The following is really long and kind of a stream of consciousness mess, but I can’t think of a better place to put than than among the other comments to this important and inspiring speech and post. I originally wrote this as part of a thread below one of John McWhorter’s Substack posts this past Summer (edited slightly to remove people’s names and correct a few typos):
E.W.RJun 19
This is such a great sub-thread and digression into topics like the idealized and actual purpose of what used to be called “civics” in primary and secondary education (ideally, both the foundations of some the philosophically grounded critical thinking M teaches undergraduates, combined with a truly diverse but ultimately unifying sense of what it means to be a citizen - maybe things like common care and social responsibility, built around empathy, as well as inculcating some idea of how delicate the balance is between authoritarianism and anarchy (how does our society work when/to the extent it does?)
F and M and others started a really fascinating discussion, below a different article some weeks ago, about the current fetish in elite circles for a self-flattering often shallow cosmopolitanism and some of the ironies or hypocrisies involved in seeking to impose it is as universal good. So, what do we teach young students about what their community is and means? What do they belong to and what represents them? What do we have in common not just normatively as humans and as just one particularly, aggressively obtrusive species, but, more practically, as people within what used to be called nation-states (not very fashionable these days, I know.) Do we in most practical areas of life have a better or more relevant alternative than our own geographic home, our own polity? As diminished as the governments of actual countries (those distinctly-colored shapes between oceans on an old-fashioned classroom or living room globe) may be in power or elite fashion, I’d argue there is not a single more relevant generally shared political and geographic locus of belonging. As accidentally, badly, or even as cynically as borders may have been drawn, and as much as power predominated over principle in drawing most; as contested as physical space and national and other identities are; as much as deeper natural and cultural history might transcend political borders, they are still for most of us all around the world as viable a mostly unifying source of common meaning and belonging as we have. Degrade, demean, or diminish the mensing of countries and citizenship too much and the hole at the heart of business class, MNC, NGO cosmopolitanism becomes clearer. Where is the representation? Where is the sense of place - of home? Too often, MNCs hollow and sell you out from within, while NGOs seek to plan and dictate your priorities from without.
I had this sort of dumb discussion many years ago over beers with an old friend about how part of the glue of both countries and relationships is at least mostly shared founding myths. (I should stop before this begins to sound too much like one of the would-be thoughtful scenes from a dismally shallow rom-com - you get the point.) But I do still genuinely think even a slightly pat or corny notion like patriotism (not national chauvinism or jingoism) is a far better alternative to racial particularism. And, that a citizenship-based inclusive and positive nationalism like ours (one of the rare countries that, in some ways like France, was founded explicitly at least in principle on a civic rather than an ethnic or “blood-based” nationalism) which has been imperfectly but almost uniquely open to legal immigration and voluntary assimilation - is far, far better as a shared and unifying principle than tribalism.
Even if this life is in the most literal physical sense or more abstract academic sense all randomness and chaos, that randomness and chaos has nonetheless delivered us to a specific place and time. And while it’s probably best for most of us to not paralyze ourselves dwelling on these abstractions, we do have to share in a practical, quotidian sense enough of a common working understanding and orientation of who we are and what we belong to to function peacefully and productively in a sprawling, wildly diverse, and complex modern technological society.
My foundational insight came at five sitting with my back against the garage door of my parents’ basic ranch house in a charmless, mostly tree-less working class suburb immediately north of Detroit. My parents’ marriage was collapsing in violent chaos and I was trying to make sense of it within the world (did the world make sense? Was there any larger sense of fairness built into it?) No and no. I could immediately picture children my age starving, and even younger kids born with terrible disabilities, given no chance at all. My very first years were spent in the wildly diverse microcosm of a downtown Detroit high rise (Diana Ross lived in the penthouse for a time). We had neighbors who had fled brutal dictatorships in Iraq and Iran. Other neighbors my mom referred to affectionately like any married couple she’d befriended, though these men couldn’t be married. In the apartments and condos around our own cramped one bedroom, were black judges and physicians. My pediatrician was black. So was a regionally notorious drug kingpin who reportedly bought my sister and me gifts at holidays. Our super was black. We lived in an largely enclosed world in which black and white residents were civil, and mostly very friendly neighbors. Even as a kid there were no illusions about the broader, larger reality of racial discrimination in metro Detroit and the history of much worse in the story and experience of our country. But there was an air in the city around us mostly of getting on and getting along - of not judging nice people on a silly basis, even if frustrations and tensions sometimes sometimes surfaced. But the painful recent history and fraught present hung there as both a common backdrop and internal question.
