"Education Matters"

 According to the Julian calendar, then in use, George Washington was born on February 11, 1731. However, in 1752 Britain and its colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar, which had the result of moving Washington’s birthday forward by one year and eleven days. Growing up, this day was always a school holiday, as was February 12, Lincoln’s birthday. While I recognize the value of a three-day weekend, I have always thought we lost something in not celebrating the actual birth dates of these two remarkable men and presidents.

 

This essay was particularly difficult to write. The subject is so large and there is so much information. But there is, perhaps, no more important issue facing us. Why do so many politicians allow teachers’ unions to hold back the education of our youth? I suspect most teachers are devoted to their cause. The fault lies not with them, but with the leaders of their unions and the politicians who place more value on their money than on the needs of children.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Education Matters”

February 22, 2025

 

“I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for

ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man..”

                                                                                                            Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

                                                                                                             Letter to Cornelius Camden Blatchley

                                                                                                             21 October, 1822

 

“Student academic achievement is the cornerstone of national success and security. This

makes a lack of academic progress today a direct and urgent threat to our collective future.”

                                                                                                            Patrick Kelly

                                                                                                            National Assessment Governing Board Member

                                                                                                            On release of Nation’s Report Card

                                                                                                             January 29, 2025

 

A recent editorial in The Washington Post, lamenting threats to close the Department of Education, referred to a “landmark” 1983 Reagan Administration report, “A Nation at Risk.” The editorial divulged “that 13 percent of American 17-year-olds – and up to 40 percent of minority youths – were functionally illiterate” at the time. The editorial claimed the United States had been falling behind its adversaries, which caused businesses and the military to spend millions of dollars on “costly remedial education and training programs.” The editorial added: “Test scores have improved (apart from an alarming slippage in recent years), and presidents from both parties have worked to make American schools more accommodating for children with disabilities, and to improve low-performing schools.” But has that been true?

 

Today, the Department of Education spends approximately twenty-two times as much per student as it did forty years ago, yet the results are dismal. According to the recently issued report from the U.S. Department of Education – the bi-annual National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card – 60% of fourth graders scored below what the NAEP deems a proficient level in math. 8^th Graders fared worse, with 75% performing below proficiency. In reading, almost 70 percent of students scored below the NAEP proficiency level. In the report, the author Stephaan Harris quoted Governing Board member Patrick Kelly of Columbia, South Carolina: “Student academic achievement is the cornerstone of national success and security. This makes a lack of academic progress today a direct and urgent threat to our collective future.” It does; education is the foundation on which our democracy is built.

 

Internationally, our students are not where they should be. According to the 2022 to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, American students did best in reading, ranking 9^th overall, behind Macau and Canada. In science, however, they ranked 16^th, behind Slovenia and the UK. And in math, the ranked 34^th, below the average and behind Norway and Malta.  The scores, according to Education GPS, “…are among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics. In reading and science, results confirm a long-term stability in result,” albeit at a mediocre level for a nation that prides itself on its schools.

 

These tests foretell a depressing story. We are a nation that has been the technological, medical and science leader of the world; and some might argue its cultural leader. Yet our public schools are a disgrace, with minorities and the poor suffering the most. 

 

School choice is the obvious answer, but it is widely opposed by teachers’ unions, and therefore by most Democrat politicians. Open Secrets reported that, for the 2024 election cycle, the two largest teachers’ unions, National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), gave a combined $32 million to candidates, with 94% going to Democrats. That dollar amount was up from $4 million twenty years ago. In the meantime, a Heritage Foundation survey (2023) found that 47% of House members and 51% of Senators enroll their children in private schools. In a February 1 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Michael Bloomberg wrote: “In New York, the teachers union has fought to maintain a cap on the number of charter schools, [schools that] have dramatically raised achievement levels, even as student waiting lists grow longer.” Hypocrisy thrives. 

 

The world faces many problems, and it is not simply the threat of foreign powers, like China with its Belt-and-Road initiatives, a revanchist Russia wishing to reclaim its lost empire, a Middle East under the threat of Iran and Islamic terrorism, or African Christians having to live with daily threats. Artificial intelligence and quantum computing are in their infancy. We must, as J.D. Vance warned our European partners in Munich, confront “the enemy within.” We must not allow fear of censorship prevent us from speaking out. We should, as Noah Rothman wrote in the January 2024 issue of National Review, “summon the courage to repudiate what passes for sophistication in the academy and renounce the trite moral relativism that cannot distinguish between the Western world and its enemies.” Western liberalism, which dates back two-hundred-and-fifty years to the Enlightenment, is under attack. One consequence has been the divisiveness of our political parties. Another is manifested in the current crop of political leaders from both parties.

