Discrimination is Un-American

When a young organizer named John Lewis spoke at the March on Washington in August 1963, he delivered a scorching rebuke of racism and its “political, economic and social exploitation.” But Lewis also did something else: He aligned his side, the civil rights movement, with the symbols and ideals of America.

The marchers would not rest, he said from the Lincoln Memorial steps, “until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete.”

It was a deliberate strategy. Even as the movement’s leaders raged, most justifiably, against their country’s oppression of them — and even as their enemies called them traitors — they cast themselves as patriots, the historian Simon Hall has noted. They urged the country to live up to its founding creed. They knew that by doing so, they gave themselves the best chance to win their fight.

A year-and-a-half later, marchers from Selma to Montgomery carried American flags. Segregationist hecklers along the route held up Confederate flags. Within six months, Lyndon Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act.

Symbols matter in politics. They often matter more than the detailed arguments that opposing sides make. Symbols are a shortcut that help persuadable outsiders figure out where to line up.

Most Americans respect the country’s symbols the Civil Rights Activists were the true patriots defending life, liberty and equality under the law. True American Ideals.

Abraham Lincoln was a believer that the Founding documents had prepared America to accomplish what he set out to do. The idea contained in the declaration that “All Men Are Created Equal” was not needed for the fight the British, for example, “but without it, we could not, I think, have secured our free government, and consequent prosperity,” he wrote at the outset of the war.

A century later, Martin Luther King made the same point in the “I Have a Dream Speech,” when he said the Founders had written a promissory note that all men “yes, black men as well as white” would be guaranteed their unalienable rights.

With Jim Crow, America had defaulted on this promissory note, King said. But unlike Kaepernick and other Anti Americans, King believed in the institutions: “We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we’ve come to cash this check.”

From the beginning of King’s “I have a dream” speech, we see it is a call to live up to American ideals. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” MLK said. “This note was a promise that all menyes, black men as well as white men would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

King was appealing to patriotism. He is clearly saying if you believe in the principles laid out in the Declaration and the Constitution, you can’t tolerate racial injustice a message as true today as it was then. One of the lessons of the civil rights movement is that appealing to patriotism and American values is an effective route to moving public opinion.

Further, while it was obvious that the focal point was justice for black Americans, the message was that addressing racism was an issue of coming together: “When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”f

Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t carry just a piece of cloth to symbolize his belief in racial equality, he carried the American flag. Although Dr. King was famous for civil disobedience, he never shamed his country by taking a knee in anything other than prayer.

There was a time when the American flag represented freedom and liberty to all Americans. Dr. King never marched without it, and it was a symbol of love, togetherness and justice for all.

Standing for the National Anthem to honor America is not a political statement, and it’s not about oppression, free speech or Donald Trump, it is a display of patriotism, togetherness, you know, like the national motto: “E Pluribus Unim;” From Many, One.

To the Alt-Left, the American flag has become a symbol of the Right, by default; another tactic of the Alt-Left to easily identify the enemy. That’s right, law abiding, gun toting, bible thumping, flag waving Americans are the enemy to the Alt-Left. If you wear the flag in any form you are a target.

Our battle is a moral battle, it’s right or wrong, good vs. evil, not black or white.

In solidarity black, white, brown; man, woman; young, old stand proudly for the flag and Anthem. After that, speak with your American brothers and sisters about whatever you want. Just please avoid spitting in their face or peeing on their shoe to get their attention.

True Americans are better than that.

Politicizing standing for or properly respecting the National Anthem, our flag or any public tradition is simply part of the manipulative agenda of the Alt-Left aimed at controlling the thinking of the People. Not this time, and not these People.

The Alt-Left says you have to pick a side, a “Yes” or a “No.” I say, be like Louis Gossett, Jr., and remember who you are, a member of the American Family. You are not who the Alt-Left says you are or should be. We’ve all come too far for anything else to make sense.

Even if it were true, that African Americans were discriminated against in the United States in 2017. The Protest is still Misdirected, the American Flag and National Anthem are symbols that represent our country.Even if some Police Officers are racist, it doesn’t make sense to protest those particular racists by demonstrating against the country as a whole.

Martin Luther King Protested Discrimination against African Americans on City Buses, by boycotting City Buses.He never Denigrated the Flag or the Anthem. In fact he did the opposite. He said that the people who oppress blacks are the ones Denigrating the flag and what it stands for.

And what does it stand for? Ironically its the protesters themselves who give us the answer. It stands for Freedom.

As a son of a non-white American I am grateful to the activists of the civil rights movement for their efforts to open up doors that would otherwise have remained closed. But at the same time, I am struck by the ease with which Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement won its victories, and by the magnitude of white goodwill in this country. In a single decade, from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties, America radically overhauled its laws through a series of landmark decisions: Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act. Through such measures, America established equality of rights under the law. Of course, the need to enforce nondiscrimination provisions continues, but for nearly half a century, blacks and other minorities have enjoyed the same legal rights as whites.

For a few decades now, blacks and some minorities have enjoyed more rights and privileges than whites. The reason is that America has implemented affirmative action policies that give legal preference to minority groups in university admissions, jobs, and government contracts. Such policies remain controversial, but the point is that they reflect the great lengths to which this country has gone to eradicate discrimination. It is extremely unlikely that a racist society would grant its minority citizens legal preferences over members of the majority group. Some private discrimination continues to exist in America, but the only form of discrimination that can be legally practiced today benefits blacks more than whites.

