A step forward
Don’t sugarcoat our racist history
It was recently reported that Sen. Tom Cotton spoke on the Senate floor Aug. 10 to urge colleagues to vote for his budget-reconciliation-package amendment which would prohibit federal funds from being used to promote critical race theory (CRT) in pre-K programs and K-12 schools. The amendment passed, 50-49.
Cotton said he grew up being taught that America is a great and noble nation because it is “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” as Abraham Lincoln stated. Cotton said, “In America, our rights have no color, our law and society should be color blind, and, as Dr. Martin Luther
King said, we should not be judged by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character.”
Let’s take a closer look at Cotton’s sentiments. I also grew up being taught that America is a great and noble nation, although my understanding was the sentiment about all men being equal came from founding father Thomas Jefferson. Being a devotee of the “Adventures of Superman” radio show (and later TV), I was also taught the values of “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”
As Joshua Isaak so eloquently put it on Screen Rant, “demanding truth from our leaders and justice from our courts” is self-explanatory. With respect to the final part, Isaak asserts, “‘The American Way’ means and has always meant to leave behind a better world for the next generation—and inspiring others to do the same—even if the benefactors will not live to experience it.”
According to Isaak, “To Superman, passing on knowledge, experience and virtues to those who follow us is The American Way, and there is no higher calling.” I agree and that is exactly why Senator Cotton is wrong.
Taking a cold, hard look at American history, and drowning out the noise and political rhetoric from both sides of the aisle, I believe we are a racist nation. Look at the facts.
It is well-documented that many of our founders were slaveholders. When Jefferson wrote those aspirational words “That all men are created equal,” he was not thinking about the Black men and women he owned and whom he depended upon to keep up his estate at Monticello. He was thinking only about white property owners in the colonies who, the founders believed, were equal in status to the British imperialists who continued to impose taxes and other indignities on the colonists without them having a say so.
Liberty wasn’t really for all; rather, it was liberty from the stranglehold of the British Empire.
And what about our indigenous populations? Speaking to the Seneca Nation of New York after the passage of the Indian Nonintercourse Act in 1790, President George Washington said, “The general government will never consent to your being defrauded. But it will protect you in all your just rights.”
We know how that turned out, as described by Arkansas writer Dee Brown in his excellent 1970 nonfiction book “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” that covers the history of Native Americans in the American West in the late 19th century. The book expresses details of the history of American expansionism from a point of view that is critical of its effects on the Native Americans. Brown describes Native Americans’ displacement through forced relocations and years of warfare waged by the United States federal government. The government’s dealings are portrayed as a continuing effort to destroy the culture, religion, and way of life of Native American peoples. Racist? Of course.
Then there is the ugly example of the Japanese internment policy following the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. The Roberts Commission Report, prepared at President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s request, has been cited as an example of the fear and prejudice informing the thinking behind the internment program.The report sought to link Japanese Americans with espionage activity, and to associate them with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Sports columnist Henry McLemore, who wrote for Hearst Newspapers, reflected the growing public sentiment that was fueled by the Roberts report: “I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ’em up, pack ’em off, and give ’em the inside room in the badlands. … Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”
The policy of internment may have been well-intentioned, but nevertheless it cannot be denied that it was racist.
The point is that America has a long, ugly history of racist behavior. And if we, as a society and as a nation, choose to look the other way and to buy into the American myth of “In America, our rights have no color” and our law and society are color blind, then we are blinding ourselves to the truth. When we do that deliberately, we stop ourselves from evolving to a place beyond our aspirations.
Critical race theory is nothing more than an effort to take off the blinders. It is not un-American; it is a step forward in order to make us better Americans.