The debate over Critical Race Theory continues to grow and seemingly grow in its contentiousness. I may be wrong, but I sincerely think most Americans would reject CRT if they only knew what it was. The fact is Critical Race Theory is a lie. And as was said by Adolph Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbells, people will believe any lie if it’s told often enough and loudly enough. That’s what’s happening today.
To dispute this lie lets start with what should be the first and most obvious aspect of CRT. It’s a theory! A theory isn’t fact. A theory is someone’s postulation, or opinion. It is unproven.
Basically, CRT says that the United State’s foundation was born of and maintained strictly on the basis of white supremacy. This would include the existence of slavery at the time of the founding of this country, but also include all institutions herein since all institutions were created by whites, i.e. the oppressors. All non-whites, blacks in particular, represent the oppressed.
At the time of the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1789 five of the original 13 colonies banned slavery. By 1812 there were 18 states and those allowing slavery had balanced out, 9 were free, 9 allowed slaves. Maryland and Delaware (adopted home of Joe Biden) were the only non-Southern states that allowed slavery. It should also be pointed out that the huge majority of whites in the slave states didn’t own any slaves. Owning slaves was a “privilege” exclusively for the rich, which most Southerners were not. So, again, slave ownership was actually something only a tiny percentage of Americans engaged in. Does that sound like an entire nation built on white supremacy?
When the Civil War began, ostensibly over the issue of slavery, the number of free and slave states remained balanced. More than 600,000 Americans died in that war. More than 300,000 of them were white Union soldiers. At no time in world history has a nation of predominantly one race waged war to free a people made up entirely of another race, except in the United States Civil War.
Advocates of the Critical Race Theory continually point to the U.S. Constitution as proof of how the United States was a racist nation from the start. In particular they point to the clause therein that designates blacks as 3/5ths of a person. What the uneducated and willfully ignorant fail to understand is that the 3/5ths of a person clause was specifically intended to deter slavery and weaken its proponents. In order to form a more perfect union and get the Southern slave holding states to join with the Northern free states and ratify the Constitution compromises had to be agreed upon. So the North was willing to allow the South to keep its slaves, not without some heated debate at the Constitutional Convention. But the North didn’t want the South to use their slaves to their advantage when it came to Representation in Congress.
As we all should know the number of representatives each state is allocated for the U.S. House of Representatives is determined by population. Population is determined by the Constitutionally mandated 10 year Census. The more populous a state, the larger its representation in Congress. The North didn’t want slaves to count at all toward a Southern state’s Census count. They wanted the South weakened by diminished representation. The South had a problem. They allowed slavery based on the premise that blacks were not human and therefore not entitled to the equal protections under the law that a white person is entitled. But how could they claim such a horrible belief while asking that blacks count as people, equally with whites, in determining Congressional representation? So the 3/5ths of a person compromise clause was established. The North had succeeded in weakening the slave holding South while still establishing and maintaining the fragile union created by the Revolutionary War.
Of course after the Civil War and the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, Jim Crow laws permeated the South but also existed in many Northern states. Hell, unenforceable discriminatory laws still exist on the books in this author’s home state of Washington, to this day. Convenants in home developments all over Western Washington prohibit non-whites. Most of these were written in the 1940s and 50s and were simply ignored upon later becoming illegal. But they are still on the books.
But here’s the thing, and the reason I mentioned these abhorrent Covenants and Jim Crow, even if they are still on the books they are unenforceable, even if some low-life tried to enforce them, because other Americans, the majority of Americans found such racist discrimination unacceptable.
Critical Race Theory advocates want to point to our history, for the most part our distant history, to make the claim that we are a nation of white racist oppressors. What they fail to mention, intentionally I believe, is that it was mostly white people fighting and dying and debating and writing the laws and issuing the Supreme Court determinations that ended slavery and Jim Crow. These are Americans too. And the slave holders and the racists were and are today only a tiny minority of this country.
No nation in world history has freed more oppressed peoples, healed more sick people, fed more hungry people, and opposed more tyrants than the United States of America.
The United States is and has always been a majority white society. Though that is changing. But when a majority takes the extraordinary steps this country has taken to protect the rights of the minority, including writing such language into our Constitution, calling it a racist country and oppressive is historically inaccurate, and entirely ungrateful for the blessings bestowed upon all of our citizens and the world as a whole.
M Schuett blah blah blah 