Damnatio Memoriae*

by RBF: Liberals often dwell in a perpetual mist of nescience, never pausing to let facts intervene with their constant ad hominem diatribes. Personal baseless aggressions succeed only with an audience equally clueless of rudimentary American history.

Among independent thinkers, an examination of evidence, history that is, reveals slavery made for a bifurcated contentious populace from our beginnings and that one segment lobbied tirelessly to end the pernicious practice. And when peaceful grievance proved fruitless, 360,000 Northern men, almost all white, willingly made the ultimate sacrifice for the cause of social justice.

After some exegesis, reasonable inference deduces that all of today’s anarchy, destroyed businesses, the murder of police officers, calls for racial justice, might be little more than a well-orchestrated deflection of a half-century of failed big-government liberalism and wasted trillions.

OUR CONSTITUTION
Article 1, Section 2, of the United States Constitution, states:
“Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons.”

In 1787 Philadelphia, James Madison, with perhaps Jefferson, Hamilton, John Jay, and Adams, pooled their thoughts to generate the most celebrated living document in mankind’s history. Its foundation was rock solid save for the above twelfth-hour architectural edit yielding a design kink, endangering the entire edifice.

To ignore this cornerstone Constitutional insert disregards our Founder’s struggles to mend antithetical perspectives. It was the defining moment at the Constitutional Convention. There may well have been no United States without this most contradictory and contentious solution. Southerners dug in and drove home the point that repealing slavery was a deal-breaker. As an ingrained Southern institution, economics coupled with inherent racism, necessitated the ownership of other humans endure. King cotton was a labor-intensive enterprise.

Known as “The Three-Fifths Compromise,” and that’s precisely what it was, was an expedient, a contrivance to kick the can down the road and to seal up that embarrassing stepchild in the basement.

The Missouri compromise of 1820, the Wilmot Proviso, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, were all heavily debated legislation that sought resolution to placate the petulant bastard. Slaves states, free states, self-determination, Henry Clay… everyone searched for a unifying answer to something ineluctably intractable.

Few believed at the time this piece of bubblegum sufficient as a permanent resolution. Under the “Compromise,” each slave counted as three-fifths of a person when calculating populations, and more people meant more seats in Congress for the Southern States.

Therefore, paradoxically, for maximum political clout, the North would have preferred slaves count for zero, while the South wanted a number as high as possible.

Another provision required the South to pay Federal taxes based on the higher population numbers. In an accommodation of sorts, Southerners gratuitously allowed the intrusion of a clause banning African slave trade no later than 1808 or twenty years after the convention. As if human servitude would sluggishly begin evaporating in the summer Philadelphia humidity, a long-lasting Northern chimera.

The questions bedeviling Federalism then, exasperates our Republic today. Since the contentious Adams-Jefferson election of 1800, states and the Federal Government exist in a continuum of bickering as proprietor of ultimate jurisdiction. Initially, those first shots at Fort Sumter, South Carolina April 12, 1861, symbolized as much about a state’s self-determination as about slavery.

As the conflagration commenced, by significantly more than two to one, America’s population adamantly opposed the institution of one man legally owning another. The North’s 22 million dwarfed the South’s meek 9 million. This puts a big leak in the silly 1619 Project assertion of “systemic racism” since the first colonists arrived. In a trance, I envision 17th century English settlers, escaping religious persecution and facing a life-threatening ocean crossing, their survival in question, with malice aforethought, contemplating machinations to enslave Africans.

ABOLISTIONISTS
Founded in 1775, The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage gets recognition as the first formal abolitionist society. This cumbersome to pronounce organization, contained black and white members alike, and became the model for other anti-slavery groups during the antebellum period. Mr. Ben Franklin held the position of president in 1787, and on behalf of all members, in 1790, he unsuccessfully petitioned Congress to abolish slavery.

For a brief period, Ben Franklin held slaves before voluntarily manumitting them. Consistent with today’s rhetoric, does owning one slave for one day, irrevocably consign Mr. Franklin to eternal damnation notwithstanding contrition and countless deeds of positive consequence to the world? (With all the intrinsic yet heretofore concealed love beneath the rioting, looting, and murder of dedicated police officers, surely the frontal lobes of BLM and ANTIFA thugs will emotionally honor Franklin, as they simultaneously desecrate marble likenesses.)

Abolitionist Societies were numerous and prominent throughout the Northern States, and each sermonized the intrinsic barbarism of slavery while calling for varying degrees of aggression to end it.

Reformer William Lloyd Garrison’s weekly anti-slavery paper, ‘The Liberator,’ demanded freedom for all slaves, with a religious tone, appealing to moral conscience. These entreaties were in like vain to Quakers sentiments, who abhorred slavery but shrunk from violence even more. Henry David Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, as was industrialist and eponymous porcelain maker, Joseph Wedgewood. In October 1859, militant John Brown, called on by God, waged the legendary assault on the Harpers Ferry, Virginia federal arsenal, intending it as incitement of a broad liberation movement to encourage slaves everywhere to rebel against their masters. As the first American convicted and hanged for treason, Brown immediately became a martyr to the cause and future folk hero to the Union army. So quick was his apotheosis that government officials feared riots and protests, and the execution was a heavily guarded event.