In the mostly dreary suburb we relocated to immediately north of the city proper there were no black neighbors. Even the appearance of one darker-skinned South Asian family visiting a local school was all it took to send panicked rumors flying. So in that simplified palette of black and white there was an early lesson in sharing an ugly history and a complicated present with people both unlike us - in the most superficial yet sometimes experiencially profound ways - who were nonetheless every iota as American as we were. In a foundational sense, to me, America was about a deep pride in us being together, black and white, and finding our way, however imperfectly, united under one banner, united in a shared pride in local music and sports, in quotidian daily habits - the mundane ups and downs of parenting, marriage, punching the clock - all encapsulated within that one building. In comparison, the white flight suburb was culturally impoverished, no matter how many Southern or Eastern European ethnicities were represented. It was too much about denying others and living in denial.
Of course the actual American palette and its collection of stories and contributions, stirring triumphs and horrific wrongs, is much more varied than that chiaroscuro of black and white (how about class as well?) I don’t shy away from wanting both elements in our civic education: honesty, recognition, inclusion, wrestling with the worst of what’s shaped not just history but actual lives; and, more than a little bit of e pluribus unum - more than a little of those positive and unifying national myths: “our story”, warts and all. Frederick Douglass and MLK made the best case: the best values underlying this national experiment, claimed and amplified at great sacrifice not least by those originally most excluded, were what it took to begin to redeem and extend their promise.
We need unifying stories. We need some positive myths and shared crowd symbols. The soft particularism of a citizenship-based nationalism, enriched and broadened by an ongoing tradition of immigration does not have to be built on negative integration or on demeaning or diminishing the value of those born outside our national borders. But to be born within them or to have chosen to join us here and participate in this shared polity has to mean something unique and positive. What black Americans have overcome and carved out here and given to our shared American culture must not be diminished. What historically despised, exploited, or ignored and excluded, impoverished but unyielding, radically egalitarian Scots-Irish immigrants have contributed to our national culture and ethos is a major part of our national story. The list is goes on and on. Andrew Sullivan, as a proud naturalized American citizen, makes this point a lot: Americans who are white simply don’t realize how culturally black they are. Black culture is American culture. Black history is American history. Our country is flawed and messy, but great. Our citizenship is a gift and a responsibility to each other. We’ve seen the grimly reductive, paranoid zero-sum antagonisms of the alternatives to this not only in the literal Balkans of Europe or Great Lakes region of Africa, but all around us at home in sharper relief every day.
Great post. I'm very sympathetic to some of the left's goals.
For example, I would like to end the drug war. I do believe we have a problem with over incarceration. I would eliminate or at least greatly reform qualified immunity. And I think it's a travesty that a black man is 8 times more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder than a white person.
In fact, even though I'm former military, I thought the taking a knee during the national anthem was a perfectly ok way to protest (opinions were pretty evenly split with my former military friends).
But the rhetoric and the narrative that the woke are pushing totally turns me off. Talking about white privledged or alleging racism because I don't agree with whatever the latest socialist policy is will not make us allies, and will make it WAY less likely for us to work together on things we do agree on.
I object to the narrative that the woke seems to be pushing. That we are a evil racist country to the core. Instead I believe the narrative should be a good country that has failed to live up to its ideals but is constantly trying to do better. In fact, a country that millions of people of all colors try to immigrate to each year, many of them literally risking their lives to get here.
That's the narrative that we should tell about ourselves, and that's the narrative that you can get bi-partisan agreement on.
Finally, I continue to believe that the society we should be striving for is one where people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Dividing people up into racial affinity groups etc seems to be the exact opposite of what we are trying to achieve.
