A Potpourri… Black Lives, Slavery, And Other Matters
By GEORGE A. KENDALL
If I never hear the expression “black lives matter” again, it will be too soon. When it comes to lives mattering, if we want a slogan, it should be: “human lives matter.” In a recent appearance on EWTN’s The World Over, Alveda King said repeatedly that there is only one race — the human race.
So what is going on in the minds of people who endlessly repeat that “black lives matter? Does it mean that they think that white lives don’t matter? My guess is that this is precisely what the Antifa crowd thinks, along with similar groups. I have noticed that the anti-white propaganda coming today from leftists, including white leftists, blaming the white race for all the evils in the world, bears a striking resemblance to Hitler’s anti-Semitic propaganda.
- + + Some thoughts on the obsession with slavery and the “legacy of slavery” on the part of black activists today: Slavery was outlawed in America over 150 years ago, yet some black people still blame it for their present problems, such as poverty, crime, drugs, and illegitimacy, all of which are the product of a toxic subculture which some blacks cling to, preferring it to making the effort to take advantage of the opportunities opened up for them by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
Another thing worth thinking about is this: If white people in America are to be punished because their ancestors owned slaves, then it will be necessary to punish everyone in the world. In the ancient world, and continuing into much of the modern world, slavery was a taken-for-granted part of life. It was generally regarded as part of the natural order.
As wise a man as Aristotle held this view, maintaining that most men are by nature slaves. That means that there is no nation on Earth that does not have slavery somewhere in its history if you go back far enough. This is true of the black community, whose African ancestors practiced slavery and some of whom even sold slaves to European slave traders who then took them to places like America to be sold.
There needs to be a statute of limitations on the crime of slavery. It is time for all of us to shut up about the “legacy of slavery” and focus our attention on how to make our society a more tolerable place for all of us, black and white alike. - + + I can’t help wondering: Do the people who hurl all the accusations of “systemic racism” at us have any idea what racism is? Racism is an ideology that uses pseudo-science to supposedly prove that some groups of human beings are by their very nature inferior to others, that they are in fact subhuman and can rightly be either enslaved by the superior groups or exterminated.
This ideology was widely accepted in the 1920s in the form of the eugenics movement and formed the basis of Hitler’s project of exterminating the Jews and other alleged subhuman races. In this country, it furnished the basis for Margaret Sanger’s birth-control movement. Sanger, who was an admirer of Hitler as well as the founder of Planned Parenthood, hoped to produce a “race of thoroughbreds” by eliminating such inferior groups as blacks and Jews.
Racism, so understood, is a murderous ideology that needs to be condemned by everyone. But it is inevitable that, in a fallen world, many people are going to have some negative attitudes about members of groups other than their own, believe stereotypes about the others, make jokes about them, and so on. It makes no sense to conflate this kind of thing with the ideology of racism, nor to embark on the impossible task of trying to stamp out such behavior (even trying to do that would require a totalitarian regime).
People who insist on blathering on about racism need to at least have a clear idea what the word means. Of course, the rabid ideologues of Antifa, BLM, and so on, are not noted for the clarity of their thinking. - + + In one of Agatha Christie’s wonderful Miss Marple mysteries, following the discovery and arrest of the murderer, Miss Marple tells the young couple at the center of the story: “Your mistake was that you believed what someone told you — that’s very dangerous.” The history of our dealings with the China virus during the past few months brought this bit of wisdom to my mind. Our mistake during that time is that we put uncritical faith in what some experts told us, those connected with politically powerful bureaucracies like the CDC and the WHO. That turned out indeed to be very dangerous.
Experts typically are people who (at best) know a lot about a narrow slice of reality, but tend to become so focused on that narrow slice that they lose interest in everything else. Furthermore, their expert knowledge often leads them into arrogance, which darkens the intellect. If they pray, I can imagine their prayer taking the form of something like this: “Lord, I thank thee that I am not as the rest of men — ignoramuses.”
Despite their limitations, they can play an important role in providing those who make public policy with relevant factual information, but they cannot be trusted to actually make policy decisions — they have specialized knowledge, but lack wisdom. We need to entrust those decisions to non-experts who possess common sense (if we can find any).
In addition, the fact that during this months-long ordeal, the experts have been all over the place in their predictions about the behavior of the virus, certainly raises questions about their credibility.
So — we believed what someone told us, and just look at the mess we got ourselves into.
(© 2020 George A. Kendall)