The above-referenced anti-slavery proponents were but a microcosm of examples of white men who vociferously, through word and deed, committed themselves to eradicate human bondage.

Possessing other humans as property extended beyond the purview of white Southerners. Some black slave-owners operated plantations as well. How do they fit into the reparations schema? Are their transgressions ignored like black on black murders? Though the underlying Southern economy revolved around cotton, only about 20 percent of the population depended on slave labor.

Prejudice and systemic racism are analog to the prefixes, “micro” and “macro.” Macro implies a global framework for the behavior of an entire organization, whereas micro focuses on narrow subsets of the sweeping mandate encompassed by the macro. Parochialism is endemic to humankind, ergo prejudice does and will always exist.

Black people can claim no monopoly on this, old as time, emotion; Hindu vs. Muslim, Protestant vs. Catholic, Tutsi’s and Hutu’s in Africa, Sunnis and Shiites, and, sometimes, the world against the Jews.

Quite distinct from smatterings of bigotry, since the historical changes wrought by Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, America has methodically arranged an entire society built on equality with a plethora of rules, and statutes, codifying fair treatment and equal opportunity for the black race. Our country has far transcended these regulatory obligations.

More than a half-century on, and with trillions of Federal dollars spent on food stamps, section 8 housing, and Medicaid, statistics still reflect a group woefully behind in metrics such as education and mainstream assimilation. Corporations drool all over themselves, fighting for moral superiority badges, by hiring black recruits to meet internal percentages.

When grades and test scores lagged, leftist colleges long ago began disregarding empirical data for admissions in favor of a “holistic” approach or subjectivity to achieve unstated and illegal quotas. Isn’t making decisions based on skin color precisely the type of racism decried by the Left?

Demand for qualified black students far outstrips supply, so the University of California System (includes Berkeley and UCLA, among others) has proposed getting rid of the college entrance exam, the SAT, almost unanimously agreed as the most reliable predictor of academic success. How far do we have to dumb down standards? Is it ever incumbent on blacks to reach any minimum benchmarks?

Not only does America not qualify as a systemically racist society, our country now demonstrably and axiomatically favors black students and job applicants beyond the colorblind eyes of a fair and balanced meritocracy.

When all the money and failed inner-city unionized schools often yielded young barely literate people depressingly underprepared for higher learning, the Left constructed a scapegoat.

They invented and brilliantly marketed, the present zeitgeist of white guilt. This concept is part of a current fluid philosophy, containing some contradictory circular logic, whereby once-assigned, white guilt is like a tattoo; it can never be totally expunged. White people faithful to this cult of ethical nihilism, tether themselves to a doctrine that, if carried to ultimate fruition, is destined to destroy America.

How has this new conventional brainwashed society that black failure stems from structural racism and never from their deficiencies? Now every industry faces retaliation of the race card if they don’t have at least 13.2 percent black employees, their slice of the population. Does Silicon Valley currently employ only 4 percent black software engineers as consequence of racism? Or after canvassing Stanford, Berkeley, and Cal Tech they astonishingly ended up with an office full of condign Asians.

Interestingly, periodical “Black Demographics” reports forty percent of all black households as middle class, versus forty-two percent for all families. Eight percent of all millionaires are black. While we must strive to correct their much higher poverty rates, these figures indicate that certain segments of their population do very well. The media accentuates only gloom and ghettos, atypical police brutality, an empty glass approach. I wonder how the many capable black professionals who earned their stripes without a free push, look upon the new spirit engulfing society? Under the adopted regime, who knows how who got where.

CONCLUSION
In the Constitution, nowhere do the words “slavery” or “negro” appear. That the Founders assiduously avoided any mention of race, skin color, black or white contextualizes 1787 as a time that illustrates slavery as emotionally charged even then.

Far from a country birthed with congenital racism, historical scrutiny reveals a stark demarcation, where one side, the North, valiantly denounced the Southern institution of humans as chattel, ultimately forfeiting hundreds of thousands of lives to terminate the practice.

Confronting our history transparently deflates Liberals arguments of an unambiguously racist America.

The data today supports not systemic racism but the diametric; a society structured where blacks receive favoritism in college admissions and certain areas of employment. They have become a protected class, where any small criticism, gets run through the liberal gristmill and reshaped into racism. Educational elites inculcate in students an ethos of white guilt, exploiting gullible minds to fit false narratives.

Hard as the Left may try, from ISIS and Taliban-like desecration of monuments to rioting that distracts from policy failures to monotonous looping of fake news, hard evidence remains of America’s remarkable though imperfect history. If the contingent on the Left bothered to analyze and contemplate our past, perhaps then reasonable people might sit and discuss their commonalities. But in that process, Liberals would inexorably discover how misguided they are about so many things.
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* Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. Thus the author is not presently identified.

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