 

The best antidote is an educated populace. “Education is the movement from darkness to light” is a quote attributed to Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind. Martin Luther King believed that the purpose of education was to help people “to think incisively and to think for one’s self.” This is particularly true as it applies to our roles as citizens. Our youth must read our Constitution, understand what makes our government unique, and how rare it is in the annals of mankind. All public school students should have some familiarity with the canon of classical liberal Western thought.     

 

Recently, Jason Riley, writing in The Wall Street Journal, noted: “Given the strong correlation between educational achievement and life outcomes, a society that allows such a large fraction of its youth to fall by the wayside academically is asking for trouble down the road.” We cannot allow this decline in education to be the “canary in the coalmine,” predicting a decline in our nation’s democracy and its global leadership. Education trains the mind to question assumptions, to challenge authority, to think, to be open to new ideas. It is the resource, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, that “most to be relied on…for advancing the happiness of man.” 

 

For forty-five years, Congress has shoveled increasing amounts of money into public school education. By itself, that money has not worked. Like other businesses, our schools need competition – not just the private schools primarily available to the wealthy – but charter schools and voucher programs that allows all parents to choose the best alternatives for their children. They need home-schooling and Catholic schools that once educated many of the nation’s neediest. Albert Einstein is alleged to have once said that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. Yet that is what has become of our public schools. The poet William Butler Yeats once said that education is the lighting of a fire, the instilling in young students a passion to question, to learn. That is what our future demands. 

 

Yes, education does matter.

"Our Political State"

 Given the Hamas-led attack on Israel yesterday, it seems unseemly to write of anything else, especially when many in the morally challenged West have abandoned the Middle East’s sole democracy, but the below was largely written earlier.

 

It is hard not to become cynical when one looks at the U.S. today, to feel we have fallen so far that recovery is nigh impossible. But I am reminded of that song from Annie, “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow.” I am reminded of Warren Buffett’s telling us to never bet against America. And I am reminded of newly elected Ronald Reagan’s confidence, sunny disposition, and humor in 1981 when the Country was in the midst of inflation and despair…And I feel better.

 

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

 

Thought of the Day

“Our Political State”

October 8, 2023

 

“The Rule of Law is the principle that all persons will be treated equally and justly in a

civilized society. No one is above the law. The highest aspirations of the rule of law are

established in the Constitution of the United States and the Constitutions of the various states.”

                                                                                                                             Paul G. Summers

                                                                                                                             Former Attorney General, Tennessee

                                                                                                                             The Tennessean

                                                                                                                              November 2, 2022

 

Yes, Virginia, some people are above the law. They are known as politicians, asses and pachyderms; they can be found in barns, zoos, but also in the circus that is Washington. Exhibit ‘A’ includes both the current President and his immediate predecessor. Unlike spider monkeys or black-footed ferrets, politicians are not endangered. In fact, they rank with nematode worms as one of the more prolific animal species on earth.

 

And, yes Virginia, if one had to classify into one word our two main political parties it would be that Republicans are dysfunctional and Democrats mean-spirited. Two episodes this past week provide examples: Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and his group of eight self-serving, dissident Republicans colluded with Democrats to remove Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. A day or so earlier, as Congress was trying to pass legislation to extend government funding for forty-five days, Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) pulled a fire alarm, so as to delay the vote. Incredulously, he had the temerity to claim he mistook the bright red alarm for an automatic door opener, a mistake impossible to believe of anyone, least of all of a former middle school principal.  

 

In the wake of the French Revolution (1789-1794), the philosopher and monarchist Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) is alleged to have written, “Every nation has the government it deserves.” Has that become our fate? Is it our fault that we have a cognitively-challenged President, an ego-centric ex-President as his main challenger, a Democratic U.S. Senator who dresses like a slob, and eight Republican Congressmen willing to sacrifice their Party for purposes of self-aggrandizement. Our Founders included Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, giants by today’s standards. Like all humans, they were imperfect, but their positive qualities outweighed their negative ones. After 250 years, can we say our politics have evolved in Darwinian fashion? Or is our current state of political affairs an example of dysgenics – a decrease in the prevalence of traits deemed to be socially desirable?

