Dakota Beacon

Black History Month merits mention. We are halfway through February and the media falderal going with Black History Month just does not seem prevalent this year.

I call upon the wisdom of my two most edifying scholars, one white and one black. These would be historian Dr. Victor Davis Hanson and economist Dr. Thomas Sowell.

Here are some observations by Dr. Sowell. Compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. Compare evidence on “the legacy of slavery” with evidence on the legacy of liberals. Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began with the passage of the civil rights laws and “War on Poverty” programs of the 1960s, the fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. Subsequently, over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks continued to fall another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of an earlier economic trend and not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.”

Another crucial point to be made. A hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children [78%] being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state the substantial majority of black children were raised by a single parent [66%]. This was before the toxic message of “victimhood” was spread by liberals.

Now for observations made by Dr. Hanson. Speaking as an historian, Hanson sees America today to be in a Jacobin Revolution of sorts. The Jacobin Revolution, synonymous with the Reign of Terror (1793-1794), nearly destroyed France. Furthermore, Hanson sees the Democratic Party as we knew it as having vanished in 2020. Hard-left ideologues absorbed it and were bent on radically forcing equality-of-result agendas beyond popular majority support.

To implement unpopular programs, the left had to radically alter our institutions. So-called "Democrats" threaten to pack the courts, end the filibuster, destroy the Electoral College, and override the states' prerogatives to establish balloting laws. The Pentagon lectured the country on its innate racism while the United States continues to lose wars abroad, abandons billions of dollars of equipment to terrorists, and allows communist China to surveil domestic American military bases.

Hanson goes on to see that words changed meanings. "Racist" now means "don't dare object." "White" became the pejorative stereotype used by racists. "Diversity" means new orthodoxy. "Equity" is a synonym for bias. "Inclusion" ensures exclusion.

White liberals became the biggest racists. Like the Jacobins, names and dates had to be radically transformed. When they could not change history, they invented it. To wit, the “1619 Project” developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones and “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn.

American race relations did improve during the Bush years. Pandering to the black vote, leftist race mongers revived dying racial animosity thereby dividing the electorate. The sorry result produced an America terribly polarized. The new racial activists have betrayed the authentic colorblind vision of the civil rights movement of the sixties as embodied by Martin Luther King, Jr.

A multitude of civil rights laws and directives have been enacted at the federal, state, and local levels. Regardless, most of the social unrest that fuels racial tensions has grown worse. The people they were intended to empower sank further behind. But the real people empowered were the leftist activists. Tax money was indiscriminately thrown at disintegrating crime-ridden black communities which, in turn, raised the self-esteem of black racial activists at the expense of whites and Asians. (See Thomas Sowell’s book “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” for an extensive account.)

An apparent reason for stubborn racial tensions has been the failure to address a social disease that has accompanied the civil rights revolution -- the disintegration of the black family. The federal government, in effect, replaced fathers in black households. Never-ending protests against white racism and the favoring of black politicians who specialized in race hustling became the leftist long-range goal. Among the most noticeable beneficiaries of the civil rights revolution have been race-hustlers like Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Jamaal Bowman, Al Sharpton, academic directors of “white privilege” studies, and recipients of DEI funds provided by virtue-signaling corporate capitalists.

We are looking at an incremental revolution that has gone on for decades embracing increased categories of designated victims. Another beneficiary of the race revolution has been the oddity of transgender activists driven by the administrative state. They now enjoy the support of culturally radicalized media, woke capitalists, and bourgeois-hating educators. As with the civil rights movement, a revolution may have started with the vision of a just cause. But that does not mean the never-ending results are worthy of applause.

Observing this mixed bag of evidence, no wonder Black History Month appears embarrassingly subdued.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).