I had planned to wrap up this topic with post #5. But I realize that I need to address BLM. I have addressed two other heavy prices paid by Americans to break us free of the Caste system and thereby enable us to fulfill our core pledge to be a nation where “All men are created equal”.
The Founders paid a huge price to free us from Great Britain. They were unable and unwilling to also pay the high cost in wealth and power to end the caste system. Let a future generation pay that price. Four score years later, their grandchildren and great grandchildren, faced with continuing the hypocrisy or ending slavery, chose the latter. And our nation went through a terrible four-year war that came with a huge cost in blood and treasure to end slavey and advance us toward the achievement of our core pledge. However, this by no means resulted in the end of the caste system. After the failed attempt at “reconstruction”, the caste system was re-implemented via Jim Crow laws and terror (e.g. lynching).
A hundred years after the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws were overturned and for the first time in America’s history (excepting the dozen years of Reconstruction) blacks nationwide were legally considered to be equal to whites. This came at another huge cost. The leader of the Democrat Party at the time, President Lyndon Johnson, shepherded this legislation through Congress knowing full well that its passage would result in the Solid Democrat South becoming the Solid Republican South. Why would the most astute pollical animal of his age do this? Doris Kearns Goodwin makes a compelling case that it was because LBJ believed it was the right thing to do.
Fast forward a half century. No doubt, significant progress has been made in bringing about equality of the races. Look at sports, entertainment, advertising and the media. Look at government. Who would have imagined that within four decades America would elect a president whose father was a Kenyan? And yet, all has not been well. The average wealth of black households is only ten percent that of white households. Year after year, week in and week out, we have been made aware of unarmed and often unresisting black men and sometimes black women being needlessly killed by law enforcement. While activists in the black community had been trying to make the point that this was wrong and that black lives should matter, white people, by and large, did their best to ignore this until May of 2020. That was when the whole world saw the video of a white policemen use his knee to slowly suffocate an unarmed black man.
This instigated what I see as the third major effort in America to change our society and bring us more in alignment with our core creed that all men are created equal. BLM was not simply a national movement; tens of millions of people worldwide took to the streets to show their support for ending the racial disparity that exists in America.
What was so disturbing and telling to me was how many of my conservative friends reviled the BLM movement. They did not see it as a genuine desire of the still subordinate class to receive equal treatment under the law. No, to them it was a threat that should be stamped out and another compelling reason for supporting and defending Donald Trump – the man pledged to take the country back to a time when such movements would not have been tolerated; to a time when whites were the undisputed dominant class. No doubt, this has a lot of appeal as is evidenced by the explosion of white nationalists stepping out of the shadows and giving their unwavering support to Donald Trump. Mr. Trump appeals to the basest natural instincts of whites to reassert their dominance as a class.
But ask yourself, is this the course that Jesus would have his followers take?
Most Relevant Comments:
Jesus would have been concerned with the soul. He was uninterested with the affairs of the government.
Mike, agreed. Jesus did not care about politics. But he did care about truth and human relationships. He wanted his followers to love one another and to love others. Life teaches us that it is nearly impossible to love people you don’t know. to love one another. You need to know each other’s stories. If you ban teaching the true story of blacks in America, you greatly undermine the opportunity to know and thereby love them. Banning the teaching of CRT – assuming it is truthful- does not comport w Jesus’ teaching.
