I originally planned for this post to appear yesterday long after the fireworks on the East Coast had come to a close. Thanks to You Tube I made the joyful decision to watch fireworks displays in smaller cities and at simple crossroads across the Midwest, the Great Plains and southern Rockies. The images carried me back to the Independence Days of my childhood in a mill town in western Maryland. All of that patriotism past and present brought me a deep and restful sleep.
Waking to a new day I'm invigorated and motivated to share my concern about a growing national threat to the historic personalities, events and ideals we celebrated yesterday. What I'm referring to is a post-modern interpretation of the American experience that operates outside objective truth and fans a racial divide that few of us want to see. We know it as Critical Race Theory (CRT), a concept cloaked in a Marxist framework and readily linked to three words: equity, inclusion, and diversity. I'll leave it to you to research CRT. Some parents familiar with CRT seriously question the theory's place in their local schools. A few months ago they began crowding local board meeting asking why their white children should be categorically declared oppressors and why their BIPOC (black, indigenous or other people of color) children should be categorically declared victims. Some point out that lesson plans and classroom activities could be interpreted as bullying or even violations of equal protection provided by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. It's no wonder the opposition has become a nationwide pushback that grows louder by the week.
One apple from the CRT tree in the news is The New York Times 1619 Project. I am not writing to discredit the a project whose aim is "to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contribution of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative." I am here to point out that the first segment of the project created by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Times reporter noted for her coverage of racial issues, contained notable inaccuracies including its very premise, that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery. Again, I leave it to readers to follow up on the criticisms of the 1619 Project. So far, the project has resulted in four interesting consequences: a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary and a tenured chair in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media for Hannah-Jones at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the adoption of the 1619 Project in school and university curricula across the country, and the New York Times distancing itself from the 1619 Project. I suppose the Times doesn't want to be associated with another Pulitzer in the manner of Walter Duranty. If you don't know that story you can read about it here.
I close with an antidote to all this wokeness about reframing the American experience by appealing to all sides to explore a book that was written fifty year ago. It is Professor Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
The book is a classic today recognized as the best scholarship on its subject in the last century. Bailyn, who passed away last August at 97 shortly after his third revision of the book, lived to see his work celebrated for its rigorous research, clear writing, and logical process that in my opinion approaches objective truth. If you read it you will learn far more than what you need to refute the claim that the American experience was born in a war to keep black people enslaved by white people.
As we look forward to a society facing Critical Race Theory and its derivatives like the 1619 Project, I can only view them as the social equivalent of New Math only this time some of the numbers are missing. I think we can do far better in our government schools than teach racial division, that some people are born superior and keep winning while other are born inferior and keep losing. That's not a solution, rather, it is a perpetual grievance with the power of division and conquest far beyond the subject at hand. The American model is not perfect but it still offers protection and opportunities envied by much of the world. Most assuredly, the future of the American world does not rest with conclusions searching only for those answer that support it.
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