Thank you Glenn! Your honest, pragmatic insight into this cauldron of race-hustling scumbags is needed now more than ever! We have to stop these mentally cave-dwelling Neanderthals(both white Liberal BLM supporting activists AND the militant black ‘antiracist’ Kendi/D’Angelo charlatans dead in their tracks! If we do not cut the head off this Medusa we’ll have a boiling underbelly of Whites desperately seeking to respond to their unjust accusers with the strongest, full throated and most importantly heavily ARMED response you could possibly imagine! And trust me, we’ve got ALL the guns and are well versed in both their use and maintenance. It would get UGLY for the Leftists real quickly. Let’s hope for their sake they don’t push this wounded animal(White people) into a corner......it would make our Civil War look like 5 year olds playing cops and robbers by comparison!
Beautiful speech; articulate, poetic and impassioned. A voice of Reason. I follow your work so it’s not new to me, but always refreshing as I work in higher education and am surrounded by the Woke. At one time I considered myself far Left but have found myself gradually shift toward center. Sometimes I’m not sure who I am anymore. I’ve lost many friends by airing my views – even thoughtfully.
I see you as a bridge, attempting to reconcile your love for black people, your community with your love for America, your home. I think speeches like this by intelligent, reflective persons are most important – and touching. The extremes are so loud right now that there is the fear that “the center cannot hold.” But the center must hold – we must hold to the center, says Lao Tzu, the middle way says the Buddha. To my mind your speech serves to strengthen this essential space.
I had an initial concern about the part of your speech that focused on the backlash of white people, fearing articulating it may encourage it. But on reflection, I agree it must be said as it’s a natural reaction that needs to be addressed up front. As has been stated many times, CRT/BLM/Woke thinking and rhetoric is fodder for its opponent, fueling an equal impassioned reaction that will mirror and eventually destroy both sides if each is left to its own myopia. I appreciated your grave warning to the potentially “tempted” audience that a white backlash would be detrimental – for all. A better but more difficult way, and what you promote, indeed demonstrate, is to burst the bubbles of deluded isolation and actually talk; we may not be so different.
May I suggest that being too timid to choose a side is to underestimate the political moment we are in. Too many good, supposedly smart people tie themselves in knots trying to avoid finding or saying anything positive about Trump, who is a national populist of which black patriotism could be a significant and welcome part. If you are still afraid of saying positive things about Trump (which essays of this sort always sidestep) it is because you have been, like all of us, indoctrinated (made afraid) by the media and all the “liberal” Democrats around you, in spite of yourself.
Really, a moment’s genuine consideration of the significance of, for example, the enormity of the Russia collusion narrative should disabuse any reasoning person of the notion that their response to Trump has been anything but the manufacture of the media—perhaps, adhering to a kernel of class disgust—and profoundly reinforced by the threat of ostracism from our peers. Yes, I was a Democrat a few years ago…
I offer the possibility that: No white backlash is coming in America because the America Firsters (1 Understand that blacks are legacy Americans—they are us. 2) Share conservative values of family and faith 3) And mostly: America Firsters know for a fact that they are not being labeled “racist” by black people, and the derision they experience comes from the media, academics and other whites. Not blacks. National Populism believes in natural law, equality for everybody, consent of the governed, the promise of the Declaration, a new skepticism of globalism, strong borders and tariffs to restore the jobs of working and middle class people. What in the hell is wrong with that?
At Princeton there is a celebrated classics professor Dr. Dan-el Padilla Peralta who now seeks to destroy and banish the classics as the roots and sinews of "white supremacy". But there was a time when Dr. Padilla Peralta was a lover of the same classics.
I wonder if Dr. Padilla Peralta began seeing himself not as a scholar, but as a black activist and anti-racist. Viewing his enterprise as a scholar, the patrimony and matrimony that are the classics, were his, as they are any other person's, whoever or whatever they might be.
But once the primary lense became race, Did he begin to see that the only avenue open to him was to destroy and resent them?
I actually spell both Black and White capitalized, when referring to the races. It doesn’t make sense to not he consistent. This amongst many other things, makes me somewhat of an oddball.