David, I agree and if CRT were taught accurately and comprehensively I would not have an issue. But here are some omissions and misinformation at issue. First if not explicitly, then implicitly early American’s are described as the worst of slavers. But in actuality, slavery, although heinous nonetheless, was minimal in the US compared with South America, Africa and the Middles east. About 5 percent of the slaves brought to the New World came to the colonies. The rest went to South America and the Caribbean and the conditions were extremely brutal. The Arab world has transported or captured over 17 million slaves. The slave trade was very active within Africa long before Europeans landed there. One man, a Mali King in the 14th century had at his peak, 12,000 slaves working on his plantations and mines. Slavery continues to this day in Africa with nations like Mauritania and Mali having hundreds of thousands of slaves in each totaling into the millions across the continent. It was said, around the world at one time not long ago, that if you had money, you had slaves. What was the first nation to ban slaves in the world, Britain who then sent military ships to Africa to shut down the slave trade at a cost of 2 to 3 thousand British lives. Here in America, abolition was very active and though late to the party compared to Britain, we were still early adopters to the ban of slavery. And a couple of hundred thousand Union soldiers died in the war that effectively banned slavery. Now was there still prejudice and discrimination after the Civil War, of course, but it has been a steady march to one of the most diverse, nations that exhibits the concept of freedom and equality far better than most. I have traveled extensively across the globe and found very harsh tribalism, ethnic hatred and discrimination in most nations. I have no problem pointing out our failings as long as we recognize where we are on the spectrum of equality and diversity.2
Mike, Just to confirm, assuming that the material is taught accurately and objectively and is balanced – you agree that it would be helpful if this information, which I will term Critical Race Theory until a new more acceptable term is found for it, is taught in our schools.
Mike, Jesus was and is very political that is why the powerful who controlled the society of his day executed him. Jesus was not and is not partisan. He lived and taught a politic of love and truth and expects those who follow him to do likewise.
Mike – Don White has changed my mind on your point that Jesus was not political. I initially agreed with you, but Don’s comment plus some additional digging I did helped me see that Jesus was actually quite political. Here is a quote from an article on that topic followed by the link: “Jesus also used political means, most dramatically in two public political demonstrations. First, his preplanned entry into Jerusalem on a donkey symbolized a kingdom of peace in which the weapons of war would be banished. Second, he publicly indicted the temple as “a den of robbers” because it had become the center of collaboration with Roman imperial rule and taxation (Matt 21:13, Mark 11:17, Luke 19:46).” Here is the link to the article. It makes a lot sense to me: https://www.bibleodyssey.org/…/relat…/jesus-and-politics
David, your topic so pls explain so that we are all on the same page (no dissertation here) just a capsule definition so that we have enough to debate —- what is your definition of CRT?
Paul, What I have written in my six discourses on Racism. I propose that what some form of what I have written in Parts I – V be taught in all high schools in America.
Newly revealed IRS tax documents show the social justice nonprofit’s (BLM) leaders used “white guilt money” to enrich themselves. It’s time to support local grassroots orgs instead.There was no excuse for the Summer of 2020 being violent with untold destruction to business and careers. No amount of reporting that the protests were “mostly peaceful” will ever erase the images – a CNN reporter with raging fires in the background made that “mostly peaceful” statement.https://www.thedailybeast.com/heres-the-real-takeaway…
Chad, The Black Lives Matter movement has become way more than the three women who first started it. There is little doubt that black people and especially young black men have much more to fear from law enforcement officials than do white people. https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/police-shootings…/ Also, there is the history of racism and the other matters that I have been addressing in my six posts on this topic that are true and relevant regardless of whether one or more of the three black women who first coined “Black Lives Matter” are shysters or not. The problem of racism still exists. Black fathers have to take a much more proactive role in preparing their sons to survive in America than do white fathers of sons like you and me have to do. Black people are killed by police at about three times the rate of white people. The slow graphic suffocation of unarmed George Floyd under the knee of a police officer made it clear that something is out of whack. The BLM movement was a planet wide response acknowledging that. The women who gave the movement a name, had little or anything to do with effecting that response.
