Frederick Douglass Versus the 1619 Project

The Epoch Times

How amusing it is to see the advocates of critical race theory (CRT) and the 1619 Project vehemently deny that their philosophy is even being taught in elementary and secondary schools. Most recently, teachersโ€™ union president Randi Weingarten insisted that CRT is merely a subject of discussion in law schools and the legal community, not in the public school system.

Hogwash! Parents wouldnโ€™t be mobilizing against CRT if they didnโ€™t witness its divisive propaganda being dumped on their children. Ironically, we have the COVID lockdowns to thank for this. Ordinarily, parents arenโ€™t exposed to what their children are being taught in school. But with online instruction, they can pop into their kidโ€™s room and go, โ€œTheyโ€™re teaching him WHAT?โ€

If CRT and its ideological cousin the 1619 Project really arenโ€™t being taught in schools, why would the teachers unions and the left worry about them being banned by state legislators? That would be like states banning unicorns. This is absolutely no problem, since there are no unicorns. Of course, the reason the unions and the left are up in arms is because CRT and the 1619 Project are being widely taught, and the state laws would curb these forms of indoctrination.

Taking a somewhat different approach, Gillian Brockell wrote a recent article in The Washington Post implying that CRT and the 1619 Project represent the very mainstream of American history, and that the great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass would have been on board with their core premises. โ€œFrederick Douglass had nothing but scorn for July Fourth,โ€ her headline reads. โ€œThe Black abolitionist spoke for the enslaved.โ€

The article, however, like CRT and the 1619 Project, tells only half of the story. Letโ€™s follow its narrative in some detail. Brockell recalls Douglassโ€™s famous July 4 address (pdf), delivered in Rochester, New York, to the Rochester Ladiesโ€™ Anti-Slavery Society. The first part of the speech does indeed support Brockellโ€™s account, because Douglass gives a savage indictment of how American independence looks to a black man.

โ€œThis Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine,โ€ Douglass says. โ€œYou may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today?โ€ Douglass here is not speaking for himself. After all, he had escaped slavery in Maryland 14 years earlier. He was not โ€œa man in fetters.โ€ Douglass, however, was speaking from the point of view of the slave, his former self.

โ€œWhat, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?โ€ Douglass continues. โ€œI answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all the other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisyโ€”a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.โ€

By Dinesh Dโ€™Souza

Read Full Article on TheEpochTimes.com

The Thinking Conservative
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