The media and the left dream up these nasty ideas that all of one kind of skin color person feels the same.... like all Italians like Pizza, or are affiliated with mafia. All people from the Netherlands eat cheese and cookies all day (well, okay they do) or All so and so's carry three guns and a machete
The media has been doing this for decades. They encourage division
I am so glad I found your blog.
We are all the same, and different. We are individuals. Not everyone likes or should be expected to like the things I like (hoarding and collecting fabrics, sewing all day, making family heirlooms, had 4 sewing machines in constant working order ready and used, hate cooking food and other such non-sense)
My dad is 98 and he says, we are all weirdos to someone else
I’m paraphrasing, in parts, a longer comment I posted to the YouTube clip very shortly after it went up earlier this afternoon. It was thoughtful and polite, if pointed, and it was removed. It’s getting harder and harder to trust that Big Tech won’t simply quash opinions it doesn’t like.
I’m a lifelong liberal who has literally never voted for a Republican. But if I’d been voting in Virginia last week I’d have voted for Republicans for all of the major statewide offices. One of the crowning moral commitments that attracted me to the Democratic Party from the time I was a teenager was its focus on equal rights and fairness (equal standing, dignity, and opportunity for all). I remember Lee Atwater; I know what actual “dog whistle politics” is. And I also know gaslighting when I hear it. The cultural left that now dominates our major institutions as well as the Democratic Party has turned that commitment to equality absolutely on its head. And is lying about it and trying to intimidate, censor, bait, smear, and ruin anyone who says that the emperor has no clothes.
TYTY. I couldn't say enough about what You say the solution is. BEYOND race. TRANSCEND race. UNLEARN race. Again, TY.
I may be overbold, but I think I understand Black people better than You understand white people. MOST white people are NOT gonna take on white supremist ideas, for ANY reason or prompting.
What they (or, I guess I SHOULD say, we) in particular do NOT like is being TOLD we're racist, when we aren't. When we're TOLD we need to ATONE for what our great-great-some-odd-great grandfathers did. When we're TOLD we need to PAY UP. For what reason? Other than vengeance, pure and simple. To be TOLD we're racists, for the simple reason that we won't vote for Democrats, REGARDLESS of how woke the Democrats are.
So I don't think BLM or any-a the rest of them should change their posture because it would be in their best interests. (Well, BLM would first hafta disavow their Marxist roots, which isn't likely.)
Maybe I'm just weird. (Well.. Actually there's no MAYBE about THAT. ;) But I don't know any white people trying to justify their whiteness based on the contributions of European Enlightment on down. I take that back. Me and just about 98% of whites don't hang out with the kind-a white supremists that WOULD say such a stupid thing.
I don't ask Blacks to justify their Blackness. (Long story.) Don't KNOW of many white people that do, but ICBW. But I do NOT understand why being white automatically makes me a villain in this delusional story. ME. PERSONALLY. And spread that view to most white people. Who made the decision that Blacks do NOT represent their race, and they should be treated as INDIVIDUALS. But blanket indictments of whites is okay-fine? In particular, white, male, heterosexuals. Guilty as charged, if that's the criteria and individuality doesn't come into play at ALL.
And I'll carry it a step further. Democrats as a whole, no matter what color, seem to think that all Republicans are white racists. Just stands to reason, apparently. Explains how McAuliffe (however You spell it) got voted down, right?
My only suggestion? Doesn't matter. Seeing the surface of semi-truths prevail, or I wouldn't waste so much time posting on Substacks. Luckily for MOST, I can't spend the time or I would.
APPOLOGIZE, of course. SURE I offended some or most. NEVER my intention. Intention to shed light, not heat. Sometimes do better than others, is all.
Almost forgot. Still TYTY, Professor Loury. Got me to thinkin'. :)
Referring to the peace and aliveness he felt before destroying a great relationship, Bob Dylan wrote: "Once I held mountains in the palm of my hands, and rivers which flowed through every day. I must have been mad. I never knew what I had, till I threw it all away."
All those years and all the sweat and all the humble pie and the disappointment and the glacial progress and the heartbreak to build a society at least aspirationally directed toward a world beyond color. This essay gives me the chill of a cold wind. May we please not go there.