WASHINGTONPOST.COMFatal Force: Police shootings databaseFatal Force: Police shootings database
David, BLM was the banner that so many flocked to during the Summer of 2020 – the women who founded that movement did nothing to quell the violence that was engendered by that movement, they took in millions of dollars and what did they do with all that money – certainly nothing to promote peace, nor to promote a reasoned and logical response to the instances of police violence against blacks – they had better things to do with the money, like become Real Estate investors – then they disappeared. Did they attempt to educate an ill educated black population, did they attempt to condemn the everyday violence of black on black crime in Chicago whose lives apparently did not matter to them? What did they do with all that money, how did it help the blacks in America?There are lots of factors that go into a statistical data base and until I know the parameters for the statistic, I will agree with Mark Twain on the subject. “Liars, Damn Liars and Statistics”.I will say this about police and their perceived immunity to prosecutions. Until the police are no longer shielded from public scrutiny over how they handle arrests, some of those “Public Servants” will only serve themselves at the detriment of those that they arrest. There is no defense of what Officer Chauvin did to George Floyd, nor for those that stood by while it happened. That said, if we used a huge data base of crime committed by the public and broke it down by demographics, we might see a different pattern.I have seen a stat that only counts instances of police violence against all offenders and blacks get 28% of the violence against them with a 13% population base. That means that the other 72% of violent take downs happens to the remainder of the population as a whole.Now what percent of police encounters involve the black population as a whole? Among homicide victims in 2019 where the race was known, 54.7% were black or African-American, 42.3% were white, and 3.1% were of other races. More than half of the homicides in the United States are committed by Blacks – that would bend the statistics towards more police violence against blacks just by itself.Ask yourself if you would be willing to walk the poorer sections of a city – would you not feel on guard, vs walking in a relatively rich part of the same city? Be honest. If you are uncomfortable walking in poor black part of a city, does that make you a racist? Why would you not feel guarded or why would you feel the need to be on guard? I posit that it is not being racist, but many would label you as such.
Chad you make good points and I appreciate you taking the time to do research and share it here. I think it is undeniable that there are a higher percentage of black people, especially young black men, who commit crimes and especially violent crimes than from other racial groups. Their higher rate of criminal behavior is attributable to the vastly different way blacks have been treated in our history including not only slavery and Jim Crow but also to Ill advised programs from the Great Society. Nearly All those policies and programs that so powerfully and often negatively impacted African Americans were designed and implemented by the white dominant caste. One of the key points I have tried to make is that we have made tremendous progress from we started. But as George Floyd et al demonstrates We still have a ways to go before we achieve the aspirations of our national creed- all men are created equal. We whites, especially those with wealth, continue to possess the ability to design and implement policies and programs that significantly influence our society. The onus is on us to proactively do wise things that move us forward. Banning the teaching of CRT will not move us forward.
David, I admire your position on taking a Christian point of view, too many of us fail to honor our Baptismal Vows and we all have to remember that when we are confronted with situations where we can have an influence but fail to do anything.I am very cynical when it comes to how we run our government, but that is a subject for another post or thread.CRT is a hot button and is a subject best left to the Universities. I disagree with the premise’s advanced in that theory, but do not want our history covered up either. Context is central to understanding where slavery and racism were/are rooted in our national psyche. Indeed, we have come a long way since Truman and Eisenhower first advanced making blacks (negro’s) equal participants in our country. This all started with Reconstruction after the Civil War and was mostly opposed by the Democrats until the 1950’s. My cynicism stems from the political strategies implemented by the Democrats to gain blacks into their membership – this only happened because most of the obstacles to getting the black vote were eliminated with the Voting Rights act. It was only then that the Democrats began to court the black vote and it worked! You may not recall, that Senator Biden was opposed to school integration when that was the subject for debate early on in the racial equality struggle.Up until the 1960’s, if Blacks were allowed to vote at all, they voted the Republican ticket.In my opinion, CRT will not advance the American cause for equality – it pits one race against the other and that is a bad start to solving the real issue of equality. Until we see our black brothers and sisters as family, we will continue to violate that Baptismal Oath**, treating each other with dignity and respect is central to God’s wish for all of humanity.
Return to links page: https://respectfulpointsandcounterpoints.com/links-to-discussion-on-understanding-progressives/