 

Consider: We have a border that is not a border. We have mobs rampaging through urban stores. We have a Justice on the Supreme Court unable to define a woman. We have political, media, educational, and business leaders telling us that our four-billion-year-old planet will become uninhabitable in a few dozen years if we continue to use fossil fuels. We have schools that focus on gender identity and our racial past, while standards in math, science, and English have languished. We have universities that cancel conservative speakers. We have politicians unable to distinguish between debt and deficits, and who are unconcerned that borrowed money must one day be re-paid. We have a collapse of the nuclear family, and an aging population with birth rates falling below replacement rates. We have social justice warriors who claim that inequality in outcomes is a deliberate decision and has nothing to do with differences in aspiration or physical and mental abilities. Political extremism, on both sides, has divided families and friends. The title of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr’s new memoir comes to mind: How Do We Get Out of here?

 

In an interview this weekend in The Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley quoted the 93-year-old Thomas Sowell: “The fatal danger of our times today is a growing intolerance and suppression of opinions and evidence that differ from prevailing ideologies that dominate institutions, ranging from the academic world to the corporate world, the media and government institutions.” One would hope that political evolution would have seen rising civility in the debating of ideas. That is not the case. Amidst this chaos, in a recent interview with Kelly Hanlon of the Witherspoon Institute, George Nash, historical scholar and author of Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservativism, rhetorically asked: “What do conservatives want?...most would say: We want to be free. We want to be able to live lives, and have our families’ live lives, that are decent and well-ordered and virtuous. And we want to be safe from external and internal threats.” Wise words in a disordered time.

 

But sadly, that is not where we are. We live in a time of dysfunctional and mean-spirited politics, when many politicians, isolated from those they represent, consider themselves above the law. There is a reason Oliver Anthony’s song “Rich Men North of Richmond” has been a hit. Money flows freely, corruption is rampant, and the self-interest of many Representatives supersedes that of the nation. Think of George Santos (R-NY) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ), among others. In the same issue of the Journal quoted above, Peggy Noonan wrote of the idiocy of the Gaetz episode. She ended her column, though, on a hopeful note: “Something has to come along and break through this stasis. Something will, but I don’t know what.” From her pen to God’s eyes.

"Why Can't We Talk?"

                                                                 Sydney M. Williams 

Thought of the Day

“Why Can’t We Talk?”

December 4, 2021

 

“It is better to debate a question without settling it

than to settle a question without debating it.”

                                                                                                                Joseph Joubert (1754-1824)

                                                                                                                French moralist & Essayist

                                                                                                                Recuil des Pensées, 1838

                                                                                                                published posthumously

 

Ambrose Bierce, in his 1906 The Devil’s Dictionary, provided two definition of the transitive verb “Defame:” 1) “To lie about another.” 2) “To tell the truth about another.” People of myriad cultural backgrounds have long had difficulty communicating, as Rudyard Kipling expressed in the first two lines of his 1889 poem “The Ballad of the East and West:”

 

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great judgement Seat;”

 

Most politicians do not communicate honestly. They promise one thing while campaigning and promote another when governing. Speaking before the 2004 Democratic National Committee, Barack Obama embraced unity: “There is not a black America, a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” But four years later when he became President, he chose discord over unity. In the words of Jason Riley, writing in last Wednesday’s The Wall Street Journal: “…he started talking about racist policing and black voter suppression, and he embraced divisive racial provocateurs... All the colorblind talk went out the window.” Mr. Obama is not alone. Politicians on both sides have long campaigned on the promise of unity and then ruled with a “divide to conquer” strategy. 

 

We are sorted by identity into “hot issue” buckets, like race, gender, immigration, climate and abortion. For example, if one does not agree with the preferred woke policy prescriptions of President Biden, one is a racist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a denier or a sexist. Case closed, no room or time for debate. Social media companies, instead of being impartial arbiters permitting the free exchange of ideas have closed Twitter accounts of conservative “deplorables” and declared opinions contrary to what is currently “woke” to be “harmful” or “hurtful.” Given their political leanings, this has meant that conservative speech is shut down. The same thing is true on college campuses where speeches by conservatives are cancelled.