A monumental speech/ loved it! Must have been very hot there in Orlando that day
The following is really long and kind of a stream of consciousness mess, but I can’t think of a better place to put than than among the other comments to this important and inspiring speech and post. I originally wrote this as part of a thread below one of John McWhorter’s Substack posts this past Summer (edited slightly to remove people’s names and correct a few typos):
E.W.RJun 19
This is such a great sub-thread and digression into topics like the idealized and actual purpose of what used to be called “civics” in primary and secondary education (ideally, both the foundations of some the philosophically grounded critical thinking M teaches undergraduates, combined with a truly diverse but ultimately unifying sense of what it means to be a citizen - maybe things like common care and social responsibility, built around empathy, as well as inculcating some idea of how delicate the balance is between authoritarianism and anarchy (how does our society work when/to the extent it does?)
F and M and others started a really fascinating discussion, below a different article some weeks ago, about the current fetish in elite circles for a self-flattering often shallow cosmopolitanism and some of the ironies or hypocrisies involved in seeking to impose it is as universal good. So, what do we teach young students about what their community is and means? What do they belong to and what represents them? What do we have in common not just normatively as humans and as just one particularly, aggressively obtrusive species, but, more practically, as people within what used to be called nation-states (not very fashionable these days, I know.) Do we in most practical areas of life have a better or more relevant alternative than our own geographic home, our own polity? As diminished as the governments of actual countries (those distinctly-colored shapes between oceans on an old-fashioned classroom or living room globe) may be in power or elite fashion, I’d argue there is not a single more relevant generally shared political and geographic locus of belonging. As accidentally, badly, or even as cynically as borders may have been drawn, and as much as power predominated over principle in drawing most; as contested as physical space and national and other identities are; as much as deeper natural and cultural history might transcend political borders, they are still for most of us all around the world as viable a mostly unifying source of common meaning and belonging as we have. Degrade, demean, or diminish the mensing of countries and citizenship too much and the hole at the heart of business class, MNC, NGO cosmopolitanism becomes clearer. Where is the representation? Where is the sense of place - of home? Too often, MNCs hollow and sell you out from within, while NGOs seek to plan and dictate your priorities from without.
I had this sort of dumb discussion many years ago over beers with an old friend about how part of the glue of both countries and relationships is at least mostly shared founding myths. (I should stop before this begins to sound too much like one of the would-be thoughtful scenes from a dismally shallow rom-com - you get the point.) But I do still genuinely think even a slightly pat or corny notion like patriotism (not national chauvinism or jingoism) is a far better alternative to racial particularism. And, that a citizenship-based inclusive and positive nationalism like ours (one of the rare countries that, in some ways like France, was founded explicitly at least in principle on a civic rather than an ethnic or “blood-based” nationalism) which has been imperfectly but almost uniquely open to legal immigration and voluntary assimilation - is far, far better as a shared and unifying principle than tribalism.
Even if this life is in the most literal physical sense or more abstract academic sense all randomness and chaos, that randomness and chaos has nonetheless delivered us to a specific place and time. And while it’s probably best for most of us to not paralyze ourselves dwelling on these abstractions, we do have to share in a practical, quotidian sense enough of a common working understanding and orientation of who we are and what we belong to to function peacefully and productively in a sprawling, wildly diverse, and complex modern technological society.
My foundational insight came at five sitting with my back against the garage door of my parents’ basic ranch house in a charmless, mostly tree-less working class suburb immediately north of Detroit. My parents’ marriage was collapsing in violent chaos and I was trying to make sense of it within the world (did the world make sense? Was there any larger sense of fairness built into it?) No and no. I could immediately picture children my age starving, and even younger kids born with terrible disabilities, given no chance at all. My very first years were spent in the wildly diverse microcosm of a downtown Detroit high rise (Diana Ross lived in the penthouse for a time). We had neighbors who had fled brutal dictatorships in Iraq and Iran. Other neighbors my mom referred to affectionately like any married couple she’d befriended, though these men couldn’t be married. In the apartments and condos around our own cramped one bedroom, were black judges and physicians. My pediatrician was black. So was a regionally notorious drug kingpin who reportedly bought my sister and me gifts at holidays. Our super was black. We lived in an largely enclosed world in which black and white residents were civil, and mostly very friendly neighbors. Even as a kid there were no illusions about the broader, larger reality of racial discrimination in metro Detroit and the history of much worse in the story and experience of our country. But there was an air in the city around us mostly of getting on and getting along - of not judging nice people on a silly basis, even if frustrations and tensions sometimes sometimes surfaced. But the painful recent history and fraught present hung there as both a common backdrop and internal question.
