On keeping the faith
Academia’s grotesque version of liberalism — distorted beyond all recognition — views U.S. history as one long binge of racism and genocide.
To point this out is not to argue that America’s history doesn’t include its shameful chapters. There’s not much of a positive gloss that can be applied to the brutal chronicles of slavery and the coercive resettlements of the nation’s first inhabitants.
But there’s more to the story than just that. To borrow a term from Martin Luther King Jr., there was always an “arc of justice” opposed to slavery and Indian dispossession, even back then. Even back then, there was a tenacious determination by a few to raise their constitutionally protected voices of liberty to recognize the evils of the status quo and force an end to them.
To this day that tenacity reverberates in liberalism’s efforts, now largely supported by conservatism, to ease, or erase, the social, economic and political effects of the past’s misjudgments and cruelties. But “critical race theory” and related sour doctrines are opposed to — not a part of — this progressive tradition.
They are driven by a resentful, divisive determination to substitute a new class of oppressed for the old ones. The newly scorned go by such whispered labels as “white trash,” “Uncle Toms,” “anti-vaxers” and “science-deniers.” They are not quite dismissed as untermenschen, maybe, but the tendency is in that direction.
The language of race dominates this new doctrine no less than it did back in the days of Jim Crow. Take note of today’s obsessions with skin color — the outraged cries against “white privilege,” against “white rage”, against “white supremacy,” against white this and white that.
The rhetoric plays with racial fire. In this atmosphere, Jussie
Smollett’s elaborate “cry wolf” MAGA attack hoax nearly pulled itself off.
In this atmosphere, frownedupon “yahoos” who possess no bachelor degrees from Wellesley, never mind law degrees from Yale, have a dwindling standing in the Democratic Party of which they were once a mainstay constituency.
Irredeemables and deplorables, these outcasts land none of the cushy jobs in HR. They receive none of the tenured faculty posts and none of the grants that are dealt out to monitor “environmental racism” and myriad other fashionable causes of the day. They hold none of the sinecures in the regulatory Leviathan that provides the Washington suburbs with the highest per capita incomes in all of America.
This haughty, sneering, newly privileged ruling class is ironically every bit as white and privileged as the one that ran the cotton plantations and drove the Indians into continuing exile. All of the 10 richest congressional districts — all! — and most of the richest 50 are today smug, hoity-toity, blue-state Democratic
Party enclaves.
The propaganda objective of history today, as evidenced by critical race theory dogma, is to apportion guilt and retroactively impose “justice” on broad, superficial categories of the scorned. This snooty outlook provides a bottomless supply of resentful, us-vs.-them divisiveness, a divisiveness that appeals to the most insidious and facile forms of prejudice.
There are no entirely clean hands in human history, no untainted “noble savage” victims, as some philosophers have suggested. The Hispanic conquistadors brought great waves of death by steel, gunpowder, horse and disease.
But their New World victims, the Aztecs, the Incas and the Mayas themselves practiced hideous rituals of oppression, including human sacrifice, before the conquerors arrived.
The original inhabitants of North America had their own ferocious, war-waging proclivities, with their inter- and intra-tribal rivalries, with their back-andforth raids to grab one another’s
horses and women and mutilate one another in chest-thumping, testosterone-driven combat.
While Europeans and their American colonizers bear the overwhelming share of guilt for the slave trade, African tribal chiefs played a crucial role by offering up their captured
tribal foes as cargo to fill the holds of slave ships.
How far back can the villainizing and blame-assessing go? All the way, it seems. If we opt to pursue it, there’s no end in sight to the ugly rancor we can stir up against one another. The blame game, if we choose, can go all the way back to the very dawn of humankind.
The first colonizing imperialists — Homo sapiens — were our forebears
spreading out of Africa into Eurasia, some 70,000 years ago, anthropological science tells us. This turned out to be bad news for the original inhabitants, the Neanderthals, who were lagging in development and, perhaps, in disease immunity. Neanderthals were displaced from their lands and eventually from the face of the earth.
“It may be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals,
the result was the first significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history,” writes the Israeli scholar Yuval Noah Harari in his “A Brief History of Humankind.”
In any event, the Neanderthals were gone by 30,000 years ago, the anthropologists say. Whether or not our forebears were directly responsible for this, it can’t be denied that tolerance has never been the foremost
trait of Homo sapiens, says HararI.
Still, an unmistakable arc of growing tolerance has marked the history of recent centuries, according to another scholar, Harvard’s Stephen Pinker. His book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” notes a dramatic, steady diminution of violence, cruelty and suppression as governing routines in human affairs.
Broad categories of demonization
once cavorted around burning crosses. Now they cavort around burning businesses and toppled statues. With the emphasis on our worse devils rather than on our better angels, where are we likely headed?
The wisdom of recognizing progress and taking heart from it was famously boiled down by the Civil Rights Movement to three simple words: “Keep the faith.”