 

I was reminded of Bierce’s definition of “Defame” when reading an op-ed last week by Greg Sargent of The Washington Post. Mr. Sargent sees risk to our democracy coming from the right; I see it coming from the left. The truth is that despotism can come from either the left or the right, as we know from history: Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany and more recent examples in North Korea, Iran and Venezuela. It is extremism, regardless of whether right or left, that should concern us. And we should never forget that a failure to freely exchange ideas abets extremism. 

 

But perhaps things are not so bad as I fear. Over the 232 years since George Washington was elected our first President, the United States has been tried several times: On August 24^th, 1814, the British burned the White House. During the years 1861-1865, the United States fought a Civil War that left about 700,000 dead, when the country was less than 10% of its size today. We have suffered economic collapses, including a decade of depression in the 1930s. We have lived through periods of violent racial and religious prejudices. American soldiers have gone overseas to fight (and die) for freedom in at least eight wars. We were attacked on our homeland on 9/11 by Islamic terrorists. Yet, the United States has always rallied when down. As Churchill observed, in a backhanded compliment: “Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.” How long will it take for politicians now – when governing, not campaigning – to admit that we are Americans first, rich or poor, black or white, female or male, believer or non-believer. Will they speak without hyperbole? Will they be tolerant or patronizing? In the third and fourth line of Kipling’s opening stanza in the poem quoted above he offers hope based on mutual respect:

 

“But there is neither East nor West, Border nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.”

 

But that is not us today. There is no mutual respect. We are more politically divided than at any time I can recall in my eighty-plus years. And what discourse we have is too often uncivil. Either you are with me, or you are against me, to borrow a phrase from George W. Bush. We cannot agree on problems that should be easy to resolve. For example, no nation can exist without borders, yet we cannot agree on how to handle the thousands of illegal immigrants who daily cross our southern border? The earth’s temperature is changing, yet the subject has become so politicized that reasonable people cannot discuss adaption, or man-made versus natural causes. COVID-19 has been ravishing our country and the world for almost two years, yet debate is not allowed as to its origin or even its science. The Constitution gives the right (and duty) to vote to all American citizens (who are not felons) above the age of 18. Proof of age, address and citizenship should be all that is required. Why should that be so difficult to implement? Inflation has become ubiquitous, but one side says pass the $1.8 to $5 trillion Build Back Better bill and inflation will recede. The other side says inflation is a function of deficit spending paid for by monetary expansion. Is not that something we should be able to discuss? One side claims racism is endemic in our white-supremacist nation. The other says that to treat blacks as needing special attention is condescending. Are we only to listen to one side? Do we only hear what we want to hear? The economy has been recovering for over a year, since 2020’s second quarter debacle; yet pessimism permeates the country, as can be seen in birthrates below replacement. Why? Francis Fukuyama famously declared “the end of history,” with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and victory for a democratic, liberal West. Now, thirty-two years later, Russia is in ascendancy, China is militarily expanding in the Pacific and interning its Uighur citizens, while the West questions its foundations of individual freedom and free-market capitalism. History is storming back.   

 

Extremism on social media platform gets thousands of “likes.” Extremism sells books, newspapers and cable news. Yet most Americans, I am convinced, are moderate in their politics, leaning slightly left or slightly right. Most are patriots who love their country and who want to live peacefully. Most admire the success the United States has had over its almost 250 years of existence, and most recognize what a marvel the Founders created. They know we are the envy of the world. Our nation is not perfect, but that was something the Founders also knew – they created a “more perfect union.” In Philadelphia, the Founders had different agendas and represented different parts of the country. If they had been unwilling to debate, where would we be today? We will never agree on all issues, nor should we. However, as Joseph Joubert stated in the rubric that heads this essay, we must be willing to debate all issues. Why can’t we talk? 

"Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell," by Jason Riley

 As much a biography, this book by Jason Riley is a treatise on intellectual thought over the past six decades, for it his mind that truly distinguishes Thomas Sowell. Sowell is an exemplar of the value of empiricism when formulating ideas that become good policy, of which, sadly, there is too little today. 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell,” Jason L. Riley

October 10, 2021

 

“The kind of idealized unity, projected by political leaders and

intellectuals, has seldom existed among any racial and minority

anywhere. Nor has the economic progress of racial or ethnic groups

been much correlated with their closeness to, or remoteness from, such unity.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Thomas Sowell (1930-)

                                                                                                                 As quoted by Jason Riley in Maverick

 