In the mostly dreary suburb we relocated to immediately north of the city proper there were no black neighbors. Even the appearance of one darker-skinned South Asian family visiting a local school was all it took to send panicked rumors flying. So in that simplified palette of black and white there was an early lesson in sharing an ugly history and a complicated present with people both unlike us - in the most superficial yet sometimes experiencially profound ways - who were nonetheless every iota as American as we were. In a foundational sense, to me, America was about a deep pride in us being together, black and white, and finding our way, however imperfectly, united under one banner, united in a shared pride in local music and sports, in quotidian daily habits - the mundane ups and downs of parenting, marriage, punching the clock - all encapsulated within that one building. In comparison, the white flight suburb was culturally impoverished, no matter how many Southern or Eastern European ethnicities were represented. It was too much about denying others and living in denial.
Of course the actual American palette and its collection of stories and contributions, stirring triumphs and horrific wrongs, is much more varied than that chiaroscuro of black and white (how about class as well?) I don’t shy away from wanting both elements in our civic education: honesty, recognition, inclusion, wrestling with the worst of what’s shaped not just history but actual lives; and, more than a little bit of e pluribus unum - more than a little of those positive and unifying national myths: “our story”, warts and all. Frederick Douglass and MLK made the best case: the best values underlying this national experiment, claimed and amplified at great sacrifice not least by those originally most excluded, were what it took to begin to redeem and extend their promise.
We need unifying stories. We need some positive myths and shared crowd symbols. The soft particularism of a citizenship-based nationalism, enriched and broadened by an ongoing tradition of immigration does not have to be built on negative integration or on demeaning or diminishing the value of those born outside our national borders. But to be born within them or to have chosen to join us here and participate in this shared polity has to mean something unique and positive. What black Americans have overcome and carved out here and given to our shared American culture must not be diminished. What historically despised, exploited, or ignored and excluded, impoverished but unyielding, radically egalitarian Scots-Irish immigrants have contributed to our national culture and ethos is a major part of our national story. The list is goes on and on. Andrew Sullivan, as a proud naturalized American citizen, makes this point a lot: Americans who are white simply don’t realize how culturally black they are. Black culture is American culture. Black history is American history. Our country is flawed and messy, but great. Our citizenship is a gift and a responsibility to each other. We’ve seen the grimly reductive, paranoid zero-sum antagonisms of the alternatives to this not only in the literal Balkans of Europe or Great Lakes region of Africa, but all around us at home in sharper relief every day.
Great post. I'm very sympathetic to some of the left's goals.
For example, I would like to end the drug war. I do believe we have a problem with over incarceration. I would eliminate or at least greatly reform qualified immunity. And I think it's a travesty that a black man is 8 times more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder than a white person.
In fact, even though I'm former military, I thought the taking a knee during the national anthem was a perfectly ok way to protest (opinions were pretty evenly split with my former military friends).
But the rhetoric and the narrative that the woke are pushing totally turns me off. Talking about white privledged or alleging racism because I don't agree with whatever the latest socialist policy is will not make us allies, and will make it WAY less likely for us to work together on things we do agree on.
I object to the narrative that the woke seems to be pushing. That we are a evil racist country to the core. Instead I believe the narrative should be a good country that has failed to live up to its ideals but is constantly trying to do better. In fact, a country that millions of people of all colors try to immigrate to each year, many of them literally risking their lives to get here.
That's the narrative that we should tell about ourselves, and that's the narrative that you can get bi-partisan agreement on.
Finally, I continue to believe that the society we should be striving for is one where people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Dividing people up into racial affinity groups etc seems to be the exact opposite of what we are trying to achieve.
