The Democrats, including most notably Hillary Clinton, want to distract us from the reality that their “Big Government” programs and policies have failed to deliver widespread prosperity, and in particular have harmed black Americans, who keep falling further behind in academics and earnings.
The distraction comes in the form of a virulent “us-versus-them” mentality directed against Republicans and conservatives — as though they are the cause of the blacks’ fading prospects — when the true culprit is the liberal-progressive element that dominates the Democratic Party. This strategy may get votes for Hillary Clinton, but it is profoundly immoral, because it victimizes all of us, especially blacks.
{mosads}Yes, there have been shameful epochs in America’s past. Our founders should have welcomed blacks and women as full partners from the outset in the grand experiment known as America. It is important that past moral transgressions not be forgotten, lest they be repeated. But we should not allow yesteryear’s injustices to hamstring our forward progress today.
Nor should we allow our founders’ imperfections to blind us to the good they did. Their core concepts of civilization, economic freedom, and bottom-up government weren’t just good ideas for white men. They were, and remain, good ideas for all of us. They were the driving forces behind the rise of the Industrial Age, which led to vast improvements here and abroad in living standards and life spans, growing the global economic pie an astounding 50-fold.
And these good ideas led to the American middle class becoming not only affluent and dominant, but also accessible to every American, both home-grown and immigrant. This was the true American Dream — not a pipe-dream of becoming billionaires (which even the most ruthless top-down regimes have), but a genuinely achievable prospect of joining our prosperous middle class through personal effort and excellence — a prospect that now is threatened for every American of every color.
To make these good ideas work for us and keep the American Dream alive, we must commit not just to offer all children a good education, but to make that education meaningful for them so that they’ll take a good education — which requires their personal commitment to put in the long-term effort needed to master reading, writing, numbers, logic, and so much more that matters.
Children need to know how much blood and treasure have been expended to take us from top-down systems to bottom-up ones, how much death and misery were brought about by Marxist top-down ideologies, why socialistic systems fail, and the threat that Big Government poses here in America.
Most of all, they need to know that, if we put government on the side of economic growth, together we can usher in a new age of greater prosperity than the world has ever seen—prosperity that will be enjoyed by all Americans, blacks included.
The Democrats want none of this. Black prosperity will not buy them votes. That’s why they insist on keeping black children prisoners of terrible public schools, where their failure to learn will render them less capable of making good judgments (such as avoiding teen pregnancies and gangs), and less able to be of economic value to society (meaning they’ll earn less).
Having created this sorry status quo, Democrats immorally encourage blacks to blame it all on conservative whites. This strategy is designed to keep blacks on the Democrats’ plantation. And so far, it’s worked!
But if you’re black, what does this bode for your and your children’s future? More bad schools? More illiteracy? More dependency on government handouts? More variations of affirmative action that perpetually lower standards, falsely conveying that you will never be capable of competing on a level playing field?
So, here’s my closing message, offered to all black Americans on behalf of the overwhelming majority of white Americans. Never in recorded history have the people of any one race strived harder to heal past moral wrongs than white Americans (the occasional bigot notwithstanding) have tried to do with black Americans over the last half-century.
Everywhere you look, you see whites trying with all their might to open their arms to blacks. We want a colorblind America in which each and every person is seen as special, is afforded meaningful opportunities to grow as a person and to bond empathically with everyone else, and is judged fairly on the basis of his or her abilities and moral character.
And we want fair standards for achieving success that are uniformly applied, so that we can reward one another commensurately with the value of the benefits that we confer.
If you think this message is insincere, you’re wrong: we really do mean it. And yes, it really does hurt us to see you being baited into hating us by the liberal-progressive Democrats. These are the real reasons why we recoil from the Black Lives Matter movement, and why we insist that the all-important message for all human beings of every color to hear is that All Lives Matter.
Please give personal growth, empathic bonding, economic freedom, bottom-up government, and white people another try. This time, working together as the brothers and sisters we all should be to one another, we can get it right.
Blaine Winship is the author of Moralnomics: The Moral Path to Prosperity (Moralnomics Press), available in hardcover frommoralnomics.com and in e-books from amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.