Some however will argue that the United States today espouses a “Racist Criminal Justice System”. Michelle Alexander, a law professor at Ohio State University, blames “the new Jim Crow.” Her book by that title, published in 2010, argues that the “basic structure of our society” has not changed since the days of segregated water fountains, merely “the language we use to justify it.” Because “today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans,” our criminal-justice system has simply labeled “people of color” “criminals” and perpetuated America’s “racial caste.”

Invoking Jim Crow it seems to be part of Al Sharpton’s daily routine is an evocative but problematic comparison, not least because Jim Crow laws were blanket restrictions on innocent Americans, while incarceration is a punishment meted out to criminals because they have committed a crime. Accusations of institutional racism upend debate by presuming the criminal-justice system guilty.

One can understand why black Americans distrusted the system in the years immediately following the Civil Rights Act, which sought to end an era when blacks were harassed without cause, convicted of exaggerated charges, and condemned to overlong prison terms, and when whites who victimized them were frequently let off, sometimes scot-free. But half a century on? Its just not based in reality

The cause of the racial disparity in the criminal-justice system is simple: A disproportionate share of blacks are in prison because blacks commit a disproportionate share of crimes. This is what Sampson and Lauritsen concluded a decade and a half ago, and study after study since then has supported their conclusion.

None of this is to deny the existence of racist cops, racist attorneys, racist jurors, and racist judges. But unlike that of the Jim Crow era, any racism in the criminal-justice system today cannot be shown to be institutional, and it is likely to be corrected by the many checks within the system.

The reality is that America has achieved greater social equality than any other society. True, there are large inequalities of income and wealth in America. In purely economic terms, Europe is more egalitarian. But Americans are socially more equal than any other people, and this is unaffected by economic disparities. Alexis de Tocqueville noticed this egalitarianism a century and a half ago, but it is, if anything, more prevalent today.

There is racism everywhere. You can’t eliminate it altogether. It has been around since the dawn of man and will always be with us.

But nowhere on the planet have we eliminated it more than in the United States of America.

We stand alone in the world as a large diverse country that has relegated racism and discrimination to a statistical error.

We may have more work to do, but to ignore our progress is truly a shame.

In America, a slave-owner named Thomas Jefferson wrote into the birth certificate of a new nation the proposition that all men are equal in the eyes of God, that they have rights that are God-given, which include liberty and equality, that cannot be taken away by government. Within a little over a generation, at the cost 350,000 Union lives, slavery was abolished in America and then throughout the Western hemisphere.

Every black person in this country owes their freedom to America. The DNA of America is liberty. And why is that? Because America’s Constitution recognizes individual rights as primary, over-riding collective identities based on race, color or creed. It doesn’t matter whether you are black or yellow, or brown, Protestant, Catholic or Jew, you are endowed by the Creator with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That’s the American way.

Identity politics are the anti-American way, erasing the individual in favor of the collective. They are designed to imprison individuals in their birth status, as in the hierarchical societies of the past, and Communist societies of modern times. Here is an official rationale, from a Cheka official of the time of Lenin, for the disposal of 30 million human souls: “We are not carrying out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. We are not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal deeds or words against the Soviet power. The first question we ask is — to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education or profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the Red Terror.”

History is replete with the births (and deaths) of nations. But the birth of the United States was unique because it was, and remains, a nation founded not on ties of blood, soil or ethnicity, but on ideas, held as self-evident truths: that all men are created equal; they are endowed with certain inalienable rights; and, therefore, the just powers of government, devised to safeguard those rights, must be derived from the consent of the governed.

“Americans and Europeans alike sometimes forget how unique is the United States of America. No other nation has been built upon an idea, the idea of liberty.” Margaret Thatcher’s 1991 words perfectly reflect the essence of American exceptionalism: that uniquely among the countries of the world, the United States was founded not on bonds of blood or race or religion or tribe, but on the ideals of freedom, equality, and self-government. From that heritage flowed an array of unique characteristics and traditions that shaped how Americans see themselves and their country’s place in the world.

This is the heart of the American creed, and to billions of people around the globe, Thomas Jefferson’s words are synonymous with the very idea of America. To believe in this proposition is, in a very real sense, to believe in America. The idea forms the bedrock of our national culture and has made that culture uniquely accessible to immigrants wishing to gain not just American citizenship, but an American identity.

In an 1858 speech, Abraham Lincoln argued that immigrants who believed in the principles proclaimed by our Founding Fathers, who felt that the “moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men . . . have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.” In most times and places throughout human history, blood relations​ ​and blood relations alone​were what defined one as belonging or not belonging to a nation. The idea that dedication to political ideals and an oath of citizenship could be just as​ ​or even more​ ​meaningful than blood was revolutionary. It remains rare in the world even today, and we can easily forget how ours is quite different from most traditional understandings of nationality.

The American identity and national bond are based not just on a common history or culture or language but, more important, on a set of common ideals and principles, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence: the equality of all individuals, the inviolability of human rights, and the dependence of government’s legitimacy on the consent of the governed.

Without a shared belief in liberty, democracy, and equal opportunity, we would cease to be Americans in any meaningful sense. Our patriotic displays express a shared pride and dedication to those ideals far beyond any brittle bond of race, ethnicity, or narrow sense of nationality.

Genius knows no race, no religion. It can be found wherever there are human beings. But it is more likely to flourish where there is freedom, equality, opportunity and innovation.That place is America.

The genius of America lies in the fact that our Constitution enjoins us to judge people as individuals, on their merits. We don’t judge them by their race and we don’t judge them by their gender. The American idea that we try to live up to is that everybody is equal before the law. Everybody deserves to be judged by who they are and what they have done, not by their skin color or gender.