Thank you Glenn! Your honest, pragmatic insight into this cauldron of race-hustling scumbags is needed now more than ever! We have to stop these mentally cave-dwelling Neanderthals(both white Liberal BLM supporting activists AND the militant black ‘antiracist’ Kendi/D’Angelo charlatans dead in their tracks! If we do not cut the head off this Medusa we’ll have a boiling underbelly of Whites desperately seeking to respond to their unjust accusers with the strongest, full throated and most importantly heavily ARMED response you could possibly imagine! And trust me, we’ve got ALL the guns and are well versed in both their use and maintenance. It would get UGLY for the Leftists real quickly. Let’s hope for their sake they don’t push this wounded animal(White people) into a corner......it would make our Civil War look like 5 year olds playing cops and robbers by comparison!
Beautiful speech; articulate, poetic and impassioned. A voice of Reason. I follow your work so it’s not new to me, but always refreshing as I work in higher education and am surrounded by the Woke. At one time I considered myself far Left but have found myself gradually shift toward center. Sometimes I’m not sure who I am anymore. I’ve lost many friends by airing my views – even thoughtfully.
I see you as a bridge, attempting to reconcile your love for black people, your community with your love for America, your home. I think speeches like this by intelligent, reflective persons are most important – and touching. The extremes are so loud right now that there is the fear that “the center cannot hold.” But the center must hold – we must hold to the center, says Lao Tzu, the middle way says the Buddha. To my mind your speech serves to strengthen this essential space.
I had an initial concern about the part of your speech that focused on the backlash of white people, fearing articulating it may encourage it. But on reflection, I agree it must be said as it’s a natural reaction that needs to be addressed up front. As has been stated many times, CRT/BLM/Woke thinking and rhetoric is fodder for its opponent, fueling an equal impassioned reaction that will mirror and eventually destroy both sides if each is left to its own myopia. I appreciated your grave warning to the potentially “tempted” audience that a white backlash would be detrimental – for all. A better but more difficult way, and what you promote, indeed demonstrate, is to burst the bubbles of deluded isolation and actually talk; we may not be so different.
May I suggest that being too timid to choose a side is to underestimate the political moment we are in. Too many good, supposedly smart people tie themselves in knots trying to avoid finding or saying anything positive about Trump, who is a national populist of which black patriotism could be a significant and welcome part. If you are still afraid of saying positive things about Trump (which essays of this sort always sidestep) it is because you have been, like all of us, indoctrinated (made afraid) by the media and all the “liberal” Democrats around you, in spite of yourself.
Really, a moment’s genuine consideration of the significance of, for example, the enormity of the Russia collusion narrative should disabuse any reasoning person of the notion that their response to Trump has been anything but the manufacture of the media—perhaps, adhering to a kernel of class disgust—and profoundly reinforced by the threat of ostracism from our peers. Yes, I was a Democrat a few years ago…
I offer the possibility that: No white backlash is coming in America because the America Firsters (1 Understand that blacks are legacy Americans—they are us. 2) Share conservative values of family and faith 3) And mostly: America Firsters know for a fact that they are not being labeled “racist” by black people, and the derision they experience comes from the media, academics and other whites. Not blacks. National Populism believes in natural law, equality for everybody, consent of the governed, the promise of the Declaration, a new skepticism of globalism, strong borders and tariffs to restore the jobs of working and middle class people. What in the hell is wrong with that?
At Princeton there is a celebrated classics professor Dr. Dan-el Padilla Peralta who now seeks to destroy and banish the classics as the roots and sinews of "white supremacy". But there was a time when Dr. Padilla Peralta was a lover of the same classics.
I wonder if Dr. Padilla Peralta began seeing himself not as a scholar, but as a black activist and anti-racist. Viewing his enterprise as a scholar, the patrimony and matrimony that are the classics, were his, as they are any other person's, whoever or whatever they might be.
But once the primary lense became race, Did he begin to see that the only avenue open to him was to destroy and resent them?
I actually spell both Black and White capitalized, when referring to the races. It doesn’t make sense to not he consistent. This amongst many other things, makes me somewhat of an oddball.
Thank you for sharing this.
