Saturday, we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The fireworks display in Washington, DC, was truly historic. Sunday morning, scrolling through social media as I often do, I saw this post on Threads. You can see my response in the image. What happened then was a full retreat by Naomi Ward. Slavery is part of our history. But it is not the master narrative of America. Emancipation is the master narrative. Liberation from bondage is our story.
The original poster came back with something like “Yet you celebrate something that happened 250 years ago.” I responded with this: “Damn straight. It was the date of our independence from a monarchy, which created the context for the greatest free republic on the face of the planet. And it still exists! By contrast, slavery doesn’t exist anymore in the United States—or in the West. We abolished slavery in the 1860s. I celebrate something ongoing and awesome. You whine over something that’s long gone—and it’s gone because the American Republic is good and just.”
My reply was so devastating that the original poster immediately took down her post. All that remains is my response. She tried to erase the thread—and her fake grievance—from history. But the Internet is forever. She is hardly alone in throwing slavery in the face of a nation where blacks are free and equal. Much of the grievance industry is heartier than Naomi Ward. Indeed, I checked today, and it appears Ward has deplatformed herself. Her profile no longer appears on Threads.
This is how we have to respond to this nonsense. We can’t let people constantly run down the American Republic. As I said in my July 4 essay on Freedom and Reason, “Like an abusive spouse who continually dredges up some past grievance his wife has apologized for a thousand times, the ghost of chattel slavery must always haunt us.” But apparitions only torment us if we believe in them. I refuse to be haunted by ghosts. I don’t believe in them. (See As We Mark 250 Years of Independence, Let’s Not Forget the True Albatross Around America’s Neck.)
Imagine America celebrating the one-thousandth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration, and there are still those who focus instead on a legacy institution abolished in the distant past of the first free republic. This will happen only if we don’t resolutely shoot down those who guilt us with original sin. They’re the albatross, not a dead bird we threw off our necks long ago. The Democratic Party is the true albatross.
The vast majority of white men without property could not vote during the early years of the American Republic. Are we whining about that today? Are white men supposed to think less of the Declaration and the Constitution because the propertied visionaries who looked like us founded our nation? Just say thank you. Gratitude is as much for yourself as it is for those who sustain you. Don’t feel grateful? It’d be a lot better if you did.
Women couldn’t vote nationally well into the twentieth century (although some states allowed it earlier). Do we say the American Republic is illegitimate because women couldn’t vote everywhere for the first 106 years of our existence? The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was certified as law after Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify, guaranteeing that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” There was only one woman in Congress when that law was written. There were no women at the signing of the Declaration. There were no women at the signing of our Constitution or its Bill of Rights. White men wrote those documents.
There is nothing about white male minds and deeds that delegitimizes anything. This is vile identitarianism—anti-white, anti-male bigotry—mapped onto our history. It’s a primitive and regressive mindset that thinks one’s race or gender makes one either an oppressor or a victim. The Founders did not establish a free republic that affords citizens equality before the law and personal liberty because they were white and male. They established a free republic because they were just.
History attests to the righteousness of the results. White men ended the slave trade and chattel slavery. White men saved the Union in the Civil War. White men saw the Nineteenth Amendment established as the law of the land. The Supreme Court was exclusively white male when Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation in public schools. White men—Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy—sent federal troops into states refusing to abide by the ruling. Long before then, a white man, Ulysses Grant, sent federal troops to the South to defend the rights of freed slaves and their descendants.
While I have you here, it may interest you to know, if you don’t already, that, in 1920, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, disbanded. Having achieved its goal, there was no reason for it to continue. Yet, instead of disbanding after same-sex marriage was recognized and gays and lesbians had achieved equal rights in opportunity, the various organizations of Pride conjured “trans rights” to keep the grievance business going.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) still exists today, despite there being no reason for it—except to keep alive the deceit that black Americans remain second-class citizens. The constant call for reparations does the same work as dwelling on the history of slavery. The War on Poverty programs alone, disproportionately spent on black Americans, have cost taxpayers over $45–60 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars since the mid-1960s, depending on which programs are included. Haven’t we spent enough? And what did we get for it? Crime, disorder, and broken families.
Let it go, people. Won and done. The nation has other problems to worry about, and we likely can’t tackle those problems unless we’re unified. Stop letting people who seek to disunite us, who seek immunities and privileges at the expense of others, get away with guilt-tripping the nation. Equal treatment is the only guarantee in a free Republic. It is the thing that lets freedom ring. Social justice is tyranny.
freedom and reason 