Thomas Sowell was born into rural poverty in North Carolina in 1930. His father died before he was born and his mother a few years later, giving birth to a younger brother. With an aunt, he moved to Harlem. Two years after being admitted to New York’s Stuyvesant High School he dropped out. At eighteen he joined the Marines. After his service he acquired his GED and entered Howard University. Following freshman year, he transferred to Harvard. He earned a masters at Columbia and a PhD in economics at the University of Chicago. After giving up teaching at age fifty, he has spent the last forty-one years at the Hoover Institute. He has written at least thirty books on subjects ranging from economics, race, education, to politics and intellectual thought. It has been his intense research and life-long pursuit of facts, which usually produce conclusions that do not conform to what is expected of a black American male. 

 

The author, Jason Riley, was born in Buffalo, New York in 1971. He graduated from State University of New York in Buffalo in 1993. After stints at Buffalo News and USA Today, he joined The Wall Street Journal in 1994. In 2005, he joined the editorial board and since 2016 has had a weekly op-ed column. He is also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.  With this biography, he has authored four books, including Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed (2014), a book Thomas Sowell applauded.

 

In this, Riley spends little time on Sowell’s personal history, relying on his autobiography, A Personal Odyssey, published in 2000 (and written up by me in August 2020.) “The goal,” Jason Riley wrote in his introduction, “…is to place what he and others consider his (Sowell’s) most important observations into context, and then trace the intellectual traditions from which those insights derive and the orthodoxy they often challenge.” While Thomas Sowell is an economist – his PhD thesis was an analysis of Say’s Law – his interests extend far beyond economics. While studying under Milton Friedman and George Stigler at the University of Chicago, he remained a Marxist, but that changed in 1960 when he became an intern at the U.S. Department of Labor, studying Puerto Rico’s unemployment in the sugar industry. A study of the data convinced him that the cause for unemployment was due to a mandated minimum wage. 

 

The book, which is 248 readable pages, is divided into nine chapters, with titles like “Higher Education, Lower Expectations,” Sowell’s Knowledge,” “Civil Rights and Wrongs,” and “Culture Matters.” Sowell is an intellectual and empiricist. Riley quotes from the preface to Sowell’s book Race and Culture: “…what is most needed is an understanding of existing realities, the history from which the present evolved, and the enduring principles constraining our options for the future.” It is the reliance on empiricism, rationalism and skepticism that has always distinguished Thomas Sowell, whether he is writing on economics, race, education or culture. For example, in an essay written in 2000, “Success Concealing Failure,” when U.S. universities bragged that Americans win more Nobel prizes than any other nation, Sowell pointed out an unpleasant truth: “While Americans won the lion’s share of Nobel Prizes in 1999, not one of these winners was actually born in the United States.”

 

Riley points out Sowell’s belief that well-intentioned people (“useful idiots,” as Lenin described them) strive to help blacks and other minorities. Yet the results, as both Sowell and Riley have noted, are often the opposite of what was intended. Sowell says it is unclear whether Civil Rights leaders’ and politicians’ intentions are unintended, as both groups have built careers on the concept that blacks can only succeed with the help of programs like Affirmative Action – a policy Sowell finds insulting to the millions of individual blacks who succeeded without assistance. If it were true, how does one explain the success of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., a black-only high school, where black students out-scored white students in segregated schools in the 1950s? School success is a function of ability and effort on part of the student and insistence on learning on part of the teacher. Can a gifted black youngster in the nation’s capital today receive as good a high school education as one could sixty-five years ago? 

 

Sowell is concerned about current trends toward wokeism. In an essay, “Lessons not Learned” published twenty years ago, he wrote, “…we and our children are being trained to be sheep and to respond automatically to words that strike an emotional chord…The very tactics of those totalitarian movements – intimidation, demonization and disregard of all rules in favor of politically defined results – have become hallmarks of political correctness today.” And political correctness has become more ubiquitous over the past two decades. 