The media and the left dream up these nasty ideas that all of one kind of skin color person feels the same.... like all Italians like Pizza, or are affiliated with mafia. All people from the Netherlands eat cheese and cookies all day (well, okay they do) or All so and so's carry three guns and a machete
The media has been doing this for decades. They encourage division
I am so glad I found your blog.
We are all the same, and different. We are individuals. Not everyone likes or should be expected to like the things I like (hoarding and collecting fabrics, sewing all day, making family heirlooms, had 4 sewing machines in constant working order ready and used, hate cooking food and other such non-sense)
My dad is 98 and he says, we are all weirdos to someone else
I’m paraphrasing, in parts, a longer comment I posted to the YouTube clip very shortly after it went up earlier this afternoon. It was thoughtful and polite, if pointed, and it was removed. It’s getting harder and harder to trust that Big Tech won’t simply quash opinions it doesn’t like.
I’m a lifelong liberal who has literally never voted for a Republican. But if I’d been voting in Virginia last week I’d have voted for Republicans for all of the major statewide offices. One of the crowning moral commitments that attracted me to the Democratic Party from the time I was a teenager was its focus on equal rights and fairness (equal standing, dignity, and opportunity for all). I remember Lee Atwater; I know what actual “dog whistle politics” is. And I also know gaslighting when I hear it. The cultural left that now dominates our major institutions as well as the Democratic Party has turned that commitment to equality absolutely on its head. And is lying about it and trying to intimidate, censor, bait, smear, and ruin anyone who says that the emperor has no clothes.
Amazing speech. Well said sir.
TYTY. I couldn't say enough about what You say the solution is. BEYOND race. TRANSCEND race. UNLEARN race. Again, TY.
I may be overbold, but I think I understand Black people better than You understand white people. MOST white people are NOT gonna take on white supremist ideas, for ANY reason or prompting.
What they (or, I guess I SHOULD say, we) in particular do NOT like is being TOLD we're racist, when we aren't. When we're TOLD we need to ATONE for what our great-great-some-odd-great grandfathers did. When we're TOLD we need to PAY UP. For what reason? Other than vengeance, pure and simple. To be TOLD we're racists, for the simple reason that we won't vote for Democrats, REGARDLESS of how woke the Democrats are.
So I don't think BLM or any-a the rest of them should change their posture because it would be in their best interests. (Well, BLM would first hafta disavow their Marxist roots, which isn't likely.)
Maybe I'm just weird. (Well.. Actually there's no MAYBE about THAT. ;) But I don't know any white people trying to justify their whiteness based on the contributions of European Enlightment on down. I take that back. Me and just about 98% of whites don't hang out with the kind-a white supremists that WOULD say such a stupid thing.
I don't ask Blacks to justify their Blackness. (Long story.) Don't KNOW of many white people that do, but ICBW. But I do NOT understand why being white automatically makes me a villain in this delusional story. ME. PERSONALLY. And spread that view to most white people. Who made the decision that Blacks do NOT represent their race, and they should be treated as INDIVIDUALS. But blanket indictments of whites is okay-fine? In particular, white, male, heterosexuals. Guilty as charged, if that's the criteria and individuality doesn't come into play at ALL.
And I'll carry it a step further. Democrats as a whole, no matter what color, seem to think that all Republicans are white racists. Just stands to reason, apparently. Explains how McAuliffe (however You spell it) got voted down, right?
My only suggestion? Doesn't matter. Seeing the surface of semi-truths prevail, or I wouldn't waste so much time posting on Substacks. Luckily for MOST, I can't spend the time or I would.
APPOLOGIZE, of course. SURE I offended some or most. NEVER my intention. Intention to shed light, not heat. Sometimes do better than others, is all.
Almost forgot. Still TYTY, Professor Loury. Got me to thinkin'. :)
Beautifully put Glenn, this deserves a wide audience
Referring to the peace and aliveness he felt before destroying a great relationship, Bob Dylan wrote: "Once I held mountains in the palm of my hands, and rivers which flowed through every day. I must have been mad. I never knew what I had, till I threw it all away."
All those years and all the sweat and all the humble pie and the disappointment and the glacial progress and the heartbreak to build a society at least aspirationally directed toward a world beyond color. This essay gives me the chill of a cold wind. May we please not go there.
Bravo, Glenn