Reconstructing History, Part 3: Social Justice Movements

There is clearly merit in some arguments of social justice warriors (SJW). American has a racist past. Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 was a dark stain on American liberty and freedom. But at least since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the attitudes and momentum changed. Though it took another Supreme Court case, sometimes referred to as Brown II, the times were truly changing and momentum grew stronger during the 1950s. Eisenhower deployed federal troops in 1957 to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce desegregation and proposed and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He stated, “Unless we progress, we regress.” President Johnson continued the effort with his Great Society Initiative.

The SJW movement says that is not enough. They cite material from the 1619 Project (1619) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) to argue racism is embedded in every American institution and effects everything Americans think, say, and do.

Education Next reports:

New York Times Magazine, Jake Silverstein, explained, “The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”

The question is, has America done enough to eliminate or at least curtain racism? The answer is clearly to those behind 1619 and CRT, no. So the next question is, will efforts ever be enough? Again, to those invested in 1619 and CRT, probably not. They gain their power and influence through racial turbulence. And Marxist doctrines often influence them. For those true believers, only the transition to socialism and then communism will be enough. Note, 1619 says capitalism is hopelessly racist. For them, social justice is just an enabling tool. These are forces represented by the dynamite in the figure above.

Is there any merit to the 1619 Project? The New York Times seems to think so. They published the original manifesto in their magazine on 14 August 2019. Nikole Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her piece.

Matthew Desmond is Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton. In a piece on capitalism, the August 14, 2019 edition of the New York Times, he wrote, “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, start on the plantation.” So capitalism played no part in New England with the mills their brutality and child labor? A list of his papers on the Princeton website shows Desmond is fully invested in the racial narrative.

There is little to debate that capitalism in America and elsewhere has brutal aspects in its history. The child labor mentioned above is one aspect. The Robber Barons of the Gilded Age are another. Upton Sinclair documented many abuses in his work, especially in the influential, The Jungle. Two of my great grandfathers died of black lung and other ailments of the coal mines. Quite a bit of these brutalities were directed against white workers. Perhaps most them. The flaws of capitalism are not racist, they are a function of greed.

Yet capitalism is also the engine that drove American growth and prosperity. The goal should be to remove the abuses and maintain a humanistic capitalism. Theodore Roosevelt, who read The Jungle, made a strong effort to do this through his Square Deal and trust-busting efforts.

We do not need to tear down history and recreate it. We need to objectively tell our history, warts and all. We need to use the lessons of history to build a successful and sustainable republic that delivers on the promise of the Preamble to the Constitution and the points in the Declaration of Independence. We need to be true to these precepts and not bury and obscure them to create something totally different from them.

The Preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

These are the enduring truths. We may have strayed from them at times, but they have guided the vector of American civilization. They are why Americans dismantled racism and sought fairness while maintaining prosperity. Racial narratives and a re-writing history and destroying the institutions of prosperity are not the way.