 

While this is not a biography in the traditional sense, Jason Riley enters the mind of a man about whom Steven Pinker once wrote, “…is one of the most brilliant thinkers in the world today.” Like most black conservatives, Sowell is denigrated by much of mainstream media and progressive politicians because the conclusions he reaches do not accord with those who feel that all blacks should speak with one voice. Riley’s contribution is to better understand this man, and that it is the individual – not the gender, tribe or race – that is important. We are not born equal. We do not have equal abilities or aspirations, but our Constitution provides for equal rights and equal protection under the law. We must strive for inclusion, diversity of ideas and equal opportunities; but equal outcomes are dreams of the naïve, which deceitfully serve only those who seek power. Ironically, and perhaps counter-intuitively, Sowell has greater confidence in the innate ability of blacks than do many of those who claim to help them. “Sowell wants to make his readers smarter, not tell them what to do,” Riley writes.

 

Maverick is an important book. It illuminates a brilliant thinker; it explains why current, perhaps well-intentioned, but racially discriminatory policies, like critical race theory, hurt those they are supposed to help, and it describes a man who rose to prominence, despite enormous odds, based on his abilities and his willingness to follow where his knowledge and research led, regardless of what public opinion might say. 

"You're a Racist!"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day

“You’re a Racist!”

February 13, 2020

“The ultimate measure of a person is not where one stands in a moment of

comfort and convenience, but where one stands in times of challenge and controversy.”

                                                                                                Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

                                                                                                Strength to Love, 1963

“You’re a racist!” The words stung. At first, I was upset and mystified. The word racist is defined by Webster as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human behavior and the racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” I could not understand the vitriol that prompted the accusation. I do not (and did not) believe I am racist, nor do I think I am misogynistic, anti-Semitic or xenophobic. While this incident occurred three years ago, I had not belittled Blacks by urging them to be dependent on an all-caring government. I have never implied they could not make it on their own; in fact, I have suggested they could and would – that aspiration was half the battle. I have never denied Asian-Americans admission to America’s most prestigious universities, simply because they were Asians, nor have I ever supported Boycott and Divest Sanctions (BADS) against Israel, just because the Jewish people wish to defend a homeland that dates back 2000 years And I never persuaded a young intern to perform oral sex in my office.

I am certainly no paragon of virtue. But all I had done was to write words in support of Mr. Trump’s attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to “drain the swamp,” a quagmire of corrupt politicians, crony capitalists and bureaucratic administrators who feed off the public teat. I had had the temerity to defy teachers’ unions, when writing in support of school choice for inner-city children. I had provoked the anger of the “woke” by supporting the “stop, question and frisk” policy in cities where crime is a constant menace for minorities.

My accuser was a man plagued with Trump Derangement Syndrome – an emotional condition that infects the rationally challenged. My support for Mr. Trump was based on his belief that smaller, less intrusive government, with less regulation and lower taxes, provides the incentives to drive economic growth. I believe it is the private sector, not government, that allows higher living standards. I support Mr. Trump’s concern for failing public schools, especially those in inner cities, and that choice should be available to all Americans, regardless of income or wealth. Is it right to conclude that order and discipline in the classroom are necessary for learning, or are they instruments of oppression as claimed by New York City Schools’ Chancellor Richard Carranza? Is it racist to help raise living standards for Blacks and Hispanics? Is it racist to support better schools for inner city children? In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Jason Riley wrote: “According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 67% of charter students are nonwhite and 58% come from loc-income families.” We live in a world where demand for such schools exceeds supply, yet they are denied by politicians financially obligated to teachers’ unions.

Is it racist to curtail illegal immigration and encourage legal immigration, and is it racist to argue against sanctuary cities and states? Most of those negatively affected by the influx of illegals, are under-educated, poverty-stricken minorities living in inner cities. They are the ones who must compete for jobs, as well as for federal and state-offered services. They are the ones most affected by the squalor and human excrement on streets in sanctuary cities like San Francisco, Boulder, Chicago and Hartford. According to the Federation for Immigration Reform, there were in the U.S., in 2018, 564 sanctuary jurisdictional cities and states in the United States. A nation of individual states is held together by common bonds and by federal laws that apply equally to all. Cynically, Democrats see illegal immigrants as a way to propagate voting supporters. While I find Mr. Trump’s character off-putting, I find his policies enlightening and supportive of individual liberties and free-market economics. Vice President Joe Biden once claimed that Republicans want to put Blacks “back in chains!” But do not policies of progressive Democrats serve to chain Blacks and other minorities to dependency on government? There is nothing racist in encouraging family formations and self-sufficiency.

Which party supports “cancel culture,” with its, microaggressions, intersectionality, trigger warnings and safe places, where cancelling events deemed “hurtful” or “unsafe” has become the norm? Which party has promoted identity politics that encourages separation, which divides not unites? Which party has embraced censorship at colleges and universities, which denies free speech by preventing speakers of opinions contrary to the standards taught?

