I wouldn’t be surprised if these were the posters Youngkin circulated around Virginia to solidify the White Trash and Centrist (aka Polite Racist) votes. How I wish Jim Kelly (the star on the poster) were still alive, he would’ve been amused by this satirical take.
The Amerikan Taliban (formerly known as the GOP) are going to hitch their fortunes to this teaching tract to win elections and I’m afraid it will be a winner since the average US citizen is a C- student in History and Civics at best. Trust me, the majority of crap Hollywood churns out is often believed with very little skepticism and whenever those who really know the truth point out the inaccuracies, they’re quickly hushed with, “Oh stop being a wet blanket, it’s entertainment!” What else can we do? The History Channel went from being mostly the WWII Documentary Channel to the cheaper, more profitable White Trash Under Pressure Network alongside TLC (The Learning Channel) and I dread to find out how far PBS has sunk to compete.
Now I’m confident there is a strain of CRT which is probably anti-White and/or blames White Americans for everything from bad weather to why they didn’t get tenure at Howard. All throughout human History, somebody with a chip on their shoulder has a scapegoat on why success evaded them. When it’s Ayn Rand, she’s an unsung hero to the Right despite her being a terrible writer, a horrendous human and a hypocritical xenophobe originally from Russia. Should it be a Black American with similar traits as Rand’s, then the band wagon agrees, hey, sour grapes.
As a White American Heterosexual Male, the favored target of certain Leftist/Liberal axegrinders, I don’t fear CRT. It’s naive to hide the truth about America’s slave-using past and continue to gloss over as if we’re all square after 1865. We have numerous past examples to examine. Case in point, after the Norman takeover of England in 1066, it took centuries for the infighting between the previous Anglo-Saxon residents (who also invaded around 400 AD) and the newly arrived Norman overlords to end. So the tensions between the many Black Americans, whose ancestors were involuntarily enslaved and the White Americans whose families got rich from the free labor, won’t end quickly. Then throw in the other White and Asian Americans who came after 1865 getting to cut in line before Blacks, you have another dilemma; it’s the one I’m mostly saddled with being a Yankee since Italian-derived people got promoted to White over 60 years ago.
One step toward the healing is to acknowledge the past, warts and all. I’m confident the majority’s sense of fairness will kick in toward preventing future atrocities. There will always be one asshole kid in the crowd who is a future Newt Gingrich or Majorie Taylor-Greene to muck matters up (I remember those greasy-haired Reaganauts I saw at Marquette); the majority can politely tell those racists to STFU. There’s no guilt. There’s no inferiority complex involved. Nobody is superior. We can go, wow, that sucked and was atrocious, let’s do all we can to never do it again and the first step is to remember, we’re all Americans and when we’re all doing better, we all do better.
Sadly the wedge matter which the Right alongside the Left’s Idiot faction can’t handle is how well-taught History is often similar to great Comedy, it is meant to create discomfort as the truth isn’t sanitary. With honest conversations and sincere debate, we will learn and not turn into supremacists or blamethrowers or apologists. There’s no guarantee of a better future as per the cliché, just a better understanding on how we got to where and how we are. What we want the future to be is up to all of us.
Where I probably veer off into unpopular turf with my Leftist Allies is the subject of reparations. I do agree it needs to be researched and let’s see how the various European states handled it well and poorly with Holocaust survivors. It will be tricky. Over 150 years have passed so the immediate recipients are all gone. The other complication is the intermarriages which have occurred between Black Americans and non-Blacks creating the argument about who then qualifies for the compensation. It sounds racist and stupid but it happens constantly within America’s First Nations, especially when it comes to paying reservation casino dividends. Many people were members of various nations, tribes, etc. and suddenly they get legally re-defined as something else to make sure certain power brokers at the top keep more. Speaking of the First Nations, if there’s anybody who should be at the front of the line for reparations from America, it’s them. They may not have been brought here in chains but they lived on this land from 12,000 to 25,000 years before 1492 and their descendants survived a War of the Worlds-level genocide. If we can formulate a fair, moral and just outcome with the remaining First Nations, then we’ll have a good starting point with Black America and CRT will be an afterthought.
