one that must be regulated in light of the inherent dignity of the human individual.
Quote from 2 Peter 2:19. They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity….for people are slaves to (whatever has mastered them.)20. If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and are overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER, AS I HAVE LOVED YOU.
Romans 6:23. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.
Proverbs 22:7. The borrow is the slave to the lender,. Especially if he doesn’t pay off his debt.
This is why the United States is the SLAVE to China,
Part 2
“Holy Scripture was used by pro-slavery Christians to defend slavery.”
This is true, though they were generally stomped on quite convincingly by anti-slavery Christians. Which is why over the course of the Long 18th Century you saw a retreat from religious rhetoric by advocates of slavery, with Slaver Lords like the justifiably infamous Lord Tarleton generally focused on appeals to economic practicality, as did their peers in the American South before shifting towards a new and theologically groundless appeal to anti-Black racism.
Turns out that trying to use the Bible with the stories of the Exodus and a detailed system of periodic emancipation during the Years of Jubilee (something you pointedly ignore, precisely because it served to undermine the creation of a permanent slave caste like what the plantation economies of the Atlantic and Mesopotamia depended on) to defend slavery isn’t the brightest move.
“”Holy Scripture was also used by pro-Apartheid Christians to defend Apartheid.”
See above.
Part 3
“It is sickening to see Christian conservatives whitewash the history of Christianity at every single turn.”
It’s sickening to see an egotistical liar and smear merchant who insists they “defeated me” in a debate about Thomas Aquinas and the Renaissance in spite of not knowing when said Renaissance started, smear millions upon millions of people for the crime of knowing the history and source material far better than their egotistical, gas lighting idols Rand and Peikoff.
“Just like the Muslims and the Marxists whitewash and evade the factual history of their evil mysticism.”
Which would be more convincing if you haven’t been demonstrated MANY TIMES OVER to suck at researching or comprehending “factual history.” Which is why you are left blathering incoherently about things such as a “Christian Dark Age” and insisting that the Catholic Church persecuted Copernicus personally.
Apparently the concept that one needs to know the subject matter to accurately critique it goes beyond you.
“Kendi’s worldview is hostile to that of Dr. Martin Luther King…. “And I knew that as they were sitting in [at the lunch counter], they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
King and Kendi are made of the same COLLECTIVIST cloth. King was not an advocate of INDIVIDUALISM, of individual rights, and private property rights, i.e., CAPITALISM. King was a Christian Socialist fully advocating the initiation of government FORCE to violate individual rights for his “noble” Christian cause.
King was an “anti-racist” like Kendi. But anti-racism is NOT individualism, it is another form of racism, or more precisely collectivism.
King had no right to violate the private property rights of the lunch counter owners. The Lunch Counter Sit Ins were a clear and unequivocal violation of individual rights and private property rights. But King was no advocate of clear cut and unequivocal individual rights and private property rights, he was an enemy of capitalism, because he was a staunch Christian Socialist. Christianity prepared the way for Marxism.
Part 1
“King and Kendi are made of the same COLLECTIVIST cloth.”
Sort of. King was not the ethical, honest conservative he pretended to be in public, and he did indeed dabble a great deal with socialist and collectivist nonsense. However, he was not the racist Kendi was.
“King was not an advocate of INDIVIDUALISM, of individual rights,”
He did not place the individual or individualism at the heart of his world view, and for that I criticize him, but he did advocate for individual rights, especially when it was convenient for him.
” and private property rights, i.e., CAPITALISM. King was a Christian Socialist fully advocating the initiation of government FORCE to violate individual rights for his “noble” Christian cause.”
Which is true. Though he pointed out (very convincingly) that many of the same forces that were quick to blather about individual rights and freedom of property rights were also happy to burn down “Undesirables” in their property or to employ the government to uphold a racial caste system. And on those grounds he was quite correct.
Part 3
“But anti-racism is NOT individualism, it is another form of racism, or more precisely collectivism.”
Agreed, which is also why i point to it. King was willing to at least postulate a future time when racism would vanish and all would gather together to play kumbaya, and certainly had less of a knee jerk vilification of whites than Kendi. His was a collectivism of an insidious nature, but different from Kendi’s racist “anti-racism.”
“King had no right to violate the private property rights of the lunch counter owners. The Lunch Counter Sit Ins were a clear and unequivocal violation of individual rights and private property rights.”
Leaving aside the fact that many (not all, though many) of the sit ins were in fact coordinated conspiracies between the private owners and the protestors so that the latter could sidestep the racist nanny state laws of Jim Crow without being singled out and lynched…
There’s the fact that the decision to exclude Blacks and those sympathetic to them from the lunch counters was not, on the whole, an organic choice that grew up from communal feeling but was codified by force in racial laws that were manifestly unjust and upheld by terror.
Part 2
He is not the secular saint he is often portrayed as, and I find his values to be far inferior to the undyingly principled, stubborn, and unpopular Barry Goldwater (to cite just a few), and his personal sins were grievous. But I can hardly fault his bravery. As for the policy of trumping the progressive nanny states dominating places like Alabama by appealing to a larger nanny state, that’s had dire consequences for human freedom (as Goldwater and others pointed out re: 1964, for which King smeared him), but his direct enemies were rarely any better.
“King was an “anti-racist” like Kendi. ”
No, he was not. He was hardly a rugged individualist and was happy to appeal to identity politics, but he was nowhere near as racist as Kendi is, both because of his outward role in the Republican Party and because at the time there were serious movements in socialism to transcend racism (at least in theory). This hardly makes him a great human being whose values were all admirable, but there’s an important gulf between him and radicals like Kendi.
Part 4
” But King was no advocate of clear cut and unequivocal individual rights and private property rights, he was an enemy of capitalism, because he was a staunch Christian Socialist. ”
Agreed, which is why I find it disturbing how much his personal sins and beliefs were swept under the rug and curated in “popular memory”, as if we are obliged to make him an idol.
“Christianity prepared the way for Marxism.”
I’ve been the stuffing out of this miserable falsehood many times over, and I will do so again.
If Christianity prepared the way for Marxism, why did Marx and Engels pointedly disagree, pointing to a mixture of anti-theist utopianism and the Prussian State’s lip service to collectivism in the public good?
For those who claim the U.S. Constitution is Racists lets see you find the N word in it first
While we are quoting Frederick Douglass let’s not forget his most famous speech: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in
the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham;
your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty
and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow
mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity,
are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would
disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are
the people of these United States, at this very hour. “
Margaret Sanger created the Planned Parenthood-abortion industry, she was a Mentor of Hillary Clinton and the Left. She was a racist and her association planned for the abortions of so many black babies. The Left screams democracy, fairness, and equality, but they have never delivered on their promises. The real racists are those that seek to divide people based on color. Teaching Critical Race Theory in Schools is anti-semitism and it is a divider of humanity. Parents should stand up to this betrayal of unity. Frederick Douglas was wise man, and proof if you can educate people with truth, the monster of racism doesn’t have a chance.
As we look at the Old South, look who owned the slaves, the Democrats and their Southern Plantations. They never wanted equal rights for blacks, they kept them in bondage until Abraham Lincoln spoke out about slavery and how wrong it was, and the Union and the Confederates went to war!i