Epithets such as “You’re a racist!” are the refuge of the unoriginal, mean and the ignorant. Those who use such words refuse to debate issues on their merits; they substitute emotional outbursts for reasoned discussion. While Blacks represent 13% of the population, they account for almost 50% of murder victims. Yet, 89% of Black murder victims are killed by other Blacks. Have policies of appeasement succeeded? Was not racism a factor in Jussie Smollett’s faking a hate crime in Chicago a year ago?

There is no question that racists exist, but they are not exclusively conservatives. There is no question that prejudice is a characteristic of some on the right – bigots who feel their color makes them superior. But there is also no question that there are racists on the left – those who feel that Blacks cannot make it on their own, so must be made dependent on the goodness of government. One stems from ignorance and a feeling of inadequacy; the latter emerges from a supercilious attitude that the masses should defer their political opinions to their elite betters. Which is worse? The question is rhetorical, as all forms of racism are wrong. Martin Luther King once said: “I look to the day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” That is a goal worthy of us all.

The beauty of American democracy is the ladder up which people climb, when aspiration, dedication and talent move them, and down which they descend, when sloth, carelessness and ineptitude infest them. America is a country rich in diversity of ideas, as well as in its people and natural resources. According to the U.S. Census, in 1950, non-Hispanic Whites comprised 87.5% of the population. Today that number is closer to 60%. That percentage will continue to fall. From its inception, the United States was deemed a melting pot. People come from all over the world, from all nations, races and religions. They are drawn by the ideals laid out by the Founding Fathers and enunciated by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, that this is a nation “of, by and for the people.” There is no aristocracy or embedded ruling class. In coming to the U.S., immigrants seek the liberty and freedom America offers. While they maintain some of their cultural ways, they throw off the yokes that bind them to other, less free, regimes and nations. They integrate into the American psyche.  

When my interrogator spat out the words of venom that prompted this essay, he demonstrated his crudeness and illiteracy. It is actions not words that should concern us. Words are cheap (and often cowardly, as were those of my accuser). To stand up to false accusations, face opposition and confront reality requires fortitude. It is the challenge to which Martin Luther King referred to in the rubric that heads this essay; it demands a rational response. Ironically, many of those who utter such venom are themselves responsible for the cultural schism that divides our country. A hash-tag society that promotes identity politics and victimization divides not unites. The consequence is a new form of segregation. Far better to treat people equally, and let the aspirant, regardless of race, religion, sex, or ideology achieve the American dream.

"The 1619 Project"

Sydney M. Williams

swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“The ‘1619 Project’”

September 9, 2019

“The goal of the 1619 Project is to reframe American history,

making explicit how slavery is the foundation on which this country is built.”

                                                                                                New York Times

                                                                                                Sunday, August 18, 2019

“In August 1619, the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies arrived in Virginia.

It was the beginning of a barbaric trade in human lives. Today, in honor, we remember

 every sacred soul who suffered the horrors of slavery and the anguish of bondage.”

                                                                                                President Donald J. Trump

                                                                                                July 30, 2019

                                                                                                Williamsburg, VA

Slavery is barbaric, but to argue that it was the “foundation”on which our country was built is hyperbole and disingenuous. In 1619, Virginia was a colony of Britain. It would be 157 years before the American colonies revolted, and they did so to be free and independent. In that year 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal,” words, as we know, that did not capture the truth of slavery, but which suggested a road map for the banning of international slave trade, which was done in 1808; the freeing of slaves in 1863 under the Proclamation Emancipation, and for the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. One might argue that 188 years is too long, but keep in mind slavery has been in existence since before written history. Also, remember, in 1776 slavery existed in all thirteen colonies and throughout Europe. And it persists today, enslaving forty million people, particularly in Asia, Africa and Central Asia.

To suggest that American history be “reframed,” as the New York Timesdid, is the way of totalitarian regimes. Liberal democracies do not re-write history. Certainly, there are, and there have always been, different interpretations of historical events and people. Victors and survivors write post-war histories. Successful and educated nations write histories, not the poor and illiterate. Liberalism recognizes those aberrations, so scholars can better interpret the past. Totalitarianism prefers the narrative to the facts. 

Slavery was a blight on our new Republic’s beginnings and its conscience. Of that there is no question. But history can only be understood within the moral, legal and accepted standards of the time. To apply today’s standards, as the New York Times is wont to do, promotes a narrative and ignores inconvenient facts. In the early 19^thCentury, according to David P. Forsythe, professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, “an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will, either in some form of slavery or serfdom.” The ubiquity of slavery at the time, however, does not (and did not) justify it, but it provides a framework to better understand this scourge. 

To read and believe the Time’s piece is to accept the notion that slavery existed solely in the American colonies and only involved black Africans. The truth is that slavery was so pervasive four hundred years ago I would venture that there are few of us today who do not descend from someone who was, at one point, a slave or an indentured servant. If the New York Timesis successful in adding the ‘1619 Project’ to high schools’ curriculum, will students be taught that slavery was a curse dating back thousands of years, and involved all races as masters and slaves? Will they condemn African traders who captured and sold fellow Africans to European traders? Will they learn that slaves were first brought to Brazil almost a hundred years before they were transported to Jamestown? Will they be taught that over 90% of African slaves carried across the Atlantic went to Mexico and Central and South America? Will students who study the ‘1619 Project’ learn about the enslaving of an estimated one million white, European Christians by Muslims between 1530 and 1780? Will today’s students confront and condemn slavery where it exists now – in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China and parts of Africa? It has only been in the past hundred years that slavery was outlawed in much of Africa (Kenya, Northern Nigeria, Botswana, the Sudan, Cameroon, Mauritania, Morocco and Ethiopia), the Middle East (Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman) and parts of Asia (Myanmar, Nepal, Hong Kong, British Malaya and Thailand). The editors of the Times assuredly know this, but will high school students a generation from now?

As any student of history knows, the United States is far from perfect, but, as any student of history also knows, no other country in the world has done as much for liberty, whether providing the rights we citizens have that are embedded in our Bill of Rights or the sacrifices Americans have made in defending liberty in foreign lands. There is a reason why emigrating to the United States is the goal of so many in dictatorial and poor parts of the world. It is not benefits proffered; it is opportunities offered. 

In a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley wrote: “Liberals want to harp on how blacks have been treated, but a focus on how they have progressed in earlier eras, notwithstanding that treatment, would be of far greater use to today’s black underclass.” Examples abound of American men and women who overcame the slavery into which they were born, to succeed as free men and women: Richard Allen, minister, writer and educator, was born a slave in 1760. Frederick Douglass, writer, orator and abolitionist, was born in 1818. Harriet Tubman, abolitionist and political activist, was born circa 1830. Booker T. Washington, educator, author and advisor to Presidents, was born in 1856. Others born after slavery ended but during the Jim Crow period would include Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, James Baldwin, Clarence Thomas, Oprah Winfrey and dozens more. Consider sports stars like Michael Jordan and Serena Williams; entertainers like Mariah Carey and Jay-Z; businesspeople like Sheila Johnson and Herman Cain; academics like Thomas Sowell and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; and politicians like Barack Obama, Edward Brooke, Tim Scott and Kamala Harris. As an opinion writer, Mr. Riley belongs among that pantheon. 

Harriet Tubman, who escaped the chains of slavery around 1849, once wrote, “Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars, to change the world.” In his autobiography Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote: “I have learned that success is measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life, as by the obstacles he has overcome.” Should we not today celebrate the courage, determination, intellect and will of those who overcame the anguish of bondage and the discrimination of bigots?

Should not those who succeeded in overcoming servitude, segregation and humiliation serve as paragons to be emulated? Is it not better to view life through the positive lens of aspiration and opportunity than through a negative optic of defeat and victimhood? While real victims deserve our sympathy and empathy, we should not assume they have no will or self-motivation to fight back. As well, we blur the distinction between those who truly have been victimized and those who claim to have been.

The ‘1619 Project’ arose because the ‘Russian collusion’ story failed. Executive editor of the Times Dean Baquet admitted the new focus: “To write more deeply about the country, race and divisions.”His message not only does not conform to the Times’ motto, it cannot compete with the optimism and hope offered by Harriet Tubman and Booker T. Washington, former slaves who overcame obstacles that the editors of the New York Timescannot even imagine. Yet they rose to prominence from chains of bondage, and they did so with a belief in God and in themselves, while bearing a positive view of what was possible.